Singing peace – 16 July 2021

 

In the epistle for next Sunday, Paul mentions peace[1] four times: …he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.  He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. (Ephesians 2:14-20)

Paul spells out something utterly basic in Christian understanding.  What he calls the hostility was between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christian believers who had never been Jews.  It was a big issue in Paul’s time… and you can imagine how born and bred, “cradle”-Jews would assume that they did not stop being Jews because they now belonged to Christ.  Jewishness was not something you could simply shed.  And it is a short step from there to the assumption that non-Jewish Christian converts should at least observe the ancient Jewish laws and customs, as Jesus did.  That issue is the whole purpose of the Letter to the Galatians, and other passages such as this one.  Paul says this dividing wall is broken down; the law of commandments and ordinances (religious requirements, preconditions) is abolished… all who are in Christ are one new humanity.  He signals to the non-Jews: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 

Christians have always been easily tempted to expect, even require, that you should be like us, think what we think.  The peace Paul so stresses is a new life without dividing walls; there can be no strangers and aliens in the household of God.  Inevitable differences, such as between Jews, Romans and Greeks, Catholic and Protestant, black and white, even saints and sinners, are to be understood and appreciated, with bridges built everywhere they should be.  In mature faith, in any case, there is no longer energy or inclination for the maintenance of walls or animosity, or building fences.  I was fascinated to read[2] how, in the 1950s, the Trump family in New York attended the very wealthy and upmarket Marble Collegiate Church.  Its minister then was Norman Vincent Peale who preached what came to be called the prosperity gospel, based on ego and on privilege—you too can be like us – so Donald J Trump learned it not only from his dysfunctional family ethos but also from that church at that time[3].  These people divided the world into winners and losers.  But that is precisely what does not happen in the household of God …if you have ever read, marked, learned and inwardly digested the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the spirit and the way of Jesus.  In contemplative life and prayer we are daily learning and being equipped, in silence and stillness, for living in peace, without walls, and also without fear.

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[1] In Greek “peace” is eirēnē (εἰρήνη) from which we get the English name Irene.

[2] Mary L Trump: Too Much and Never Enough (Simon & Schuster 2020)

[3] The Marble Collegiate Church is a very different place now.