Sermon: Anakephalaiôsis

… a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Ephesians 1( v 10)

For the next four weeks we are going to take the opportunity for a more concentrated reading of one particular book of the Bible, the letter to the Ephesians. This period also spans start of Lent; so it will be a way of starting to prepare ourselves for the celebration of Easter.

Let me begin with a question: As a disciple of Jesus Christ today, in the light of your own faith and of what you know of Christian believing as a whole - both today and across the Christian centuries - how would you sum up the whole significance of Jesus? The writer of Ephesians chose to do so by means of the term anakephalaiôsis.

That word is the noun that comes from the verb in v.10 that in the New Revised Standard Version is translated to gather up: ... a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. And it is this word, anakephalaiôsis, upon which I should like to focus our thoughts this morning.

The word can bear six possible meanings: to sum up, to recapitulate or repeat, to rule, to unite, to crown or bring to a conclusion, to start again.

1. to sum up:
a. This is how the word is used in Romans 13.9, The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” b. And the word is used in that sense in writers about rhetoric in Greek literature of the period; the first century rhetorician, Quintillian, says, the setting out and gatherring together of points, which is Greek is call anakephalaiôsis..., serves both to refresh the memory of the judge and at the same time to set the whole case before him. [Institutio Orationis 6.1.1.]

2. to recapitulate, repeat:
a. Famously, the 2nd century Bishop of Lyons, St Irenaeus, wrote of Jesus 'recapitulating' - 'summing up' - the story of Adam, in the sense of 'repeating' it. He says, Christ ... was incarnate and was made human; and then he summed up in himself the long line of the human race, procuring for us a comprehensive salvation, that we might recover in Jesus Christ what in Adam we had lost.... [Adversus Haereses. III. xviii. 1.]

3. to rule:
a. This comes from the meaning of that part of the word which is kephalai-, which comes from the word kephalê, which means 'head'. And 'head' can be a metaphor for 'ruler', or 'chief', so the word can mean 'to head up', to 'rule'

4. to unite:
a. This is what is expressed in the NRSV translation 'gather up', to which I have already referred. b. It is what you do to an argument or a list of laws or rules: you bring them all together, or 'unite' them.

5. to bring to a conclusion, to crown:
a. And the same may be said for this well: you bring your argument to a conclusion, and you attempt to express it in its best light, by 'summing it up'.

6. and finally, it can also mean, 'to start again'.
a. It can mean that because of the translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek around the second century BC. The Hebrew word for 'head' is rôsh, and from it is derived another Hebrew word, rêshith, which means, 'beginning'. And this connection between the two Hebrew words is carried over into the Greek of the New Testament. In several points in the New Testament it is clear that the idea of 'beginning', or 'source', is around whenever something is said to be the 'head' of something. b. Most particularly, this is the case in Paul, when he talks of the man being the 'head' of the woman (Cf. 1 Corinthians 11.7-9). He certainly means that the husband is the boss - he was no first century feminist - but he does so on the basis of the Genesis story of the woman being 'taken from' the man, so he is her source and origin.
c. So - and I am aware that this is all a bit convoluted - if you add to all that the prefix ana-, which can mean either 'up' or 'again', depending on the context, but which in this particular instance is most sensibly taken as 'again', the word anakephalaiôsis means also 'starting again'.

So there you have it: to sum up, to recapitulate or repeat, to rule, to unite, to crown or bring to a conclusion, to start again. And all those meanings are here, at some level or another, and they apply to Jesus Christ.
Now it is worth just adding one further thought. This statement, of a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth, comes in the middle of a 'Benediction', which is a particular form of Jewish prayer. You see how it starts in Ephesians 1.3: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.... Benedictions, or Blessings of God, are to be found frequently in Jewish writings; they give thanks for God's acts, for personal blessings, for good fortune and all manner of things. Paul himself begins 2 Corinthians with: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction....
The point I want to make is that our language about Jesus has had as its context from the very beginning the worship of God, and as part of that, the worship of Jesus himself. So this Benediction talks about the plan of God for the summing up of all things, which is brought about in Christ, and which is brought home to human beings by the Spirit of God.
Ephesians makes of this a great prayer, which can be said or sung by a whole community of worshippers; and this prayer provides the background to his theological reflection. But it is not static - as we shall see in the next couple of weeks: it builds creatively, imaginatively - and aesthetically - on what has gone before. That is the genius of Christian theology.
So how would you 'sum up' the total significance of Jesus? You, too, might start that in the context of worship. And you might need to re-coin some language And you might still fail to exhaust the meaning of him.
But you will be engaged in the task of serious theology, which is the constant exploration and redefining of the meaning of faith, in terms of how it is in the scriptures, how it is to us in our thinking and feeling, and how it has always been coherently and elegantly expressed, in such a way that it bears the good news of the kingdom of God.
And if you were to consider all that the character of Jesus in the scriptures does to inform your daily life, your hopes, your aspirations, your regrets, your redemptions, your changes as you grow; and if you were to put those on a map of the world and explore what they might mean for humanity as a race; then you might come up with some such curious word from the field of rhetoric as anakephalaiôsis.
Now rhetoric is the art of persuasion. So if we want to say, 'In Jesus Christ, God sums everything up', we could point out that he does that in such a way as to persuade us - and the whole human race - to acknowledge their participation in Jesus Christ and to get involved in that plan, a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.