“For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles — Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly. In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to people in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus. I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power. Although I am less than the least of all the Lord’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father,” (Ephesians 3:1-14)
Hello, this is now July and I’m travelling in England. I’ve got a family wedding to attend, in fact a family wedding to run and various things. So, I’ve been asked to do a short homily by Father Dave on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians from the first chapter. So here we go.
Paul’s letter to Ephesians is actually a wonderful book for any Christian who wants to spend a little bit of devotional time with. It’s only six chapters long. It can easily be read in one sitting, but it’s filled with very important insights into our Christian faith, both on broad terms, but also on very specific ways on how we are to live our Christian faith.
Today’s passage begins right after Paul’s initials greeting, and it’s a wonderful blessing for all that God has done for us. It’s a blessing that starts in verse three and doesn’t conclude until verse 14. So in the original Greek, it’s one long run on sentence, but obviously we break it down into specific areas.
And it’s almost as if Paul can never say enough when he’s praising God, which we know is absolutely true. That’s part of his extremist behavior in some ways. When Paul blesses God in this passage, or indeed when he praises God, what’s the first thing that he thanks God for? Well, he thanks God for choosing us – you and me.
He said, blessed be God, because he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, which is quite an extraordinary concept to get your head around. Even before the world was formed, God knew you and God knew me. He’d planned to create us. and decided to have this amazing relationship with us. You and I have been chosen to be part of God’s family. It’s an amazing freeing, almost truth, when we really embrace it.
God chose us in Christ. We can be confident of that. And even when our plans for this life don’t work out, we can fall back on this knowledge that God has chosen us. And no choice of ours takes this away. But let’s think a little bit more about what Paul means by this, because, like I said at the beginning, he has something very specific in mind.
You see, Paul grew up reading the Old Testament. That was his Bible. There wasn’t a New Testament at that stage. And a very prominent theme in the Old Testament is that Israel is God’s chosen people. Now, it begins with Abraham, who God chose to be the father of many nations. and through whom all nations would be blessed.
Abraham was chosen and blessed in order to be a blessing to others. That theme continues when Abraham’s descendants are rescued from Egypt. For example, if we look at the seventh chapter in Deuteronomy, it says, you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. So the Israelites at that point were God’s chosen people, but they were chosen for a very single purpose. They were chosen to be a light to the nations and to bless all nations of the world.
Now, this is a very difficult subject when we consider today’s world, because. religious Jews hang on to these kind of Old Testament statements it gives them the raison d’etre to behave as they do they believe that the land of Israel was given to them by God so anybody who is in that land who is not part of the Israelites or the Jewish or the Israeli population is not a Jew. In other words, is not there with god’s grace They’re there as an interloper or an immigrant or whatever language you want to use. So, it justifies for them the actions of stealing land, imprisoning children, murder, all the things that we know. state of Israel does and for those who aren’t aware the settlers which are very much part of the news at the minute are the religious element of uh of Israel and it’s interesting even Netanyahu has chosen to quote things from the old testament to justify their actions in Gaza but the truth is that the children and the people of Israel – The Israelites – were chosen by God and they were chosen to be a light to the nations.
And it’s a very simple and a very important concept that led the Israelites to survive in a way that many of us wouldn’t have done. You have to admire the thousands of years of the Israelites surviving without their own land, without somewhere to call home, a place to lay their head. For you and I, when we think of being chosen, we simply sometimes think of it as a first class ticket to heaven and when we get there we’re going to be at the front of the line, and that may or may not be true but what Paul is saying is in the person of Jesus the Old Testament has now been fulfilled.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. So Jesus is now the chosen one to bring light to the world not the Israelites. They’ve done their job it is now Jesus and as followers of Jesus, chosen by god from before the beginning of the world. We have been chosen to do God’s work on this earth – care for the poor and the sick, feed the hungry, bring hope to the hopeless, ever more needed to strive for justice and peace and to do it all in the name of Christ.
