Transcription
Now, I am a fan girl, a little bit, because I get to introduce our speaker today, N.T. Wright. And I'm so excited, and I'm going to make sure I read everything so that I don't say anything too crazy. But this man needs no introduction, but I'm going to read it anyway. Professor N.T. Wright, oh, he needs no introduction. That's in my lines. Okay. Um. He, okay. He is the world's foremost biblical scholar today. N.T. Wright is currently research professor emeritus of New Testament and early Christianity at St. Mary's College at the University of St. Andrews and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He has held a variety of both academic and chaplaincy posts at Oxford, Cambridge, and McGill University in Montreal. He was canon of Westminster in in the year 2000. In 2000. Ooh, that's a long time ago. 2000. Um, sorry, no, I, I was looking, going, "Do I say 2000? Do I say what?" Okay. Um, before serving as Bishop of Durham between 2003 and 2010. That's what I was saying, 2010. A quick Amazon search of his name comes up with a list of over 100 titles. You can listen to him on his weekly podcast, Ask N.T. Wright Anything. He is a scholar committed to the church and the glory of God. So, I invite you to give a very, very warm welcome to our speaker, uh, Professor N.T. Wright. Welcome.
>> [applause] [applause] [applause]
Thank you very much for that welcome, and I want to say thank you to all those who've worked very hard to get this whole event together. There are many different moving parts required to bring something like this into being, and I'm not going to name anyone. It's just, you know who you are, and I'm really grateful. And to those who've given money for it, to those who've done all the organization, sending out messages, and so on. And not least, arranging chairs and all of that. That's, that's really a blessing, and I'm delighted to be with you this morning to talk about Ephesians, which is what I've been asked to do. I said to somebody, well, I wrote this little book on Ephesians, which came out back end of last year. I assume they've all read it. So, really, I don't need to do more than just
>> [clears throat]
just alert you to it. But I want to tell you a bit about how this book came to be what it is, but then particularly what Ephesians itself is all about. And as I have learned and grown over the years, I found that my reading of Ephesians and of much of the New Testament has gradually moved. I wouldn't say changed from one thing completely to another, but different dimensions have come up and made themselves familiar to me and made sense of the text.
One of the little books that my publishers still want me to write, and really, by, by now at my age, I ought to be on the golf course or somewhere sensible rather than sitting at the desk. But one of the books they still want me to write is a project I have in mind called "50 Things I Wish I'd Known 50 Years Ago." And, uh, actually, it's a lot more than 50. Um, and, and when I told my wife I had that in mind as a title, she looked at me rather quizzically as though to say, "So, I suppose there's going to be something on marriage in here." Um, that, that's a moot point. We're waiting, we're waiting to see.
But one of the key things that I think, as I look back over the last 20 or 30 years particularly, has been one major theme which comes up very strongly in Ephesians, which most of us back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, when I was doing my training and then as a young pastor and a teacher in the university, we, we just weren't talking about. And I'll mention it now because we'll then come back to it, and it's the whole theme of the temple. Ephesians is very much a temple-oriented book. And for many Protestants, for many Christians in general, the problem about temple language and imagery is that it reminds them of either the kind of ritualism of a certain style of doing church, which many Christians today have turned their back on in favor of a more free and easy approach rather than an old-fashioned sort of either Catholic or high Anglican ritual. So, people worry about temple language for that reason. But also, alas, the Western church has held off from it because it is basically a Jewish idea, or in the first century, a Judean idea. And tragically, the Western church increasingly distanced itself from anything to do with the Jewish people and, and all that therein was. And we know where that led. But, so, we'll come back to the temple.
But let me tell you a little bit about the beginning of this. Some of you will know that my colleague Michael Bird, who's an Australian New Testament scholar, he and I now work together on the podcast which was mentioned with this ridiculous name of Ask N.T. Wright Anything. And you know, that's, how, how did that happen? I'm really not sure. But, um, Mike Bird and I collaborated on a book called "The New Testament in Its World," which was really a compilation of work that he and I had done over many years brought together. And so, the publishers wanted to take us out on the road to film some bits and pieces in different locations. And we went to Galilee, we went to Jerusalem, we went to Athens, we went to Rome. It was a great time. Although, while we were in Jerusalem, rumor was going around that this was about 10 years ago, that Greece was in the middle of a major financial crisis and that the currency was about to collapse. So, people in the Tel Aviv airport flying to Athens were saying, "Maybe we should buy cigarettes, 'cause that may be the only currency that they'll accept in the, in the restaurants in Athens." Fortunately, life in Greece was so chaotic that it didn't seem to matter one way or another anyway.
