Here’s my longer notes (with some extensive footnotes) from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (28th June, 2026), as we continue our journey through Paul’s extraordinary letter, Ephesians.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.’
— Jonathan Swift[i]
‘The “color line” was washed away in the blood.’
― Frank Bartleman[ii]
READ: EPHESIANS 3:1-11 (NIV/NET)
ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL
Somewhere, in the hectic-ness of last weekend, I got a bit of time to switch off.
On Sunday afternoon, I had to take Corban across to Smithills Hall, in Bolton, and so, while I waited for Corban, I sat on a bench behind the hall, in the shade of a tree, attempting to enjoy a book, but finding myself distracted by the scenery.
If you’ve never been, Smithills Hall is a thing of wonder. The building itself is a patchwork quilt in stone and wood of differing time periods: the far end was built in medieval England, and it ends in Victorian England. Yet, it works. There’s a nice long lawn at the back, surrounded by woods, and planted out with a variety of flowers; some are garden flowers, others are wild, but they sit well together. All of it was bathed in sunlight.
Accompanying the view was birdsong from the woods; that wonderful soothing drone of bees moving between flowers; the humming of human chit-chat.
All these colours, textures, sounds coming together in one great chorus—none competing with the other, none subservient to another, but each somehow setting the others in a more beautiful light.
I found myself nodding at it all, ‘this is good.’
A lady, who suffers with Alzheimer’s, was sitting a couple of benches away from me (her daughter had gone to buy them coffee), and she shouted across to me, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
It was. Beautiful was the perfect word for it.
And I found myself thinking: If I were not already a believer in God, it would be moments like these that would make me curiously suspicious that perhaps there is a Creator after all. Moments that have always triggered me to say (even in my most atheist of days), ‘Well done!’, to whoever orchestrated it all.
Ephesians 3, what we’ve just read, is an odd passage.
In verse 1, Paul begins to pray a prayer we eventually get to with verse 14.[iii] But within the opening sentence of his prayer, Paul breaks off and appears to go down a rabbit hole for thirteen verses, talking about the joyous calling he has been given to take the good news of Jesus to the the non-Jewish peoples of the world (Gentiles).
There are several things we could say about this “diversion”.[iv] But all I want to say — as others, like Tom Wright, have pointed out[v] — is, that what looks like an unintentional “detour” is not. It is Paul seizing the chance, like any good preacher, to repeat the point he has been banging on about throughout chapter two, before he goes on to reinforce that very same point in a prayer he desperately desires the church to say, ‘amen’, too.[vi]
His point is that there is a particular quality of gathered life that is not an optional footnote to what the church is, but the very point of what the church is. As with the scenery I experienced last weekend, there should be something about the church that makes the watching world, the watching universe, the watching heavenly realms stop and stare, and declare towards God the Creator, ‘Well done!’[vii]
In verse 10-11, the climax of this passage, Paul writes:
‘[God’s] 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.’ (NIV, emphasis mine)
The word Paul uses for manifold (Greek: πολυποίκιλος / polypoikilos) is a beautiful word. In the ancient Greek it was often used when describing a many-coloured, richly woven, embroidered pattern. Think of a Persian rug, or — and maybe closer to what Paul is picturing — a tapestry.[viii]
Think of all those threads of fabric, in all their variety, which, left to themselves, would never naturally belong beside one another nor come together, but then an expert artisan comes along and, over a great amount of time, weaves them together to form one thing of intricacy, complexity, and extraordinary beauty.
It’s certainly not the first time in this letter when Paul describes God as an expert craftsman. Paul has been stacking metaphor upon metaphor.[ix] But no matter the metaphor Paul adopts, the final work is the same: God’s eternal intent has been to take many differing things — all the peoples and ethnicities of the world — and bring them all together to be one people, one family, under Jesus.
This, Paul says, is what God’s eternal work throughout history has been about, and now this explosive and new, yet ago-old-project, has come to pass through Jesus Christ.
Not in any way that erases or bleaches these ethnicities. And neither in a way that makes any ethnicity subservient to or superior to any other. But where each, woven beside the other, sets the other in a more beautiful light, forming a counter-cultural scene that makes the watching world take note.
Again — and sorry to encroach on next week — Paul hits this note in his prayer.
We could mention its opening line, where he radically states that ‘God is the father of all the families of the world … ‘
But Paul goes on to pray that we should know, ‘as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep [God’s] love really is.’ (Eph 3:18).