That is what it means to be chosen what it means to be a follower of Christ We’ve been ‘chosen in Christ’, as Paul puts it, to be holy and blameless before God in love. And there’s only one problem with that is how many of us think that we’re holy and blameless? Well, of course, we’re not. Christ was the only holy and blameless human being. And I have to say that if we look at our churches around the world, they don’t even come close in many occasions. And sadly, that’s become ever more evident with their unwillingness to support the Palestinians in the current situation, but this is all, of course, why Paul tells us we need a savior. We need somebody who is holy and blameless. We need Christ, who is truly god’s chosen one. We often don’t get it right, but Jesus does. He’s god’s beloved in whom God is well pleased. He’s god’s treasured possession. He is the light to the nations.
The very first time I went to Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and I have to say, if anybody gets an opportunity to go, you should. It’s an extraordinary place. It brings you to tears. The suffering of the Jews through the Second World War, the Holocaust, is unimaginable, or at least was unimaginable until, let’s say, since last October.
And it’s a place that reminds us of the importance of the Israelites to God in the Old Testament. Now when I went there the first time, they had one of these pull-up banners that you see – you know, advertising things right at the door – and I went with a group of pilgrims. I’ve got my clerical collar on and so on, and this this banner basically said “Never trust these Christians. They still blame us for killing their savior, Jesus.”
Now, I know many Christians who do blame the Jews for killing their savior, Jesus. Killing Jesus’ death and then resurrection was part of God’s plan, not our plan, and besides which, there weren’t Christians at that time. There were, you know, Christians hadn’t as such been invented.
So, it’s a very strange way, but it’s one of the ways that young Israeli people, people have to go there, school children have to go, soldiers have to go, everybody has to go through Yad Vashem, and rightly so. when they’re indoctrinated with this kind of speech it’s driving a wedge between us or between Israel and the rest of the world, and one of the reasons for it is that they don’t want to be replaced by Christ. They still see themselves as the chosen ones and if Christ has replaced them as god’s chosen ones where does that leave Israel? Where does that leave, in particular, religious Israelites or Israelis if you like in modern parlance, and so we’re in a very difficult place because we have to honor God’s Old Testament view of the world, but we have to live in the view of being God’s chosen family through Christ.
That’s who we are. We have redemption through his blood forgiveness of our sins and God promised that we would be a part of his family and he marked that with a seal of the Holy Spirit. Life does get confusing, and we question our choices at times, and we’re hurt by other people’s choices. But in the midst of the confusion and chaos that sometimes swirls around us, there is this one wondrous fact that we have to hang on to – that we have been chosen in Christ. And we’ve been chosen for a very specific purpose. We know that God intends to save the world through Jesus. And that gives us an important responsibility. We have been chosen to live, as Paul concludes in this passage, to the praise of God’s glory.
Well, if you read the rest of Ephesians, you’ll understand from Paul what he means by that, because he goes on to talk about it in detail. But what he really wants us to understand at this point is that We need to know that we’ve been chosen by God to be in Christ. It’s no longer just the Israelites. It’s all of us who set our hope on Christ. That’s you, me and every Christian in the world. We’ve been chosen by in Christ before the foundation of the world. Every one of us. We are God’s treasured possession. We should be the light to the nations. We should be the chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world who live for the praise of God’s glory. We are the blessed to be a blessing to the world. And that’s a message that our church leaders, our brothers and sisters who sit in pews or halls or online or whatever need to remember. We are to be a blessing to the world.
It’s our job to be the chosen one of God and bring light to the world. I would love to say that each of us has got the opportunity to do this on a national stage or an international stage. Of course, we don’t. What we do have is the opportunity to do it in our own little corners of our world, our own little lives, because that’s what God chose us to do. So my love to you all. my hope for your lives, my hope for our world. My prayers continue for Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land. My prayers for peace through justice are needed every day and every minute of every day, as indeed are yours. And so, I ask you to be and to think of yourselves as a blessing to the world as part of Christ’s chosen ones. Amen.
Father Mark Battison is President of Friends of Sabeel, Australia.
First broadcast on The Sunday Eucharist, July 14th, 2024