But while we were filming in Athens, we were on the Areopagus, which, as most of you will know, it's mentioned in Acts 17 as the place where Paul was laying out, setting out his stall to the highest court in the land. It wasn't a philosophers' debating house. It was a court. It was the, the scene like the Supreme Court. And Paul is justifying his own place in having come to Athens with his message about the one God and about Jesus. And anyway, we, Mike and I had done the basic filming about Paul on the Areopagus and so on. And we're standing there in the afternoon sun. Athens is a bit hot, but basically very nice. And the cameras were still rolling. And Mike turned to me, and we hadn't scripted this at all. And he said, "So, Tom, what's your favorite Pauline letter and why?" And I thought, Mike, we've been working hard all day. We hadn't planned this. How could you do that to me? But I thought, okay, this is a challenge I need to rise to. So, I breathed a quick prayer. I took a deep breath. And I said, Mike, where I live, this is when my wife and I lived in Scotland in, in near St. Andrews. Um, I said, "Where we live, we, we have a rather quirky house which has several different rooms. One room is very busy and gets overheated and people bump into each other, but it's where stuff actually happens." I said, "That, that's Galatians." And then I said, "Across the hallway, there's a more formal dining room where things are laid out nicely and where there's decent furniture, etc., where you go for a formal dinner. So, that's Romans. Take the stuff from Galatians and, and work it all out, and there it is. Then up the hall one way there are bedrooms, and down the hall the other way there are living rooms. And that's like the Corinthian correspondence and so on." I was thinking on my feet, you understand. I was wondering just how many rooms in the house can I assign to how many letters? Um, but then I said, and this is where it was all going. At the back of the house, which faces south, there's a room with windows around three sides. And from the, from that room, we look out across the Firth of Forth, which is a river about a couple of miles wide at that point, past the entrance to Edinburgh, and up into the Lammermuir Hills, which are 45 or 50 miles away. And when we look to the east at certain times of certain days, we can see the sun rising out of the North Sea. And when we look to the west at certain times of certain days, we can see the moon setting over the Lomond Hills. And I said, "That's Ephesians." Ephesians is visionary. It gives you the big picture.
One of the reasons why some scholars didn't think maybe Paul wrote it is because the big picture which Ephesians offers doesn't fit with the truncated vision of a Pauline theology which has sustained some branches, particularly of German liberal Protestantism, in the 19th century particularly. But no, it makes so much sense of everything else and creates a world within which all that we have in Romans and Galatians and Corinthians and Colossians and so on makes the sense that it makes.
Interestingly, this is the American edition of this book. And for the American edition, the people who designed the cover read the bit at the beginning of the book where I say what I've just said to you now. And they designed this cover so that it's got that sense of a vista with the sea and the mountains and so on. And I, I, I was delighted they did that, and it kind of says, says the whole thing.
So, how does Ephesians work? Most people who've studied Ephesians and taught Ephesians, and I'm well aware I'm speaking to pastors who probably preached sermon series on Ephesians. Most people who've taught Ephesians will say that it divides neatly down the middle. Chapters 1 to 3 are about doctrine and chapters 4 to 6 are about ethics. And I want to say, "Yes, but and no, but to that." Because our division of doctrine and ethics doesn't actually correspond to the way Paul thinks. There's an awful lot of doctrine in the second half of Ephesians, an awful lot of practical stuff in the first half as well. And I think that sometimes what we've done is we've allowed the frameworks of theology that, of, we've inherited from the Middle Ages and from the Reformation to set the agenda, to pose the questions, and then we've drawn on Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, whatever, Romans and Galatians, to answer the questions which those cultures have actually given us. But again and again, because my first discipline was ancient history, I find myself wanting to say, "No, I don't think that was the way they were thinking back then." And the mantra that I've developed over the years is: "We must stop giving 19th-century answers to 16th-century questions and start giving 21st-century answers to first-century questions." And when we do that, we are doing our best in the power of the Spirit and through prayer to listen to the Bible as it really was. And I grew up believing in the authority of scripture, and I still firmly affirm the authority of scripture. But I regret that so, so
>> [clears throat]
many churches, including, including some that think of themselves as biblical, in fact, embrace a theology which comes from somewhere quite different, some much later movement, and simply use the Bible as a source of proof texts.