It’s all too easy to read this as if Paul is wanting us to grasp how immeasurable God’s love is for me. While true, Paul actually wants to the church to celebrate and embody the ethnic-boundary crossing love of God.
The church, in its gathered unity across division — one people, drawn from many peoples; different, and together — is God’s tapestry, hung out for all the watching powers of the world see, announcing, ‘my new creation has begun.’
The church is, and is supposed to be, God’s declaration over every power that delights in division.
DIVISION AND MULTIPLICATION
Our world is a divided place. It always has been.
The modern world likes to make a great deal of noise claiming that all humanity has equal value and equal rights — that this is self-evident, plain to see, perhaps even scientifically provable. While I agree that we are equal in value and have equal rights, this isn’t self-evident at all. Plus, despite it’s noise, the ideal is rarely seen on a global stage, and consistently fraught with tension on a national stage, too. The only reason we can make that claim is because of the Scriptures.[x] Strip them away, and history tells a very different story.
In the ancient world, the idea that every human being carried equal worth was not obvious in any sense. Every culture, in some way or another, thought itself superior to others, and reached for all kinds of justifications (“scientific” and “religious”) for feeling so.
Paul, in chapter 2, already mentioned the ‘wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile’ (Eph. 2:14). But this was not one sided. As one Roman writer put it bluntly, ‘As the Greeks say, all men are divided into two classes — the Greeks and the barbarians.’[xi] It is the age-old instinct: there is us, and then there is them.
But the division didn’t stop there. The math got worse. Within each ethnic group the divisions multiplied.
In a city like Ephesus, for example, class divided people at every level. ‘Citizen’ was not a synonym for ‘inhabitant.’ Most people in most cities were not citizens at all, but strangers and foreigners — words Paul has already pressed on in Ephesians 2. Clothing, jewellery, and hairstyle all functioned as a visual vocabulary, marking out each person as either elite, freeborn, freedman, slave, young, old, married, or unmarried. You could read a person’s rank at a glance.[xii]
Throughout chapter 2 of Ephesians, Paul has masterfully taken on all this ethnic- and class-based language of division, and shown how within Jesus’ economy and kingdom, no one can claim any superiority because grace abolishes every claim to superiority. Not one of us as earned citizenship in God’s new people.[xiii]
It was a radical claim in a divided world. It remains radical.
Division between peoples is not merely an unfortunate feature of human history, ancient and modern. It is one of the clearest symptoms of humanity’s fallenness. The world went astray under our care, and one of the most visible results of that fracture is that humanity itself broke apart. The tapestry became a heap of warring, tangled threads — each pulling away from the other, each refusing to lie beside the other.
And we have never quite managed to fix it ourselves. Though we tried, often with the same methodology.
The Bible holds two stories side by side that contrasts humanity’s great attempts at solving this alongside God’s strategy.
The first is the story of Babel.[xiv]
You remember the scene. Humanity gathers on a plain in Shinar, and decides to build a city and a tower — a project to unite the whole human race under one language, one vision, one project. Unity at last! Or so it seems.
But there’s something that stinks about Babel.
Ancient Near Eastern archaeology hints that this story carries a sharper edge than we usually notice. Imperial inscriptions from the Neo-Assyrian period record kings boasting of ‘making the totality of all peoples speak one speech’ — of forcing the nations they had conquered to abandon their own languages and adopt the imperial tongue.[xv] One cylinder inscription records that Sargon II caused all the peoples of his empire to ‘accept a single voice.’[xvi]
Sure, they from a later date than the Babel story, but they reflect an ancient tactic and give us a big clue over what’s going on: The Babel building project describes the violent, coercive erasure of human difference in the name of a single, dominant power.[xvii]
Think of it in terms of the tapestry. The problem at Babel was not that the threads were diverse. The problem was that someone decided the only solution to the warring tangle was to dye every thread the same colour — to force uniformity upon the whole thing, to make everything look like us. The result is not a tapestry. It is a bolt of plain cloth. Technically unified, but actually impoverished of all intricacy and beauty. And, in truth, maintained only by force.
Sadly, this ancient story has far too many modern parallels.
So, when God confuses the languages at Babel and scatters the peoples, he is not unleashing chaos — he is restoring the difference that had been flattened. He is giving back to the nations their God-given distinctiveness, their irreplaceable colour. The diversity of the human family is not the problem to be solved.
