By grace you have been saved!
1 You were dead through the faults and sins.
2 Once you lived through them according to this world and followed the Sovereign Ruler who reigns between heaven and earth and who goes on working in those who resist the faith.
3 All of us belonged to them at one time and we followed human greed; we obeyed the urges of our human nature and consented to its desires. By ourselves, we went straight to the judgment like the rest of humankind.
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, revealed his immense love.
5 As we were dead through our sins, he gave us life with Christ. By grace you have been saved!
6 And he raised us to life with Christ, gi ving us a place with him in heaven.
7 In showing us such kindness in Christ Jesus, God willed to reveal and unfold in the coming ages the extraordinary riches of his grace.
8 By the grace of God you have been saved through faith. This has not come from you: it is God’s gift.
9 This was not the result of your works, so you are not to feel proud.
10 What we are is God’s work. He has created us in Christ Jesus for the good works he has prepared that we should devote ourselves to them.
Christ is our Peace
11 Remember that you were pagans even in your flesh and the Jews, who call themselves Circum cised (because of a sur gical circumcision), called you Un circumcised.
12 At that time you were with out Christ, you did not belong to the community of Israel; the covenants of God and his promises were not for you; you had no hope and were without God in this world.
13 But now, in Christ Jesus and by his blood, you who were once far off have come near.
14 For Christ is our peace, he who has made the two peoples one,
15 destroying in his own flesh the wall – the hatred – which separated us. He abolished the Law with its commands and precepts. He made peace in uniting the two peoples in him, creating out of the two one New Man.
16 He destroyed hatred and reconciled us both to God through the cross, making the two one body.
17 He came to proclaim peace; peace to you who were far off, peace to the Jews who were near.
18 Through him we – the two peo ples – approach the Father in one Spirit.
19 Now you are no longer strangers or guests, but fellow citizens of the holy people: you are of the household of God. You are the house
20 whose foundations are the apostles and proph ets, and whose cornerstone is Christ Jesus.
21 In him the whole structure is joined together and rises to be a holy temple in the Lord.
22 In him you too are being built to become the spiritual sanctuary of God.
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Comments Letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 2
• 2.1 The path of humans without Christ leads to death.
We obeyed the urges of our human nature and consented to its desires (v. 3). There is no need to seek a clearer affirmation of what we call original sin. Paul does not speak of a fault committed before our personal sins, and in addition to the sins we are responsible for. It is a flaw easily seen in human condition and in all our acts; it is the liabilities of our life insofar as God has not taken us in hand.
The account of Genesis (chaps. 2–3) has placed in the past this “original” sin, as well as creation. It is a way of speaking prop er to Hebrew culture. In fact both our creation by God (v. 10) and our revolt against him are a part of our daily reality.
He raised us to life with Christ (v. 6). Actually an authentic conversion is experienced as a resur rect ion. Paul is saying more: nothing can stop God’s merciful plan. He sees beyond time and has already raised us with Christ. We are seated with him in heaven, that is to say, assured of victory.
• 11. Another aspect of the human condition without Christ: death goes hand in hand with divisions. Before Christ, humanity was divided and people did not know our common Father. Since they were not mature enough for a quick unification in the true faith, God took that into account when he began to prepare for Christ’s coming. He chose a people and to avoid their being contaminated by the errors of the pagans, he separated them through a law that forbade their living together with other peoples (see Mk 7:14 and Acts 10:1). So there was in the Jerusalem Temple, far from the Sanc tuary, a patio open to the pagans and another one, near the Sanctuary reserved for the Jews, and a wall between the two. There came a time when this dividing line became a sign of all the barriers that Christ was going to destroy.
He taught them to share life with non-Jews, forbidden until then. Christ, put on the cross by Jews and pagans, overcomes the hatred of all by a love that forgives and, once risen, gathers all people to himself.
Thus, just as the cross is made of two pieces, one vertical, towards heaven and the other, horizontal, towards the earth, so peace goes in two directions: towards God and towards others. He has made the two peoples one… and reconciled us both to God. These are the two sides of only one thing, because human violence is the other expression of our inability to meet God.
Christ united them, that is to say, whether we like it or not, the Gospel will destroy all differences between people. No matter how much segregation emerges in our societies, our laws and our institutions will collapse perhaps through violence, but better by being discredited through the sacrifices of their victims.
In one Spirit. It is only through the Spirit that each one has communion with others. Often, unity among people means one party, one ideology, one religion. Imposed order destroys both the one who accepts it and the one capable of silencing his adversaries.
Unity in the Church is not uniformity: the believers are not of one mold. It is not a question of having the same options regarding human problems; we have the right to differ in our view of faith provided that we accept all that the Credo contains. The Spirit enables each person to be true to himself and to continue “in communion” with the community. This is how the “new creature” is born: not as the work of politics or of any ideology, but as the work of God, since we are dealing with a new creation as Paul says.
You are of the household of God. In biblical language this means: to belong to God’s family. From there, Paul moves on to an other image: you are the household, namely, the true temple of God. The community of believers form the temple, or better, is being transformed into the temple of God.
This imposing vision of the Church and our unity in the Church will perhaps astonish many Christians of today who are usually more aware of their responsibilities towards the world than towards our antiquated Church. Yet, of what Spirit shall we be bearers, and shall we do this work if we are not supported by a community? Solidarity with those who share our options and our culture cannot replace participation in the Christian community. There are probably many things in the Christian community we are not happy with. However, it would be a bad sign if we were unable to recognize in it the truth that is missing in our non-Christian friends, and without which we would lose our reason for living.