OK, Tychicus, are you ready to start? Listen, brother, I’m really sorry your hand cramped up so badly . . . I have to admit, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a pen fall out of someone’s hand like that. —But you’re better now? Good. Thank you.
Just let me put myself in the proper frame— Yes, I’m going to take a minute to think about—well, I know we’re planning to send this around all the churches in the province of Asia, but “Asians” sounds strange, and the only church I really know is Ephesus; I’m just going to call them “Ephesians.” If I can fix them in my mind’s eye, it will be like I’m talking directly to them. You know that’s how I work.
No, I don’t want to sit down, I think better standing up. —Something to lean against? You’re right, I’m not feeling well; that might be a good idea. —Though I think you’re just hoping if I walk less, I’ll talk less.
So . . . where did you put the copy you made? —Oh, right, I’m holding it. Thank you. Now, where were we? . . . Hmmmm . . . Tychicus, I never finished my prayer for the Ephesians—I must have forgotten I was writing a prayer, because I went off on a tangent. It was a good tangent, but still . . . I wonder why we didn’t catch that? —You caught it? Of course you did. Why didn’t you tell me? —Because it was a good tangent and you didn’t want to interrupt me? Well, that’s something, anyway.
Still, I need to finish that prayer. So, let’s see, where did I leave off—mutter mutter “no longer exiles and resident aliens, fellow citizens with the members of the house of God, built on the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus the cornerstone, being built by the Spirit into a temple for God.” OK. Ready? Good. Continuing:
That’s why I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—I assume you know about that, right? I know some of you do, anyway. God made me the steward of his grace—he gave me the job of distributing his grace to anyone who would receive it. He gave me insight into the mystery of Christ—I didn’t figure any of this out myself. No one did—because no one could until God revealed it to the whole world in Jesus. The mystery is that when God chose the Jews, he didn’t just choose the Jews, he chose them as part of his plan to save you Gentiles, too. He told Abraham that in him, God would bless all the families of the earth, not just Abraham’s family, but really, God went further than that. He has made you Gentiles part of Abraham’s family, heirs of the promise to Abraham just like the Jews. He has made Jews and Gentiles one body, with Christ as our head—we’ll get to that more in a little bit, I don’t want to sidetrack myself again. —What? I already have? Oh, the prayer, right. Well, I’ll get back to that too. Let me finish this thought before I lose it. Continuing:
God has made Jews and Gentiles one body, with Christ as our head, and he has given his Holy Spirit to you Gentiles just the same as us Jews. We are all one in the Spirit. It’s a great mystery, no one saw it coming—somehow or other God has taken people who were bitterly opposed to each other and put us all together and united us as the church. We have nothing in common but Jesus, but the mystery of the church is that having only Jesus in common is enough.
This is amazing good news. And God included me, which is a mystery too. I was utterly unworthy of him—I tried to destroy his people—but that’s how big God’s grace is and how great his power is, that he could not only include me in his grace but transform me into a servant of his grace. I’m still the absolute rock-bottom of the saints, just hanging on by my toenails to the bottom of the ladder, but he gave me the gift anyway to preach the good news to you Gentiles everywhere I go. He gave me the privilege of proclaiming the unfathomable riches of Christ. Do you understand how wonderful that is? I could do nothing but talk about Jesus and what God has revealed in him for the rest of my life, and I would never get to the end of the story. None of us ever will—it just keeps going! God created everything, and we shattered it, and now in Jesus he’s redeeming it, and that’s just the beginning.
And it keeps getting better—he didn’t just include me in this, he included all of us! The wisdom of God has more sides than we can count, it has more colors than we can see, and in uniting all of us with all our differences into one body, he’s made us an image of his wisdom. It’s a mystery how God could make one body, the church, out of Jews and Gentiles who can’t stand each other, out of people from all different cultures and languages who can’t understand each other, out of slaves and masters and men and women all as equals before him, which the world can’t understand—nobody saw this coming, and nobody can make heads or tails of it. In the world, you pledge your allegiance to your tribe, your race, your class, your political party, your culture, and that tells you who you’re for and who you’re against. To take people across all those groups and give all of us together a higher allegiance, to make us one family without erasing any of those differences, is far too complex for the world to understand, let alone do. But God has done it to make us a physical picture of his beautifully complex wisdom. It’s like a great diamond, with each of our differences as one of the facets.