But this is not all that God does. God doesn’t simply scatter the people and leave the tapestry to pull itself apart. Another story follows, where God calls one man, out of all the peoples of the earth, to be the beginning of something new.
His name is Abram. He is called to leave his country and his people. And what God says to him should stop every instinct toward tribal exclusivity in its tracks:
‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
Five times in Genesis, God repeats this to the patriarchs — to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob.[xviii] Abraham is not being elevated above the nations so that his descendants can look down on everyone else. He is being chosen for the sake of the nations — so that, through this one particular thread, the great artisan can begin to draw all the other threads together.
The plan and promise of Genesis 12 flows out of the climatic problem shown in Genesis 11.
This, Paul says, is the plan God has been working out across all of history, the mystery ‘hidden for ages’ (Eph. 3:9) but now, in Jesus Christ, finally and fully revealed.[xix] Not many parallel communities. Not a hierarchy of peoples with one at the top. But one family, woven from all nations — each thread retaining its colour, its texture, its particular beauty, but brought together by the master craftsman into one thing of extraordinary complexity and grace.
This is no Babel but, to use Paul’s wording from Ephesians, a body.[xx]
Part of the renewing of creation is not only the reunion of humanity with God, but the reunion of humanity with itself.
As E. F. Scott puts it:
‘The innumerable broken strands were to be brought together in Christ, knotted again into one, as they had been in the beginning.’[xxi]
The church is not Plan B. It is what God has been building toward since before the foundation of the world; reweaving the tapestry.
The church, Paul is saying, is meant to be the living, working, visible, evidence that this is happening. Not a perfect community – we are not that. But a practising community. A community that is, week be week, learning to be something that the world cannot produce on its own.
The Church becomes the firstfruits of a restored humanity: this odd ensemble of diverse humans, unified in God’s Anointed, living under his kingship, becoming a community that anticipates the world to come.
Let me also be clear about what this is not. It is not a call to false unity — a bland, thin togetherness that pretends our differences don’t exist. It is not uniformity, where everyone must look, sound, and worship in the same way.[xxii] And it is certainly not dangerous assimilation, where Christ himself is quietly edged out so that everyone feels comfortable. Christ is the centre. He is the very reason we are gathered. And it is precisely because he is Lord over our differences that genuine unity across our differences becomes possible at all.
STRANGE PEOPLE
So what does this gathered, woven, one-family-from-many-peoples actually look like in practice? How does it show up in the texture of everyday life?
Well, we have examples…
TASSELS
If we jump back in time, into the Old Testament, we get a foreshadow of this.
In Numbers 15, God gives Israel an instruction that sounds rather peculiar. Every Israelite is to wear tassels — blue cords — on the corners of their garments. It sounds odd, but not once you understand the world it was given into.
Israel were not the only ones wearing tassels in the ancient world. Archaeological evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia — paintings, sculptures, and rock engravings at Timna dating to the 13th century BC — reveal that tassels were worn across the Ancient Near East. But in those cultures, they were a status marker. Fringed garments were for the nobility, people of rank. Tassels were reserved for the elite.[xxiii]
Not in Israel. In Israel, every man wore them. From the tribal chief to the day labourer. The symbol that in every other culture said I am above you was levelled. It now said simply: we are all God’s people. The very garment of privilege became the garment of equality.
THE KISS
If we jump forward a millennium and a half, something similar — and equally striking — happened in the early church with the practice of the holy kiss. Paul mentions it in several letters: ‘Greet one another with a holy kiss’.[xxiv] The early church took this seriously, and writers from the first few centuries record it as a regular feature of Christian worship.
Like the tassel, its was an intentional subversive act.
In the Roman world, a kiss was not simply a warm greeting. It was a coded social transaction. Those of lower status kissed those of higher status. The kiss always flowed upward, never downward.[xxv]
But in the early church, everyone kissed everyone. The slave and the senator, merchant and widow, Jew and Gentile. It flowed both ways. As with the tassel, a gesture that had always reinforced rank was inverted — repurposed to dissolve the very hierarchy it had always assumed. And the watching Roman world, deeply formed by honour and shame, noticed. This strange community, in which the first and the last greeted one another as equals, was — well — peculiar. Peculiar in the best possible sense.[xxvi]
Some of you may be quietly relieved that I am not about to suggest reinstating this practice. There is much wisdom in recognising that some biblical instructions travel better across cultures than others. Culture changes, and that is entirely fine.
