No Longer Strangers

   Paul begins Ephesians 2:11 with a command to "remember." He wants the Gentile Christians in Ephesus to pause and recall who they were before Christ. The command is pastoral not trying to be judgmental. People who forget where they came from take for granted what they have been given. Remembering is the foundation for everything that follows.
   They are asked to remember their exclusion. Five layers of exclusion stack up in verse 12: separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. The Gentiles had no standing before God. No covenant, no promise, no access, no hope. They were godless in the structural sense, exiled from the entire architecture of relationship with God. The ancient world, both physical and spiritual, said clearly: this is not for you.
   The Jerusalem temple had a wall separating the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts where God's presence dwelt. A stone inscription on that wall read: "No foreigner may enter within the balustrade and partition wall around the temple. Whoever is caught will be responsible for his own death which will follow." The wall communicated what the covenant communicated: there is an inside, and you are on the outside.
   Paul is setting up the greatest reversal in human history.
   "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (verse 13). The structure of verse 13 mirrors the structure of verse 4. Both begin with an adversative that interrupts the description of hopeless condition and announces divine action. "But God" in verse 4. "But now in Christ" in verse 13. The pivot is always external. The change arrives from outside the condition.
   The mechanism in which we are granted this new condition is important. "Brought near by the blood of Christ." The distance between the Gentiles and God closed by a death. This is where Christianity parts ways with every other account of reconciliation. Other frameworks assume that parties that have gone their separate ways, given enough time and goodwill and effort, can find their way back to one another. Paul's account says the gap was unbridgeable from the human side. The cross crossed it.
   Paul then writes one of the most compressed and powerful christological statements in all his letters: "For he himself is our peace" (v. 14). Christ does more than make peace and announce peace, though He does both. He is the peace. The reconciliation is a union accomplished in His person. Jew and Gentile both stand in Him, and in Him the categories collapse.
   The "dividing wall of hostility" Christ abolished was real on multiple levels. The temple wall was one expression of a system of ordinances and distinctions that structured the ancient world. Israel's law created clean and unclean categories, practices that separated the covenant people from the nations. These categories were God-given, and they served their purpose. That purpose was always temporary, pointing forward to a unity they themselves could not produce. When Christ fulfilled the law and absorbed its condemnation on the cross, He dismantled the structural logic of separation. The boundary markers that had kept the nations at arm's length were abolished, so that "one new man" could be created in their place (v. 15).
   This phrase, "one new man," deserves to sit for a moment. Christ created a new category. A third thing. A new humanity that did not exist before the cross. The reconciliation is generative. Something is made that was not there before.
   The reconciliation runs in two directions simultaneously. Verse 16: "that he might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility." The cross deals with two estrangements at once. Horizontal reconciliation with each other and vertical reconciliation with God happen in the same place, at the same time, through the same death. A person who claims peace with God while maintaining hostility toward a brother or sister has misunderstood what the cross accomplished.
   The access that results is shared and equal. "For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father" (v. 18). The trinitarian structure here is deliberate: through the Son, by the Spirit, to the Father. Both groups, Jew and Gentile, approach by the same route and arrive at the same place. There is no special VIP entrance. The cross leveled the ground completely.
   Verses 19 through 22 then describe what this new community looks like from the inside. "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens." The language of verse 12 is directly reversed. Every element of exclusion named at the beginning is answered by an element of inclusion at the end. The stranger is now a fellow citizen. The one outside the household is now a member of it.
   Two images carry the description of the new community: political and familial. Fellow citizens and members of the household. Both images communicate permanence and belonging. You are not visiting. You are not on probation. You belong here, because you were made to belong here, by the same sovereign who designed the belonging.
   The building metaphor in verses 20 through 22 extends the image further. The community is a structure, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ as the cornerstone. The cornerstone in ancient construction was the first stone laid and the most critical. It determined the alignment of everything that followed. All other stones were measured and positioned in relation to it. A true cornerstone makes a true building possible. A faulty one cannot be compensated for anywhere else in the structure.
   The building is still under construction. Paul uses a present-tense verb: the structure "grows" into a holy temple in the Lord. The church is a living thing still being built. The destination is precise: a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (v. 22). The temple in Jerusalem was where God's presence dwelt among His people. The church now carries that function. A people, joined together stone by stone, becoming the place where God makes His home.
   This week's passage challenges the instinct to build walls, and that instinct is strong. The same impulse that made the temple wall plausible makes every other form of sorting plausible: political, economic, cultural, ethnic, generational. The walls feel natural because they reflect real differences. Differences are real. The cross has made them irrelevant to the question of belonging. The church is the community where the wall has been demolished. To rebuild it, in any form, contradicts the cross.