Breaking Down Walls

Ephesians 2:11-22

Robert Frost wrote a poem entitled “Mending Walls.” The poem is about a spring ritual of mending stone fences in New England. He describes how two neighboring farmers meet to pick up the stones that have fallen off the walls during the winter and put them back in place. The walls were nothing more than boundary lines, but it was a tradition to keep those boundary lines from crumbling.

On one side of the wall were pine trees. On the other side of the wall were apple trees. What they are doing every spring is to fight against another force that wants to break down walls. Here is part of the poem:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

Something has knocked the stones off the wall. There is something that wants the wall down. This is the first force.

But there is another attitude which opposes it.

“My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines,” I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I never have quite understood that saying, but I know that we must believe it. We have spent a great deal of energy building and repairing fences.

The non-Christian public talks a lot about the exclusivity of the Christian faith – that only through Jesus can your sins be forgiven and you can get to Heaven, as though Heaven were high on the list of priorities for non-Christians. People resent that for two reasons, I think. One is the preposterous notion that good people need to be forgiven for anything, and the other is that Heaven is only for certain groups of people.

If you analyze the psychology of this thinking, you will realize that those who accuse Christians of being exclusive are really themselves the exclusive people. They are people who are proud of their goodness, as though goodness is the object of their existence. They are proud of their religiosity or even the lack thereof. They are proud of their accomplishments and their standing within the community. In fact, most of us raise our children to be proud of being good. There is nothing wrong with that, provided we teach them that any goodness we have is a gift from God or a reflection of His image.

The Christian, on the other hand, has at least some sense of the need to be forgiven perhaps even from his or her pride of goodness. The best way, then, for the exclusivist to reinforce belief in himself is to point out the Christian’s inconsistency – his arrogance or self-righteousness or even sinful behavior. The tragedy is that many times the exclusivist is right. Most sincere Christians would agree with that assessment, I suspect.

This goodness to which exclusivists seem to be called, however, doesn’t work very well, does it? Not only history but current events indicate that this world is filled with hostility of one person toward another, one group toward another and one nation toward another. Here in America, we seem to have gotten down and dirty with our neighbor. We are suing each other, spreading gossip against each other, knocking each other off on our career ladders, grabbing the spotlight – it is quite a mess of demanding our rights and destroying anyone who stands in the way.

In fact, I was reading the other day in an article that the US has the highest incarceration rate of any developed nation on earth – some 721 inmates per 100,000 people. What that may tell us is that crimes against others are at an all-time high in our country. All these blessings that God has bestowed on America are leading to greed, pride, hostility, anger, self-righteousness and more exclusivity. This has crept into the church so that we are now treated to the specter of two professing Christians running for President and tearing each other apart. Exclusivity in the highest levels of power!

Walls are standing strong and high. We have become adept at building walls of prejudice, hostility and exclusivity between ourselves and those whom we consider not to be like the more-savvy us. Wherever and whenever there is the “us” and “them” distinction, we see walls going up.

Out text this morning deals with the hostility between Jew and Greek, the most prevalent example of the pitfalls of exclusivity perhaps in human history.

To the Jews of Jesus’ time, there were only two classes of people – Jews and Gentiles. To be a Jew was to be one of God’s chosen people. To be a Gentile was to be a heathen dog – worth nothing. Jews looked with disdain and contempt on Gentiles; Gentiles did not have warm feelings for Jews, either. Both hated the other.

The Apostle Paul turns exclusivity on its head here in the 2^nd chapter of Ephesians. When he is finished, Christians become the multi-culturalists. Paul talks about a wall – a barrier – in v. 14 & 15:

For he himself (Christ) is our peace, who has made the two (Jew and Gentile) one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

There are several interesting points to be made here. First, this wall of hostility was very evident in the wall surrounding Jerusalem. Furthermore, within the Temple there was a separating wall between the area where a Jew was allowed and the area designated for Gentiles. There were inscriptions along the wall that warned the Gentiles to go no further upon penalty of death. While Robert Frost, an ancestor of mine through my paternal grandmother, said in his poem, “…Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he should have substituted “Someone” for “something” – “…Someone there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

The second interesting point of this Scripture is that Paul defines that new “peace” that Jesus came to give. You will recall that Jesus said in farewell to His disciples in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

The peace that the world gives is the spreading of exclusivity – the idea that the world is divided into good and evil people and that we must strive to resolve conflict. There is nothing wrong with resolving conflict. It works for everyone. Its track record, however, is not very impressive. We are told that there were more people killed in the 20^th Century than in all other wars combined in human history. Maybe so; I don’t really know who keeps those kinds of statistics.

This is not the kind of peace that Christ came to give, however. His peace is about destroying the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and non-Jew within the context of the Church of Jesus Christ. It is about inclusiveness among those who profess Jesus Christ as Lord that breeds an assurance that no matter what happens in this world or to our bodies, we are safe. Christ’s peace is an invitation that reaches across race, gender, class and circumstances and makes us one man in Christ.

To put this into the context of our interest in the Middle East, I have been very careful to avoid appearing as a peacenick, as though I have some special gift for solving human conflict. I don’t. I may have a gift for avoiding conflict, but that may be more of a weakness than strength – “He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.”

My interest in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has to do with the role that the Christian Right has been playing in exacerbating that conflict by funding settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem and teaching American Christians to stand behind Israel unconditionally. I am in search of those in Palestine who are one with us in Christ and to reinforce Paul’s teaching that the purpose of Christ’s coming was to “…create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace.” I wish to come to my Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ as one with them and to display this example to believers here in the US.