But what does not change is the principle underneath it: the church is called to take the social norms of its day and, in the name of Christ, invert them. To make the first last, and the last first. Not in some chaotic, destructive way — but in the way of grace, in which Christ himself ’emptied himself, taking the form of a servant’ (Phil. 2:7).
If you want a modern equivalent: If the King walked in right now, we’d bow and go through all the fuss we could muster to show him honour.
Imagine a community that made the same level of fuss for a homeless man! That’s what we’re talking about.
Both the tassel and the kiss did the same thing: they took a symbol of rank and stripped it of its claim. They said, in effect: in this community, the old markers don’t mean what they used to mean. Grace has levelled the ground. The tapestry is not arranged with the finest threads at the top and the roughest at the bottom. It is woven together — each beside the other, each setting the other in a more beautiful light.
AZUZA
Let’s jump forward again, another couple of millennia, to Los Angeles, America, in the early twentieth century, during a time of rigid racial segregation due to the Jim Crow laws, when William J, Seymour opened the doors of the Azuza Street Mission to everyone, regardless of skin colour or nationality. In 1906, the Holy Spirit moved powerfully!
The miracle of Azusa Street was not merely that people spoke in tongues. It was that people who had been told to avoid each other suddenly shared a table. The walls of race were broken down: African Americans, European Americans, and Hispanic Americans, met together, sat with each other … and the secular press was scandalised.
Eyewitness and historian Frank Bartleman observed that, ‘There was much persecution, especially from the press. They wrote us up shamefully, but this only drew the crowds … ‘. He goes on to add, that what drew the crowds was that ‘the “color line” was washed away in the blood.’[xxvii]
That’s some of the best words ever written.
The world around it was doing what the world always does: drawing lines, enforcing separations, encoding status and hierarchy. Who was American, who was not? Who is a citizen, who is not? But in one small building in Los Angeles, the church was doing something peculiar. Something the world noticed.
BBQ
Let’s jump forward a century, to 2024, and there is a church in Bury putting on a Funday, serving the surrounding community and inviting them to sit with us. It’s us (MCC), btw, just in case you’re wondering.
A professional photographer came along to capture our Fun Day and barbecue. He wandered around all afternoon taking photographs and chatting with people, and afterwards, via email, he said something that has stayed with me ever since:
‘We live in a very unforgiving time, so it is so nice—no, special—to see such a great mix of ages and cultures simply enjoying each other’s company. You are all doing something very special.’
WORLD CUP
Let’s jump, one last time, to now; to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, where the thing making the headlines in the papers, is not the scores, but the fact that Christians from differing teams are gathering together, post-match, to pray.[xxviii]
The players have all been asked what they’re are doing, and they’re giving the same answer. But German goalscorer Felix Nmecha highlighted this perspective perfectly, stating:
‘In the game we are opponents, but after the game we are all Christians, we are all brothers.’
All of this to say, that when the church genuinely embodies Ephesians 3:10, people notice—and often don’t quite know what to do with it.
Sometimes it’s scandal. Sometimes it’s, ‘Wow! That’s beautiful.’ One act can create both reactions. As Paul wrote elsewhere, ‘to some we stink of death’ — especially to those who want to cling to walls of ethnic segregation — ‘and to others we smell of life.’[xxix]
This, Paul says, is the manifold wisdom of God made visible. Not from a pulpit. Not in a theological argument. But in the ordinary, embodied, sometimes-awkward reality of people who should not, by every natural measure, belong beside one another — and yet they do.
KU KA NA WEWE
A few weeks ago, I learned an amazing Swahili phrase from AE and MH: Ku ka na wewe.
It means, Sit with me, or more precisely, Sit where I sit.
I was also told, that in John’s gospel, where the English reads, ‘so the Word became flesh and dwelled with us …’ (Jn. 1:14), the Swahili is ‘the word became flesh sat where we sit … ‘. Ku ka na wewe.
Jesus spent much of his ministry sitting with people. Eating with tax collectors. Talking with Samaritans. Welcoming children. Allowing women to sit among disciples. Touching lepers. Crossing rooms. Crossing boundaries. Crossing assumptions.
Someone once observed that in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.[xxx] Sitting with others was not a mere side quest to Jesus, but his main mission.
I mention this because, perhaps discipleship, displaying this tapestry, often looks less dramatic than we imagine; no more complicated than crossing a room; learning someone’s name; asking a question; listening to a story; sitting beside someone who is older, someone from another country, another social class, another political instinct.
