Ephesians 2: 11-end; Mark 6: 30-34, 53-end
In the first reading appointed for today, St Paul says something quite extraordinary. I wonder whether you noticed it. Reflecting upon Christ’s work of reconciling Jews and Gentiles to one another, he says that Jesus has “abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances.” This is the holy law of Moses, given by God, so that his ancient people Israel might reflect the divine life into the world. But St Paul is saying that Christ has abolished this law. A better translation might be that the law has been made of no effect.
What does this mean? Are we no longer commanded to live according to the law of the Ten Commandments? Is it of no effect whether we love God or not? Has the commandment, “Thou shalt not murder”, been abolished? Didn’t Jesus say in the gospels that he came not to abolish the law, but rather to fulfil it? So, what does St Paul mean when he says that Christ has made the law of no effect.
Well, in the passage immediately before the one we heard this morning, St Paul has just told the Ephesians that all people, Jew and Gentile, were “dead through trespasses and sins”. This was the consequence of disobedience to the law as set out in the Book of Deuteronomy. When Moses gave the law to ancient Israel, he said that he was placing before them the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. And he exhorted them to choose life and blessing by following the law. To fail to do so was to turn away from God, the source of life, which only meant one thing: death. And so, the law, which is good itself, led to death. Spiritual death in this life, and the prospect of total loss and perishing in the age to come. There are echoes here of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
But this death sentence of the law is precisely what St Paul has said has been abolished, or made of no effect. As he says, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ”. The law itself is holy, and so cannot be abolished. It is the consequences of disobedience to the law which have been abolished, because Christ has defeated death, and raised us to new life.
And this brings us to the passage we heard this morning. Because separation from God by death was not the only consequence of the law. In addition, the law had the effect of separating the people of the world from one another, especially by the division it fixed between Jews and Gentiles. As the late, great James Dunn, the eminent New Testament scholar, and former Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in this University, argued so often, this division often expressed itself in the form of nationalistic exclusivism by ancient Israel, whereby Gentiles were seen as disqualified from the life of God’s chosen people.
You can almost hear St Paul satirising, or even impersonating, this looking-down-one’s-nose-at-the-other attitude in today’s epistle reading: “Remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”… remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise”.
This was an attitude which treated circumcision – the sign of God’s covenant to bless Abraham, so that he might be a blessing to all the nations of the world – as a tribal badge and a means by which to keep the Gentiles far away. St Paul rather scandalously refers to circumcision as made “by human hands”, a formula which the Hebrew prophets often used to critique Pagan idols!
But now, through Jesus’s death on the cross, this effect of the law, this separation and division between Jew and Gentile has been abolished. For, the law pronounced that everyone who hangs upon a tree is cursed. In his death, Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, the anointed and blessed one, identifies himself with the outcast, the rejected, the accursed. He takes the place of the alien and the stranger, the one outside of the commonwealth of Israel and the covenants of promise, the one who is seemingly without hope and without God in the world. In other words, on the cross, Jesus takes the place of the Gentiles.
And so, in his flesh, he brings the two groups into one man, and thereby breaks down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile. This means that Christ is “our peace”, that is, the peace that binds us together. He is the one around whom the disciples gather. The Good Shepherd who has compassion on the crowds, and draws them into his fold. He is the peace of the nations of the world, because his body is the new Temple, in which all people are citizens, and where all have access in the one Spirit to the Father of all.
The way in which God brings about the unity of the human family is by identifying himself with the stranger, the alien, and the outcast. So, the unity that the Church is to seek is not one that is forged by excluding those we find difficult or monstrous. It is a unity that is forged by going to the abandoned, the despised, and the scorned, and recognising in them the presence of God’s love. If we ever feel ourselves being drawn into a kind of identity that needs a scapegoat, a victim, or someone to exclude, in order to sustain that identity, then we must resist that impulse, and come back to the heart of God, who is revealed in the accursed victim hanging upon the cross.
In the life of the Church, we called to hold open that space within creation which speaks of the universal love of God for all people. In a world that is tearing itself apart by various forms of narrow tribalism and selfish egotism, the Church is to be the witness of the God whose love and welcome know no limits nor boundaries. The place where all can draw near – the abandoned, the hopeless, the hurting, the rejected – and touch the hem of Jesus’s cloak, so that they may receive healing.
May the Lord give us grace, that we may truly be that all-embracing dwelling-place of his Spirit. Amen.