Now,
>> [clears throat]
excuse me, I've done a lot of talking the last 5 days, and my voice is maybe more tired than I thought it was going to be. Um, we'll get there. But having said that about proof texts, I'm going to give you my easy way in to Ephesians 1, 2, and 3. And I say this to students because students love to have something they can get hold of and then work out from. And the easy way in is the verse 10 thing. Chapter 1:10, Chapter 2:10, Chapter 3:10. And I'm just going to talk you through that, and then explain and expand and, and show how it, how it all works.
Chapter 1:10 is in the middle of Paul's great opening prayer, Ephesians 1:3-14, which is actually a single sentence in the Greek. And it's a very Judean prayer. It comes right out of the Old Testament and the Judean traditions because it's a prayer about creation and redemption. It's a prayer about God having made the world, calling his people Israel, rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, taking them to their inheritance. And so many Christians have read that in Paul and have said, "Well, inheritance, that's obviously taking us to heaven." And I'm here to tell you that when Paul talks about the inheritance, he's not talking about dying and going to heaven. He is talking about God's rescue and renewal of the whole creation. And Chapter 1:10 makes this abundantly clear. And I've often said, "If the reformers, who I honor and venerate, William Tyndale is one of my lifelong heroes, um, if the reformers had made Ephesians, rather than Galatians and Romans, their main set text, then the entire history of the Western world would have been different." Because they were still trying to answer the question, "How do I go to heaven when I die? How do I leave Earth? And how do I then go to heaven?" Whereas Ephesians is all about how God has brought heaven and Earth together in Jesus, and how he is bringing heaven and Earth together and holding them together in and through the work of the Spirit in the church for the world.
Because Ephesians 1:10 says, um, that God's plan for the fullness of time was to gather up all things in him, that is in the Messiah, in Jesus, the Messiah. To gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on Earth, not to take up people from Earth and transport them somewhere else called heaven, but to unite heaven and Earth. And this is where the whole temple theme really gets underway. Because in the ancient world, everybody knew that temples were heaven plus Earth places. When you went to a temple, it wasn't as though you were in the realm of the gods, you were there because this was one of the places where God's realm and human realm overlapped. And so what you'd have in an ancient temple was an image to reflect the, the God's presence into the community and reflect the praises and worship and allegiance of the community back to the God. I'm talking about the God, these are pagan temples. So, when you get in Israel's world, you get the tabernacle, in which there is no carved image. The point is, this is a small working model of God's heaven plus Earth creation. And who does it have at its heart? Living, breathing human beings. The tabernacle in the wilderness, it's the high priest. When Solomon builds the temple in 1 Kings 8, it's the king. And the kings and priests, of course, that's really part of the story of the Old Testament, Kings and Chronicles, actually, a royal narrative and a priestly narrative. And that continues on through, we'll come back to that, perhaps.
But the point is this: God's plan in making his bipartite heaven plus Earth creation was not to create an earthly sphere in order that there should be a place where humans could undertake a moral examination to see if they were fit to leave that place and go to be with him in heaven. That's a bizarre distortion of Genesis 1, 2, and 3. The point is, humans are there as the image to reflect the stewardly love of God into the world, God's saving, loving sovereignty, and to reflect the praises of all creation, and articulate them back to God. So, when Paul is talking about God's plan was to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on Earth, that nesting as it does at the heart of this opening prayer of Ephesians, which is about creation and redemption, is all saying that this is God's way of launching his project of new creation out of the midst of the original creation. Not to deny the goodness of the original creation, but to affirm it and to show how in the gospel God has transformed it, following, of course, the debacle where the humans said, "Actually, we don't want to do that image-bearing stuff. We want to do our own thing." When they did that, God did not say, "Okay, that's enough of that silly idea. We'll do something quite different." What happens is God calls Abraham and says, "In you all the families of the Earth will be blessed." You know this as well as I do. Genesis Chapter 12. But Abraham's family have to learn that they are the people who have received the rescuing love of God. And so the whole Exodus narrative is about the children of Israel being gradually taught that, or partly taught that, or God trying to teach them that. But then the ultimate thing is that they're given the tabernacle, the wilderness tabernacle, because the whole point is that just as God wanted to dwell with Adam and Eve in the original creation, the heaven plus Earth reality, the point of calling a people, Abraham's family, was that they would be the tabernacle-bearing people. They would be the people in whose midst God would come and dwell. And the design of the tabernacle, the way that it's constructed, the, the manner and the form of it, is all to say, "This is a small working model of new creation. It's the sign of hope." The God of Genesis 1 and 2 has not abandoned his good creation. He is rescuing it. And the people of Israel are called to be the people who hold onto that hope as they wait for their inheritance. And the inheritance, as in Romans 8, is not now one strip of territory in the Middle East. It is the whole world. The whole world is now God's holy land. If only, my brothers and sisters, if only people had realized that over the last few hundred years, think
>> [snorts]
how much of today's political and social turmoil would have been very, very different. That's a whole other thing.