It is easy to imagine that someone else ought to do that; that someone else has to make their way toward me. But Paul does not allow us that luxury. The responsibility belongs to each one of us.
Paul himself, a Jew, counted it an enormous privilege, a ‘special joy,’ he calls it, to carry and embody the Good News of Jesus across cultural boundaries – boundaries he used to take pride in. More than this, as Paul reminds us, God crossed the greatest distance imaginable to sit with us. And now he invites us to sit with one another.
The nations of our world are fracturing. Social media algorithms entrench us within echo chambers. Political tribalism deepens. The default inclination of our age is polarisation — the careful, comfortable arrangement of people into groups that do not need to encounter one another.
Into that world, Paul says, God has placed the church—not a perfect community, but a community that is tending its inclination towards one another.
We are called to be something radically different to the ‘Babel sounds’ of our world.[xxxi]
This week, cross the room, whatever or wherever that room is. Tend to your inclinations towards others. Remember that grace has already levelled the ground on which we all stand.
Let us be, together, what God has always intended his people to be so that His wisdom—in all its rich and irreducible variety—can be made known to the rulers and authorities of our age.
May the grace of Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all, evermore.
Amen.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
— Jesus, Matthew 13:31 (NIV)
ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES
[i] Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting (1706)
[ii] Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), p. 54
[iii] Most translations show this grammatically. The NIV and the NET, for example, reflect in the English the repeat phrasing of the Greek (both verse 1 and 14 begin with, ‘For this reason I, …’), and they close the end of verse one with a hyphen (.—.) to show the beginning of Paul’s “digression.”
Without the “digression”, it would read something like: ‘For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles, kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may …’ (1, 14-16a, NIV)
[iv] Just one more, for the curious: Many theologians, along with avid studiers of this letter, have wondered why Paul needs to ask his audience if they are aware of his special calling to share the gospel with Gentiles (3:2). It could be rhetorical, of course; a way of saying, ‘in case you forgot’. However, this, along with other things, has been long suspected to indicate that Paul is addressing this letter to communities who may not be familiar with him. And this idea, along with others, all adds up to address the age-old question of whether Paul is addressing the Ephesian church at all.
Yes, it’s entitled Ephesians, or The Epistle to the Ephesians, but this title was added much letter (there’s no time to go into a long digression here, but none of the letters came with anything like a ‘book’s title’).
And yes, the opening verse implies, in many translations, that Paul addresses the people of Ephesus. However, as your Bible’s footnotes transparently point out, the line ‘of Ephesus’ doesn’t occur in the earliest manuscripts. They read, ‘ … to God’s holy people, who are faithful … ‘. Like the title, the addressee is also probably a later scribal addition.
Without the later addition of title and addressee, we can only go from the contents of the letter, and nothing in the contents specifically screams ‘Ephesus.’
From the contents, we see that Ephesians is Paul’s most impersonal letter. I don’t mean to say that Paul is impersonal, as in cold, grumpy or reticent to write. He’s not. Warmth, thanksgiving, excitement and joy pervade throughout. Rather, it is the only letter of Paul’s without any personal greetings or personal messages. This is odd. If this was Ephesus – a place Paul was certainly acquainted with on his missionary journeys (he spent three years there, for a start, see Acts 20:31) and where he had a strong acquaintance with Timothy who led the church there (see Paul’s letter named thus) – it is difficult to believe Paul would have sent such an impersonal letter. Such lack in mention of intimate experience with the Ephesians, alongside Paul’s need to explain his personal calling, points to the idea that Paul cannot be specifically addressing Ephesus (alone, at least). To suggest otherwise, also raises questions over why Paul must write, ‘I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus … ’ (Eph. 1:15, italics mine).
This impersonality stresses that here is something rather ‘generic’ about Paul’s audience. Also, rather uniquely for this letter and unlike his other letters, Paul does not appear to address any point of controversy unique within the specific congregation and neither does he seem to be replying to any letter(s) they have addressed to him. Not only is the audience ‘generic’, but so too is the content. (By ‘generic’ I do not mean ‘boring.’ I mean, ‘spans several specific contexts’).
The plot thickens: As is often noted, Ephesians covers a lot of content akin to Colossians, with some saying they share around fifty-five verses in common. Additionally, both letters seem to have been carried by the same messenger: Tychicus, mentioned by Paul in Colossians 4:7 and Ephesians 6:21.