The things that separate us as believers in Jesus Christ have not been placed there by God. Contrary to popular belief, it is not eschatology that is driving Palestinian Christians out of their homes. The wall that I call the Concrete Curtain does not make good neighbors. The peace that Jesus came to give is inclusive of all but exclusive to the Kingdom of God. I’ll repeat that. The peace that Jesus came to give is inclusive of all but exclusive to the Kingdom of God.

Frost adds another couple of lines to his poem:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out.

The Middle East conflict is not about a wall planned by God to favor Israel over Arabs. Paul is making it very clear here that the barrier between Jews and non-Jews has been destroyed. Under those circumstances, we cannot as Christians cling to a campaign to prepare Israel for the return of Christ lest we be accused of destroying the very peace in Jesus Christ that we share with brothers and sisters all over the world. In other words, we can become so committed to peace at any price that we can destroy the peace that Christ came to give.

Paul is very direct in addressing Christian Zionists in America. In v. 15, he makes it clear that Jesus has abolished in His flesh “…the law with its commandments and regulations.” Because we are saved by grace alone and because we are saved for good works, our attitudes toward other Christians ought to change. Our place is not within the political conflicts of this world. Our place is standing with those who have renounced their sin and for whom the Lordship of Jesus Christ is their common peace.

Jesus has made the two peoples one by bringing outsiders into the same covenant relationship with God that had been exclusive to the Jews. He has done this by “…destroying the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” The wall of hostility was the law that separated us Gentiles from Israel. The law defined who was on which side of the barrier – who had the promises and who belonged to the people of God.

What Paul is saying here is that Jesus has abolished the Old Covenant with its exclusivity. What, then, are Christian Zionists doing in promoting that Old Covenant? What are they doing in preserving a special grace for Jews when Jesus destroyed that special standing with His death on Calvary?

Paul goes further by offering to you and me and Christians worldwide citizenship in the Kingdom.

He came and preached peace to you who were far away (Gentiles) and peace to those who were near (Jews). For through Him you have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone (vs. 17-20).

As Christians, then, our primary point of reference is Jesus Christ himself as the chief cornerstone of a common building – a holy temple – in which God has been invited to reside.

Paul was a Jew. He knew his OT well. He lived in the hope of that book and, indeed, as Saul of Tarsus, he was a zealot in preserving the exclusivity of Judaism by breathing out fire and damnation on people of the Way. Paul knew of the promises to Israel: “You are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth” (Deut. 14:2).

Israel is God’s people in a very special and unique way. The current way to solve this conflict between Christianity and Judaism is to do what John Hagee is now doing and insist that God has two plans to bless people. One is the Jewish covenant, and the other is the Christian covenant. Both can get to God their own way – with Jesus (for Christians) or without Jesus (for Jews). That is political correctness in the extreme.

Ephesians 2 knocks such theories into a cocked hat, so to speak. The mystery of Christ is that the Gentiles are now fellow-heirs with the Jews and fellow-members of the body and fellow-partakers of the promise of God in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Once we were separated from Christ, but now Christ has drawn us in. Once we were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel; now we are fellow citizens in Israel. Once we were strangers to the covenants of promise; now we are fellow partakers of the promise. Once we were without hope; now we are fellow heirs of all God has to give. Once we were without God in the world; now we are members of God’s household.

The point Paul is making here is not that we move Gentiles into these blessings on a separate two-track system apart from Israel but that Gentiles and Jews move into them together on one track. The true Israel becomes the church of Jesus Christ, and the church of Jesus Christ emerges as the true Israel. We are no longer separate and apart. What unites this new people is Jesus.

The New Covenant is not a replacement theology for Judaism. It is an extension of the restricted tent of God’s blessing on His human creation. The tent has been enlarged to include the Gentiles. The fullness of God’s glory and the promises to the Jews have been fulfilled in the Church of Jesus Christ. True Israel, then, has become the church, and the church has emerged as the true Israel.

It is clear to me that on the Day of Pentecost, an avalanche of Jews began to enter this new Israel. 3,000 became converts that first day, and that was just a beginning. With the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 and the scattering of the Jewish people throughout Western Europe, millions of Jews have assimilated into this new Kingdom of God that has extended to the nations God’s blessings to Israel.

Those who were far away – the Gentiles, and those who were near – the Jews, suffered from the same problem. They were both enemies of God in their desire to be exclusive. Christ reconciled them both in one body through the cross. After centuries of animal sacrifices, Jews needed to be reconciled to God and Gentiles needed to be reconciled to God. This was not about enmity between Jews and Gentiles but was about enmity between Jews and God and Gentiles and God that needed to be overcome by the peace-making work of Jesus.

Today, we have both American Christians and Jews insisting that the good news of Christ’s reconciling work is anti-Semitism. That is a creation of the exclusive – the politically correct. Christians are not an independent body over against Israel. We have been grafted into the true Israel.

The problem is that we have confused the nation-state of Israel with the new Israel. We have carried on the Nazi mantra that anyone with an ounce of Jewish blood is a Jew. This Jesus who, through His own body, has abolished the law and the commandments, has made peace by abolishing the distinction between Jew and Gentile through the creation of “one new man.”

In Christ, the distinction between Jew and Gentile has been abolished. The Christian, then, who insists on meddling in the Middle East either to create a division or to bring a worldly peace is acting contrary to his citizenship. We can build walls between people, but we cannot build walls within the Kingdom of God. Christ, in His flesh, has torn them down.