But so, Ephesians 1:10, God's plan is to sum up all things in heaven and on Earth in Christ. In other words, to create in Christ and then by the Spirit a new heaven plus Earth community, which will be a new way of being human which will bring God glory by reflecting his saving love into the world and by summing up the praises of the world before God. And that's really what Ephesians 1 is all about. And the second half of Ephesians 1, verses 15 through 23, is about the way in which the calling of the church nests within that and how the calling of the church as the Messianic people of God are shaped by the Messianic reality going all the way back to passages like Isaiah 11 where the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the branch that will grow out of his roots is anointed by the Spirit to be the one of wisdom and counsel and might and knowledge and the fear of the Lord. Paul is channeling all of that and saying that's true of the Messiah, and if you're in the Messiah, then this is your birthright as well.
Because then verses 22 and 23 of chapter 1, God has put all things under his feet. That's a reference to Psalm 8. This is the human vocation. One of the things that's been lost in so much Western Christianity is a proper sense of the human vocation in the Bible. We've tended to think, "No, we humans are hopeless. There's nothing we can do. God has
>> [clears throat]
to do it all. So, yeah, we happen to be human, but too bad," kind of thing. No, the human vocation, uh, in, in Psalm 8, we are made little lower than the angels to be crowned with glory and honor with all things put in subjection under our feet. As Paul says elsewhere, we see that already in Jesus. He is the ultimate human being. He is the one who stands at the dangerous intersection of heaven and earth and holds them together, reconciles them, and invites people of all sorts and conditions to come and be part of this new project, this thing called the church, which is his body, says Paul here. The fullness of him who fills all. Think about the filling. Exodus 40, the glory of the Lord fills the tabernacle. So, that Aaron and his sons can't stand there because the place is full of divine glory and splendor. Same thing happens in 1 Kings 8. Solomon builds the temple and the glory of the Lord fills the house. This idea of filling is temple language. It's Shekinah language. It's glory of God language. It's the return of Yahweh to Zion language drawing on Isaiah 40 and 52, drawing on Malachi 3, drawing on a whole lot. We'll come back to that later.
So, that's, that's Ephesians 1. Now, Ephesians 2, just go to verse 10. A well-known verse, hard to translate. I happen to have the NRSV updated edition here which says very clunkily in verse 10, "We are what he has made us." Well, yeah, that's true. The, the, the, the Greek is, the Greek is auto got estin poiema. We are his. What's poiema? It's the word from which we get poem. We are God's artwork. We, we are God's sculpture. We are God's freshly painted new amazing scene. We are God's architecture, whatever it may be. We are God's dance. We are God's poiema. And I've often said to people, "For God's poem, well, some of us may be haikus, some of us may be sonnets, some of us may be limericks, some of us may be epics, but that's fine. It's God's." And the point about artwork is that it displays something to people who might otherwise not see what's going on and opens their eyes and imaginations to different possibilities, different ways of being, different ways of seeing the world. My friends, the church is called to be God's poiema so that the world may see that there is a different way to be human. And, and we are God's artwork created in Christ Jesus.