Because of this, some have suggested that Ephesians could possibly be the “missing” letter addressed to the believers in Laodicea, that Paul indicates Tychicus had also delivered in Colossians 4:6.
It’s an interesting suggestion, and it does solve part of the mystery. However – although affirming that Tychicus was carrying a letter that the Laodiceans had received – the lack of Ephesians’ specific content raises the question of whether it was addressed to Laodicea specifically (i.e., we should not be thinking of redubbing the letter Laodiceans). Plus, the Colossian church is requested by Paul, in the same verse (Col. 4:6), to share their letter, which is specific to them, with Laodicea too. As they were upriver of the one other, sharing the same geography and culture in the Valley of Lycus, the specific content of Colossians would likely address the specific situation of Laodicea.
So, was the letter that the Laodiceans had ‘Ephesians’? I would say it’s highly probable. But it was more than a letter to them and the Colossians alone.
The best suggestion, I feel, is that the letter we call Ephesians was not written to any one church but was Paul’s circular letter to all the churches of Asia Minor. As Barclay states, ‘If this is so, Ephesians is Paul’s supreme letter,’ as if Paul, while in prison, said, ‘”This is something that I must get across to everyone ….” to tell them of the supreme task of the Church … ’ [William Barclay, The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians, The New Daily Study Bible (Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, UK, reprinted 2009), p. 82]
None of this conversation is ‘new’. Pick up any commentary and you’ll find it discussed at varying depth. Also, whatever the case may be, it doesn’t negate the importance of the letter being within the canon of scripture.
[v] Tom Wright, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God (SPCK, London, UK, 2025), p. 66
[vi] Years ago, someone came to me after a service saying, ‘Do you know you repeat yourself?’ I simply replied, ‘Yes. It’s intentional.’
[vii] There is some debate as to what is in mind when Paul refers to ‘rulers and authorities.’ Is Paul referring to political, social, cultural and religious forces which are contrary to the will of God, or to literal heavenly beings (and then, good or bad heavenly beings)? Various arguments are made for each. Personally, based on all Paul has said thus far in Ephesians — where he has mentioned both the ‘prince of the air’ (2:1-2) and socio-religious systems (2:11-22) — I see no difficulty in saying ‘all the above’ could be in view.
Jumping ahead of what I will say, the existence of the church sends a message to both the human rulers and the spiritual powers that drive them to divide and devastate the earth. As Esau D. McCaulley states, ‘The church’s unity across ethnic difference is a testimony to God’s wisdom, authority, and power. The powers tried to create a society based on dishonesty, greed, oppression, and mutual hostility. God created a society (the church) rooted in sacrificial love, mutual forbearance, graciousness, and respect.’ [The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2024), p. 424]. Plus, I add, what the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire had created and attempted to hold together through domination and coercion, God had created through self-giving sacrifice.
[viii] Well, to be honest, the closest parallel to what Paul is getting at is the embroidered patterns found on cloaks worn by the wealthy and ruling classes. In this context, then, we are akin to a garment that God has draped around his shoulders, exciting and arousing the jealousy of other so-called ‘kings’. It could also be that Paul has the story of Joseph in the back of his mind as his draws on this picture — Joseph’s cloak was the envy of his brothers. If so, then Paul, writing to a church that often experienced, as Joseph did, ostracization and betrayal from ethnic brothers, could be giving a cosmological backdrop this suffering. In this sense, Paul is also implying that, ‘when your unity across ethnic difference draws such attention, do not be downhearted, be encouraged. It’s a sure sign that God, out of sheer joy, is parading you.’
[ix] Ephesians 2:10 (we are God’s ‘masterpiece’), and Ephesians 2:20, 21 (we are [God’s] house … carefully joined together).
[x] For a brilliant and accessible exploration of this, I’d highly recommend Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality.
[xi] Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Republica (On the Republic), Book 1.37, written by around 54–51 BC. The phrase comes from a conversation between Laelius and Scipio; in which Scipio is putting forward his arguments in favour of monarchy. After a question from Scipio (whether, at Rome’s founding, Romulus was a King over barbarians), Laelius replies, ‘If, as the Greeks say, all men are either Greeks or barbarians, I am afraid he was, but if that name ought to be applied on the basis of men’s manners rather than their language, I do not consider the Greeks less barbarous than the Romans.’