God has done this to make his wisdom obvious to the whole host of spiritual powers. I know you’re afraid of them, and I know you have good reason to be, with the kind of supernatural powers displayed in Ephesus. I know you see great forces shaping your lives that you cannot control, and I know many of you have turned away from the temptation to influence them through magic. But understand this: those powers which are hostile to God work to divide people. They strive to make people enemies by using differences to breed hostility and fear. The powers of darkness teach people to see others who aren’t like them or who disagree with them as a threat to them which must be destroyed. They want people to believe it to be good and right to inflict pain and shame on their enemies, and even to find pleasure in doing so. Listen to me carefully: the mere fact of your existence is proof to them that their power has been broken and their days are numbered. God has reconciled you—has reconciled us—across all those differences; in the church, he has brought an end to all those divisions, showing that his wisdom is great and complex and many-faceted enough to incorporate all of them—to include them all in one body.
—What, Tychicus? You’re right, we’ll probably need to tighten that up before we send it. And yes, I need to get back to finishing the prayer—again. But it connects. Listen:
This is God’s eternal purpose—this is the mystery which he revealed in Christ and is revealing in the church—to make Jews and Gentiles, civilized people and barbarians, men and women, rich and poor, old and young, slaves and free, all one people—his people—in Jesus; and Jesus has accomplished his purpose. And this is the God we worship, and this is Jesus in whom we have believed, and so we can pray with complete openness and confidence, because just as he has reconciled us to each other across all that divided us, so he has reconciled us to himself across everything that divided us from him.
In light of that, don’t let my own troubles discourage you. I know some of you know me and feel bad for me personally in my imprisonment; most of you don’t, but I understand if you see my confinement as a victory for the powers opposed to God. In fact, I can sympathize: this is a comfortable house, but I admit that having been confined to it for years now is discouraging for me at times. But even if it can be hard for me, please don’t let it get you down. You see, whatever I may suffer is no defeat, either for me or for the cause of Christ; my suffering is for you, and for the whole body of Christ, the church, which means it’s my participation in the suffering of Christ himself. It’s an honor to be allowed to share in the suffering of Christ, because it’s through his suffering that we have the hope of glory; if I suffer with him so that you and others may have that hope, then my suffering is no cause for discouragement—it is your glory.
This is why I kneel before the Father in humble reverence and submission to pray for you. I pray to the one to whom every family owes its existence—all the spiritual powers in the heavens, even those hostile to him, and every human tribe, clan, and people—they all exist only because he made them, and only because he sustains them each moment—I pray that you would be strengthened by his power through his Holy Spirit from the inside out, on the lavish scale of his inexhaustible glory. The world will do everything it can to discourage you; the enemy will do everything he can to make you feel doomed to failure, whether as individuals or as a church; and so I pray that the limitless power of God will give you strength in the core of your being to resist and overcome discouragement, so that even when you feel your bodies wasting away under the burdens of the world, you will feel him renewing your hearts day by day by day.
I pray that the more you are empowered by the Spirit of God, the more your faith will be strengthened to experience the reality of the continual spiritual presence of Christ in your hearts, in the command center of your lives. You have been rooted and grounded in the love of God in Christ—his love is the foundation on which your lives are being rebuilt, and it is the soil in which you grow. Out of his love, by the power of his Spirit, Christ is transforming you into his likeness; I pray that you would know in every fiber of your being, beyond doubt, beyond fear, that he is with you, and that you are being changed.
As you grow in the love of God, I pray that he would strengthen you, and all his people, to know the breadth, the length, the height, the depth—as high as the heavens are above the earth, as far as the east is from the west—the infinite dimensions of the mystery—I pray you would know what is beyond knowledge, the incomprehensibly great love of Christ. You will never know it fully, for you will never reach the end of it; you will never wrap your minds around it, for it will never fail to exceed even your wildest imagination; but I pray that by the power of God, you will experience it so fully that you will grasp with your hearts what you cannot describe with your words. You cannot know the limits of his love; I pray that you will come to know, bone-deep, soul-deep, that his love truly has no limits—and that this knowledge will transform your lives. All the fullness of God dwells in Christ, and Christ dwells in you, and you are being changed to become what you already are; I pray for you that he would do what he has already accomplished, and bring you up to the measure of Christ who is within you, and that by his power you would become fully the people he has created you to be.
This is impossible. But to him who is able to do the impossible—more, is able to do the implausible—who has already conceived the inconceivable to love the unlovable—to him who is able to do so much more than what I have prayed for you as to make my prayer piddling by comparison—to him who has the infinite almighty power to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ask or think or imagine or dream or wish, and is at work in us by that infinite power every moment—to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen and amen and amen.
Photo © 2017 by romanboed. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.