See, the trouble is, we read that verse, certainly I, growing up in the normal Protestant way, we read that stuff about good works created in Christ Jesus for good works and we think, "Good works, help. Are we justified by works after all? Is it faith first, first works next?" That's missing the point entirely. That's the projection of a 16th and 17th-century neurosis back onto the text where it doesn't belong. So many people still get caught in that trap because, of course, the earlier verses say, "By grace we are saved through faith." Paul has just spent chapter 2 verses 1 to 8 talking about the plight of all humans and the fact of God's rescuing grace. But God, who is rich in mercy, he, he's, he's rescued us. He's saved us. He's done everything that's necessary so that we might be his people. And, and so, what is this all about? And so many Protestants reading the bit about good works in verse 10 have said, "Well, okay, okay. We are saved by grace, but then, of course, we don't lapse back into sin. We are still to do good works." As though good works here means behaving in ethically and morally okay ways. Well, of course God wants us, as Ephesians 4 to 6 says, God wants us to behave in the appropriate way for renewed humans, but that's not what good works here means. Good works here, as in the letter to Titus, as in one or not one or two other places, good works is what you would say about somebody in a city or a community in the ancient world who, having maybe made a bit of money, then builds a, a new town hall for the city or builds a bridge across the river so that people don't have to go all the way around or does these good works which enhance the community and make people grateful that now there are new possibilities. The church is to be the people who do good works not in order to earn their salvation. We're too fixated on that. Once you get away from the idea that the whole point is this moralistic one that somehow I need, need to get to heaven, but help, I'm a sinner. So, what's going to happen? No, the point is we are human beings called, like Jesus, to stand at that intersection between heaven and earth and reflect the love and stewardship and creativity of God into his creation. We are his poiema, his poem created in Messiah Jesus for the good works which God has prepared beforehand. Some to write poems, some to open universities, some to go and dig wells in Africa, whatever it may be. The good works which God has prepared beforehand not in order to earn something, but in order to express our gratitude for who God is and what he's done.
And
>> [clears throat]
then in order to get to chapter 3 verse 10, I want to draw your attention to 2:11-22 which I come back to again and again.
>> [clears throat]
And regret that in so much Western church traditions this has just been forgotten with disastrous results. That in the gospel the divided world of humankind is reconciled. Remember that at that time he says, "You Gentiles, you were outside. You were strangers to the covenants of promise. You were without hope, without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you've been brought near." Near to what? Near to the community of the people of God, to Abraham's family, to the commonwealth of Israel. How does that work? Well, in Christ, God has broken down the wall between Judean and Gentile. Now, most of us don't live in communities where that's the major social division, but in Paul's world and seen from Paul's point of view, that was the major social division. 'Cause there were Judeans over here and there were all these dirty, unwashed, idolatrous pagans out there. And so the Judeans from way back in their scriptural tradition are told, "Don't go near those Gentiles. Don't intermarry with them. Don't do, don't have any contact that you don't have to with them." And it's a major problem in Paul's day within Judean communities in Turkey, Greece, Rome, Spain, wherever. How do you live alongside these Gentiles? And there were different ways through that. And Paul says, "No, God has sliced through that." And he uses the temple imagery. Says God has broken down the dividing wall. As you will know, in Jerusalem, in the temple in Jerusalem, there was a wall separating the court of the Gentiles. That's as far as Gentiles were allowed to come from where the rest of the people were allowed to go. And Paul says God has broken down that wall.
In this chapter, as in Galatians 3, as in Romans 15, as in actually several key passages in Paul, part of the point of the gospel is the creation of a single new humanity composed out of many nations, kingdoms, tribes, and tongues. One of the problems of the last 400, 400 years of Western Christianity is we've been so concerned with Ephesians 2:1-10, "By grace you are saved through faith," that we've ignored Ephesians 2:11-22, God creating one single new family. Think about what that means in terms of Western culture and the pressures that we're under right now. How did that happen? Because the reformers believed in the inspiration of scripture, in the authority of scripture over against human tradition. So, why wasn't the integration of different ethnic groups front and center in their agenda? I think one of the things that happened, and nobody intended this, it just seems to have come about. It's in the 16th century, a lot of people were very concerned about, quite rightly, having the Bible and the liturgy in their own language. Fine. I don't want to worship in medieval Latin. I mean, once in a while, it's quite fun. I, I did once take an entire service in St. Mary's, um, the university church in Oxford, in Latin from start to finish. That's an old university tradition. And when I was chaplain of Worcester College, I was asked if I would take my turn and go and do that. And it was fun, actually. Having done Latin from the age of seven, it wasn't too difficult for me. But, um, I normally don't want to worship in Latin. I'm, I'm sometimes quite happy to worship in German or French. I'm afraid not Spanish. But, um, mostly we want to worship in our own language. And we want to hear the Bible in our own language because if it's in somebody else's language with somebody then explaining it to us, then we, we feel we're not probably getting the real message, the full thing. So, from the 16th century onwards, the Western church, the Western Protestant church, divided on linguistic lines, which became ethnic lines, which accidentally developed into theological lines. So, that when you look at Europe in the 17th century, any great city, there'll be a French church and a Portuguese church and a Polish church and an English-speaking church, etc., etc., etc. And nobody seems to have minded. And then, God help us, we exported those problems to the new world.