BTW, the Greek term for barbarian (barbaroi) likely traces its origins to the older Sumerian word barbar, meaning “foreigner.” I don’t know what this means for the cartoon elephant I fondly grew up with? That aside, in Greek usage, it functioned both as a borrowed term and as an onomatopoeic expression, mimicking what Greeks perceived as the unintelligible speech of people who spoke other languages. Initially, barbaroi was a neutral designation for all non-Greek peoples and did not carry a derogatory sense. Over time, however, the term acquired increasingly negative associations. Especially following the Persian Wars (c. 492–475 BCE), Greek attitudes toward outsiders changed considerably. Greeks emphasized the contrast between themselves as free people and the Persians as slavish subjects of despotism. As a result, barbarian evolved into a cultural category that implied inferiority, a lack of “civilization” and, ultimately, an anti-Greek persona: barbarian was everything the Greeks did not want to be.
[xii] Sandra L. Glahn, The City of Ephesus: A Short History (Aspire Productions, Kindle Edition, 2024), p. 13
[xiii] Another long, yet important, aside and historical context note: Paul’s already knocked out all the prop’s we may lean on, and that the ancient world certainly leant on, to demolish any idea that some of us are more racially or civically (is that the word I want?) privileged than others.
Regards ethnic privilege: Eph. 2:14, should be clear enough. Paul does not downplay the special calling or significance of the Jewish people within this eternal plan of God, and neither do I. However, just in case this calling be used somehow as a superiority claim, Paul, himself Jewish, does something telling in Eph. 2: 3b: When talking of our spiritual state of death and need for Divine intervention, Paul writes, ‘… indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest…’ (NET, which notes, helpfully, that its translation of vv. 1-3 is very literal, to the point of retaining the awkward syntax of the original. Italics mine). This ‘as the rest’, regardless of how we understand the ‘wrath’ mentioned in this scenario [as either God’s, or humanity’s own violent, self-destructive inclination (again, as the NET notes, ‘Children of wrath is a Semitic idiom which may mean either “people characterized by wrath” or “people destined for wrath.”’)], is Paul clearly placing his own ethnicity in the same boat as the rest of humanity. Otherwise, who are the ‘rest’? And so, Paul is stating, all are dead, all need life, and, more importantly to the “perks” of status, dead people have none.
With regards to any privilege due to social status: In Eph. 2: 8-11, Paul has made clear that our inclusion into this new ‘masterpiece’ is not based on our works. Today, we think of this verse exclusively in terms of faith versus deeds—and that’s good. But, in Paul’s Greco-Roman missional ground, the word he uses for works was already rigidly tethered to the idea of being the citizen of a city.
In the ancient world, just because you lived somewhere, inhabited a particular place, like Ephesus, didn’t make you a ‘citizen’ (as mentioned). Your work (ἔργον / ergon) qualified you. In ancient Greek philosophy, ἔργον (ergon) translates to “function,” “work,” or “purpose”. Classical thinkers already applied this to the polis (city-state), defining a citizen (politēs) not merely by legal status, but by their active, functional contribution to the collective community. Without this ‘work’, you were, at best, seen as a xenos (foreigner) or a paroikos (stranger/alien). Also connected to this term is the word metoikoi, resident alien. We have similar attitudes today, with these terms (stranger, foreigner) still in use to segregate the so-called “us” from the so-called “them”. In the ancient Greco-Roman cities, citizens had privileges and the right to contribute toward the running of the city, whilst the other categories had ‘social disabilities’ applied and where functionally denied within society. These social borders where tightly policed. (For an exploration of citizenship in the ancient world, see, Alain Duplouy’s introductory overview, Pathways to Archaic Citizenship in Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece (Oxford University Press, London, UK, 2018), pp. 1-49)
Paul intentionally flips this social apple cart, clearly stating that in God’s kingdom, no one has contributed to the building of his new city, nor it’s governance—it’s all God’s work, we cannot boast in our ergon. Although, and again, flipping the ancient double standard, God, as Paul goes on to state in the same verse, has assigned all those who are his (not just certain classes) ‘good work (ergon)’ to do.
This is why Paul can say can go onto say, in Eph. 2:19, that Gentiles, non-Jews, are not foreigners or strangers, but fellow citizens [συμπολίτης / sympolitēs – coming from the joining of sym (meaning together; as in words we still use, like sym-phony and sym-pathy) and politēs (citizen)]. They are not afterthoughts, nor second-class. By using the prefix of sym, Paul is showing that there is still difference, but it is not a difference in status.
