November 19 – Ephesians 2:11-22

Main Focus: To sustain a multi-ethnic community, we must practice reconciliation.

The last few verses of this passage supply a vision for the church, while the rest of the passage explains the work that it takes to get there. All this work starts with God, who’s taken foreigners, strangers, and even enemies and made them fellow citizens, members of his household, and ultimately into a dwelling place for his Spirit. It’s critical for us to grasp this vision of unity and move towards it, and, as we’ll see in discussion, the way God enables this movement is through gospel reconciliation.

Ephesians chapter 2 is like a more thorough explanation of what Peter describes in 1 Peter 2:10, “Once you were not a people; now you are God’s people.” In Ephesians 2:1-10, Paul makes a big case for how the mercy of God resurrects us from spiritual death into spiritual life through being made “alive together with Christ.” It’s this mysterious, holy union with Jesus that makes all our sanctification and communion with him possible because we have been reconciled to God through him.

But it doesn’t stop there; Paul starts Ephesians 2:11 with “therefore” (ESV) to relate all this to the church, specifically to the tensions between Jews and Gentiles experienced in the early church. Jews were frequently struggling to see how Gentiles could be a part of God’s people without becoming Jewish through cultural and religious practices, thus Gentiles were often treated as second-class citizens even though they were increasingly populating churches around the Mediterranean. But, as Paul puts it, God has taken these “two men” and broken down the dividing hostility between them through Jesus’s death for sin, making them into “one man.”(v.14-15)

To be clear, this was not to erase their cultural identities. The New Testament devotes significant airtime to address how Gentiles could become Christians without becoming Jews (1 Cor 7:17-19; basically all of Galatians), while Jews could continue their cultural practices after believing in Jesus as long as they didn’t trust in these practices for their salvation (Rom; 14:1-12, 1 Cor 7:17-19; 9:19-23; Col 2:16-23; Heb 13:9). Paul is a good example of this—he still referred to himself as a Jew (Acts 21:39; Phil 3:5), observed the Law while in the company of Torah-observant Jews (Acts 21:23-24; 1 Cor 9:19-20), and even undertook the Jewish Nazarite vow in Acts 18:18.

Being united with Christ thus doesn’t erase our cultural identity or identities, but it does reconfigure our relationship to this identity through a new, superseding identity in Jesus. You might say our new identity in Christ kicks our cultural identity out of the driver seat, but not out of the car. This has important implications for how we think about God’s multi-ethnic people: ex. there’s no single dominant culture among God’s people, no expectation on people to drop amoral cultural markers once they belong to Christ, no cultural assimilation or homogenization that needs to occur, plenty of opportunity to learn about one another’s cultures, etc. But, foremost among them is this: in Christ, God has so reconfigured our identity that no source of identity is now a legitimate means for division within the body of Christ.

The vertical reconciliation that God has worked between us and him extends horizontally. Black Christians, White Christians, Asian and Latino and African Christians, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated—all Christians are members of Jesus’s body and thus united together. Paul’s big point here in Ephesians is this: there is not an individual relationship with Jesus that is somehow separate from the shared life of God’s people. Union with Christ, the head, simply cannot be disconnected from union with the church, his body (Eph. 4:11-16).