>> [laughter]
And so, you know, the rest is history. But, then people have just sort of assumed that our way of doing stuff is the right way. And those people down the road, well, maybe they're Christians, we're not quite sure. They do things so differently. We don't need to bother linking up with them.
When I, when I wrote my big book on Paul, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God," back in, uh, whenever it was, I think it was published 2013, the publishers sent me out on a, a road trip to talk about it and to take questions. And I had many gatherings, some of them as big as this. And it was great fun. But, in the questions, again and again in the Q&A, people would say, "If Paul could come back today, what would be the thing that would surprise him or shock him most?" And I don't know what people were expecting when they said that, but I unhesitatingly answered and would still answer: "He would be shocked to the core, not only that we are not united, but that we don't care. We just accept it. It's the way things are." And Ephesians 2 says, "No. God has broken down the dividing wall of hostility so that he might create one new human being in place of the two, so making peace." He's still thinking about the temple with the image-bearing humans in the middle. And now the temple in Jerusalem is being set aside with its restrictions because one of the great innovations in the Christian gospel was that when Jesus came, he reached out. "Many will come from Abraham from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God. Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to every creature," etc., etc. Shock, horror. What? You mean those, those dirty Gentiles? And you can see this rumbling along through Acts. They say to Peter, "You went to eat with uncircumcised people. How could you possibly do that? Don't you know this is against 200 years of tradition?" In Galatians, when, uh, Peter is eating with Gentiles in Antioch and then some people come from James and Peter realizes things are on the line here, we'd better back off. And Paul says, "You are forgetting the very core of the gospel."
And I mean, this is a kind of a scholarly aside, but some of you will know about the movement over the last 40 years, which loosely goes by the name the New Perspective on Paul. And people often say, "Oh, that New Perspective on Paul is swapping soteriology for for sociology. It's saying we're not talking about salvation, we're talking about reordering of society and getting better table manners to eat with one another and so on." That's not the point. As makes, as Paul makes very clear in Galatians 2, the gospel of the cross and resurrection of Jesus is at stake because if those Gentiles out there, whatever ethnicity they may be, but they're not Judean, if those Gentiles out there have come by grace to faith in Jesus the Messiah, to believe that he is the Lord and that God raised him from the dead, and if they have been baptized confessing that faith, they are idolaters no more. They are sinners no more. They are fellow members of the one body. It's, and if you don't agree with that, then you've forgotten the meaning of the cross. And that, that is absolutely basic.
So, that Ephesians 2:1-10, "By grace you're saved through faith," leads directly, organically, to Ephesians 2:11-22, that there is then this single new humanity. And look what happens. You're built upon the foundation. Well, Paul often writes like this where he, he's got a key point in his mind and he works round to it this way and that. And if we pick up the hints early on, we might just see where he's going. But, in case we don't, he finally says it at the end of the passage. This is quite a usual Pauline technique. So, he says, "So, you are no longer strangers and aliens. You are fellow citizens with the saints, members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets." You can see what's happening with the Messiah Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him, the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built into it, into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
When the Spirit comes to indwell this multi-ethnic community, this is a sign of God's intention, already fulfilled in Christ, to be completed when he returns, to join together heaven and earth as one. There will be neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female. We will all be one as indeed we already are in this new temple. So, that the church inherits the vocation of the tabernacle and the temple to be the small working model of new creation. There's a vocation. I've, I've been working with a church in New York where I've become good friends with the senior pastor there. And he got me to go to a, a meeting which he had last year. And where are we now? Is it still February? Yes, it is. This was back in October, um, something like that. And he said, he said, "I've heard you say this thing about small working model of new creation. I want you to spell out what that means." And I went to the book of Revelation where you get this image of the new creation with this wonderful coming together, the, the new Jerusalem coming down like a bride adorned for her husband. And, and then, one of the key things there which I homed in on, "God will wipe away all tears from all eyes." And I said, "If the church is the small working model of new creation, we must be the, the people of consolation, the people who stand where the pain of the world is, and the people who share in the Spirit-given godly work of wiping away tears from the eyes." And that happens in so many ways, as you know, in the, in the life of the church, in, in healing, in individual work, in community work, etc.