Thus, Paul is clearly stating, in a radical way in his world and ours, that when it comes to God’s economy, there is no superior class or race of people. There is an equal share! (Eph. 3:6). All because of the grace of God. Therefore, as Paul goes to say in Eph. 3:12, ‘Because of Christ Jesus and our faith in him, we …’, (and all who make up that we), ‘ … can now come fearlessly into God’s presence assured of his glad welcome.’ (NLT, italic mine).
[xiv] Genesis 11:1-9
[xv] This inscription is often cited as being from Ashurbanipal II. The problem we have, however, is that we don’t have any evidence of such a king. The inscription itself is part of the ‘Library of Ashurbanipal’; a name given to a collection of over 30,000 clay tablets and fragments inscribed with cuneiform that were discovered in the ruins of the city of Nineveh (now northern Iraq), once capital of the mighty Assyrian empire, ruled by Ashurbanipal from 669–c. 631 BC. It seems Ashurbanipal was an avid collector of his own nation’s history.
[xvi] Sargon II ruled 722 – 705 BC, and these words are recorded on what is known as the Dūr-Šarrukīn Cylinder Inscription. The fuller quote, in which Sargon also records his “divine mandate” for this, is ‘Populations of the four quarters of the world with strange tongues and incompatible speech . . . whom I had taken as booty at the command of Ashur my lord by the might of my sceptre, I caused to accept a single voice.’
[xvii] See Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s essay, Individual and Collective Responsibility (https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/noach/individual-and-collective-responsibility/). I have also mentioned this in a older blog of mine: The Spirit of Diversity, and mentioned something about this in my book, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity (Black Coney Press, UK, 2019).
[xviii] Gen. 12:2–3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14
[xix] To anticipate the argument, Abraham/Abram is not a one of. We see this eternal plan, this love of God for all peoples woven (excuse the pun) throughout the text. To hop, skip and jump through just a few: Joseph, at the end of his life, remarks that God had sent him to Egypt to ‘save many lives’ (Gen. 50:20) – not solely the lives of his kin, but also the Egyptians and, through the Egyptian grain stores, the other surrounding tribes and nations dependent upon this food store. Jumping ahead, Jonah’s story also captures this, as he is sent to Ninevah, the Assyrian capital, because of God’s great concern for them – a lesson Jonah struggles to learn (Jonah 4:11). The prophet Amos, in 9:7, also speaks powerfully of God’s passionate intervention in more nations than solely Israel. We could add many more.
[xx] Just to say, yes, this works a biology analogy. But, in Paul’s day, ‘body’ also was used to talk about socio-political groups and cities.
[xxi] Scottish theologian, Ernest Findlay Scott (1868–1954), as quoted in William Barclay, The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians, The New Daily Study Bible (Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, UK, reprinted 2009), p. 77
[xxii] Time doesn’t allow, but let me state for the record, that the existence of denominations, streams and varying expressions within the church is not a problem. Yes, I’ll be the first to admit, the stories of fracture and warring factions are problematic. But, and it’s a big but, the problem is not the existence of various streams, but how we relate to each other across these streams. I feel, and I’ve seen this in practice, that secular society is extraordinarily taken aback when it sees us blessing each other and embracing one another across our important denominational divides. As such, these divides create much opportunity, if used responsibly.
[xxiii] See, Stephen Bertman, Tasselled Garments in the Ancient East Mediterranean, in Biblical Archaeologist 24(1961), pp. 119-128; Beno Rothenberg, Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines (Thames and Hudson, London, 1972), pp. 123-124. As quoted and referenced in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Numbers: The Wilderness Years (Covenant and Conversation: A Weekly Reading if the Jewish Bible), (Maggid Books and The Orthodox Union, Jerusalem, 2017), p. 200, fn. 6 + 7
[xxiv] Romans 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26. Peter also mentions it, 1 Pet. 5:14.
[xxv] As an aside, it’s what adds to the scandal of Judas kiss.
[xxvi] For a more throughout exploration of this, see Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2016), pp. 214-219.
[xxvii] Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), p. 54
[xxviii] Seen especially in the matches between Ecuador and Curaçao, and Germany and Curaçao.
[xxix] 2 Corinthians 2:16
[xxx] Robert Karris, as quoted in Tim Chester, A Meal With Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community And Mission Around The Table (InterVarsity Press, 2011), p.14.
[xxxi] ‘Babel sounds’ is a line from the second stanza of Edmund H. Sears’ classic Christmas carol, It Came Upon A Midnight Clear (1849). Great song!
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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