So, I must hurry on 'cause, 'cause Ephesians 3:10 is really where all this lands. Or one of the places all this lands. There's a bit that looks like an aside, 3:1-6, but, uh, and, and so on, but it isn't really an aside because Paul is describing how his own personal ministry, including the sufferings which he's been enduring and being imprisoned and so on, is part of this strange moment in God's plan. Paul is the one who's gone to the dangerous place, who's gone where the principalities and powers still think they run the show. And he says, "No. Look at this. Uh, uh, Ephesians 3:8, 9, and 10. Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of the Messiah and to make all people see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. And here it is, verse 10. So, that through the church, the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places in accordance with God's eternal purposes." Echo back to chapter 1:10, God's purpose was to create this multivariegated, multicolored, multi-ethnic people of God to demonstrate to the principalities and powers that think they run the world that there is a different way to be human, and it's the way of love and reconciliation and building
>> way to be human, and it's the way of love and reconciliation and building new creation together. Not that we finish the building ourselves, God builds the new creation in God's way, but we are to be the small working model of that. The sign to the principalities and powers, both I would say for Paul, both the earthly and the human. In other words, Caesar on his throne, if he gets to hear about this new movement, will make no sense. People don't do that kind of thing. People don't go to meetings where they greet as family, people of different ethnicities, people of the opposite gender, people who cross the boundary, boundary between slave and free. Yes, in Christ they do.
I thank God for so many churches I know that have not only been struck by this vision, but grasped and shaped by it. But there's a long way to go. Because there are many, many Christians in our world, alas, who are quite happy to let the principalities and powers keep up their rule, which is a rule of division. A rule which says, you don't mix with those people, and so on. You know what I'm talking about, but it's, this is actually part of the vital message of the gospel. Here we are in, what is the year? 2026? We're a quarter of the way already through the 21st century, and things have got worse, not better. In my lifetime, you know, I grew up in the '50s and '60s thinking, well, we've had all those world wars, and now happily we're settling down into, into a better way of being. And I want to say, hmm, yes, well, I'm kind of glad that I'm nearly 80, and I may not live to see the disasters that may come on the world, but I, I pray for my grandchildren. Where is this world going? And, and the, the right answer, the good answer to that would be that the church must lead the way into new ways of being human together, across the boundaries, across the cultures.
And I said this on a podcast a, a year or so ago, and my interviewer, with a big smile on his face, said, "Tom, many people will think this is, you're just following a woke agenda." I said, I said, "Read my lips. You won't find anyone less woke than me on so many fronts. But," I said, "it just sometimes happens that when one person is on a journey from A to B, and somebody else is on a journey from C to D, those roads might just overlap. You know, if you were on a journey from Manhattan to Minneapolis, and somebody else was on a journey from Cleveland to Chicago, here in the West you probably don't know where those places are, but they're out, they're out east somewhere, but, but, but you might well be on the same road for some of that time. But the starting point and the finishing point will be different. In the same way, when the church forgets elements of its core message, don't be surprised if other groups with other agendas and other philosophies come in and fill in the gaps. And so when somebody says to me, oh, that's basically, we, we, we heard somebody saying that, and they were a Marxist group, so obviously they're anti-Christian, so we can't, sorry, you know, if we haven't been doing our job, don't be surprised. Jesus himself said, the kingdom of God is breaking in violently, and the men of violence are trying to get in on the act. That's often how it works. So don't be put off. The problem is we have allowed our hollowed-out culture to frame and shape our theology instead of letting the Bible challenge the culture. And how does the Bible challenge the culture? Of course, by Bible-believing and prayerful Christians saying, "Oh my goodness, this is stuff we've got to work on." And it's got to be something which spills out into the wider community and makes people realize something different is going on here.
Multiculturalism, you know, the original multicultural community, as far as I can see, was the church in Syrian Antioch in the '40s AD, where Paul and Barnabas were teaching the people, and Antioch was on the trade routes, it was a, multi, multi place. And by the way, in the ancient world, in Paul's world, the Mediterranean world, nobody bothered much about skin pigmentation. They knew that if somebody came from down south in Africa, chances are their skin would be more black than the rest of us. And if somebody came from up north in Scythia or one of those wild places up there, let alone Britain, heaven help us, then their, their skin might well be fairer than you. But that wasn't a big deal. There's another whole series of cultural history questions to be addressed here as to how we have got to where we have got in the last four or 500 years of history, and it's, it's not a pretty sight, of course. But then, when people say, oh, multiculturalism, we tried that and it doesn't work. Well, no, of course it doesn't if you're trying to get the fruits of the gospel without the roots. And that's, that's how so much of the modern secular world has gone wrong. Pope Benedict said this in his speech to the United Nations in April 2008. He said, "The secular humanistic post-Enlightenment world has been trying to get the benefits of the gospel without believing in the gospel." And Pope Benedict said, "When that happens, the whole thing dissolves into a cacophony of special interest pleading." Does that sound familiar? He was absolutely right. The church must obviously not collude with that. The church must be living that gospel-rooted community life, which declares to the principalities and powers that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that there is a new way of being human.
And therefore, um, Ephesians 3:14 and following, this lovely prayer. I mean, the whole of Ephesians 1, 2, and 3 is basically a meditation and prayer. And as it starts with "Blessed be the God who," so it finishes with, "So this is what I'm praying, that according to the riches of God's glory, he may grant you to be strengthened in your inner being with power through his." There's a lot in Ephesians about power. That the Messiah may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are rooted and grounded in love. You know, I've been taught the message of love ever since I was small, and it just kind of washes over you. Oh, yeah, we're supposed to love one another. But actually, both at the divine level and at the human level, this was a huge shock in the ancient world. The ancient gods didn't love you. Zeus didn't love you. Athena didn't love you. Artemis was very glad that Ephesians, that Ephesus built her a huge temple, but she didn't love them. The gods used humans in their plots and plans and their games that they played, but there was no sense that they loved. So, the, the early Christians, with this message, that the God who made the world actually loves you, and you, and you, and you. And, and that that love extends to all the families of the earth. That's an extraordinary message. It's actually an unbelievable message until it becomes believable through communities that are showing how it works. Because when the communities are living in love, rooted and grounded in love, then, verse 18, "I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of the Messiah that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." And you know, there were some theologians in previous generations who, doing their best to avoid the Judaic background of the New Testament, were trying to invent pagan systems like Gnostic systems in which there would be this thing called the fullness, the pleroma, which is a kind of quasi-divine being that maybe Paul is referring to. That's absolute rubbish. This is temple theology. Who gets to be filled with the fullness of God? The tabernacle, the temple. Who gets to be filled with the fullness of God now? The people of Jesus, the Messianic people, the Holy Spirit people.
Now to him, he says, who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. We have to ask for stuff. We have to imagine stuff. By being God's poiema in the world, we have to help other people to imagine and ask for it. But God will do exceedingly more. Right now, we are called to be, as broadly speaking Western Christians, a community who bear witness in a world that has almost forgotten what this true message is about, including, tragically, many groups in my country as well as yours, who call themselves Christian and use the label Christian in order to advance agendas which are totally different from what you have in Ephesians 1, 2, and 3. So to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. To him be glory in the church and in Messiah Jesus. The divine glory which filled the tabernacle and the temple, that divine glory is to fill the church because it comes to us because we are in Christ, to all generations.
Let's just pray for a moment, and then we have a break coming up. Gracious Father, thank you for this breathtaking vision. Thank you for Paul sitting there in prison dictating this. Thank you for those little communities around Western Turkey and elsewhere to whom he was writing. Thank you for the way in which despite everything the early church lived this out and witnessed to the principalities and powers that there is a different way to be human. Pray for the church in our day, the church here in Seattle, the churches represented in this room right now. That we may know what we are to do, which good works we are called to do to bring this reality to birth afresh and to make all people see that there is indeed a new way to be human and it's the way of Jesus. We pray in his name. Amen.
>> [applause]