NOTES for Eph 5:8-10

How can one know what is pleasing to God? How should one act so as not to be guilty before Him? These questions are not simple and, most importantly, far from idle, for very much in our life depends on the practical answer to them. In the letter to the Ephesians the apostle Paul uses a remarkable verb, translated into Russian as "test." It really does mean "to test, check, find out the truth about something." This verb was used when checking recruits' fitness for military service; in those times there was no medical commission, and they checked the ability to throw a spear and the like. This means the apostle calls us to act as children of light, checking our actions "for fitness," checking whether they will be pleasing before the face of the Almighty.

In the Greek text all these words form one sentence, and this is important. A test must be based on criteria, and therefore the apostle names the main criterion: the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Thus, what is pleasing to God is what can be called the fruits of the action of the Holy Spirit in our life. Chiefly this is all goodness, righteousness, and truth. Perhaps by these closely related words the apostle is trying to convey something that cannot fit into words. Modern language designates this with the rather vague term "good." Precisely what we call good, its growth and therefore the diminishing of evil, becomes for the apostle Paul the criterion of whether our actions and life itself are pleasing to God.

In the "Question and Answer" section you can find a question about what one must be like for the Holy Spirit to descend on a person, and the answer to that question. The verse from Ephesians that we have just read says that such "preconditions" at any rate do not include "all goodness, righteousness, and truth," since these are, on the contrary, fruits of the Spirit. So then, in order for the Spirit to descend, must one be a villain, an ungodly person, and a liar? Of course not. It is simply that without the Holy Spirit we are villains, ungodly people, and liars. We need to want very strongly to stop being that, to ask for the Spirit and wait for Him. To wait not passively but actively, confessing our sins, staying awake, watching ourselves, perceiving every deviation from goodness, righteousness, and truth in our life as an insufficient freedom for the Holy Spirit within us, and turning again to God, asking Him to give us the Holy Spirit, again and again.

Today the Orthodox Church celebrates the Day of the Holy Spirit. The Epistle to the Ephesians reminds us that 'the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth' (v. 9), and calls us to 'be filled with the Spirit' (v. 18). The apostle Paul calls this new state of the human being 'light in the Lord'; the apostle John also turns to this image of light when he speaks of brotherly love among believers (1 John 2:10). In the spirit of love we are called to 'seek those who have gone astray' (Matt 18:10-14), to resolve problems in our relationships (Matt 18:15-18), and, finally, to receive God's grace in unanimous prayer in the name of Christ and in His presence, just as we were promised.

For today's Day of the Holy Spirit, let us quote words from the liturgy written by St Theophanes the Branded, who lived in the first half of the ninth century.

Source of life, in whom we believe, stream of goodness, Holy Spirit of God, bring my deadened mind to life and by Your action raise it up to sing of Your divinity.

O Spirit of wisdom and the fear of God, Spirit of truth, counsel, and understanding, Giver of peace, dwell in us, so that, sanctified by Your indwelling, we may sing without ceasing in the night: We glorify You, Lover of humankind.

Almighty and Lord of all, who preserve all creation from decay, grant us sanctification and enlightenment, so that, filled with Your light, we may sing without ceasing in the night: We glorify You, Lover of humankind.

Come to us, Holy Spirit; make us partakers of Your holiness, of unfading Light, of divine life, and of Your fragrant gifts, for You are the stream of the Godhead, proceeding from the Father through the Son.

‘See, then, that you conduct yourselves carefully, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of time, because the days are evil…’ It is astonishing how contemporary these words are. We think that only our age is in such a hurry, that this mad merry-go-round began only in the twentieth century: trains, cars and planes racing somewhere, people running, everything scheduled to the minute from cradle to grave. We imagine that in blessed antiquity people lived differently, at a much more measured pace. But why go back to antiquity? We read Chekhov, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and wonder where those days have gone when people would gather on verandas and talk for hours… Yet it turns out that our haste and their measured pace differ less in quality than in quantity, while the quality—that is, the essence—lies elsewhere. We hurry, but that does not make our time, our days, any less evil. ‘For our days have vanished in vanity; deliver us from the hand of the adversary’ (the prayer of the Ninth Hour). ‘Vanity of vanities,’ we sigh with a pious expression, explaining our own disorganisation by appealing to unquestionable authority. We often speak of Christianity overcoming time. This is a vast subject, one we have already touched on briefly in our reflections. But in this subject we often encounter a seductive deception. We picture our other life, our life in eternity, as something in which, among other things, we shall be completely free of the bonds that structured time imposes on us: we shall no longer have to hurry anywhere or arrive late; there will be no time pressure or frantic rushes. In fact, this is already a matter of individual perception, but it seems to us a simplified view, and we may take today's words of the apostle as our basis. Time is not only something to be overcome, but also something to be cherished. In fact, time is a very complex concept. There is time as the direction of entropic processes, the arrow of time that determines ageing and death: physical time, the time of the universe's development. And there is a wholly different time: the time of the Church. It has fundamentally different properties. Mary's perpetual virginity, the transubstantiation of the Holy Gifts and other phenomena of spiritual life do not fit within physical time. The annual and daily cycles of worship are further evidence of this. So when we speak of eternity as a world where time has simply stopped, where the clocks have come to a standstill, we are profoundly mistaken and do not understand what time is.

Paul repeatedly reminds the Ephesian Christians that the spiritual life of a Christian is incompatible with any conscious sin. Of course, through ignorance or weakness everyone sins in one way or another, and this will continue until human nature is fully transformed. But this gives a Christian no grounds for taking sin lightly, confident that "God will forgive everything" because "in Christ every sin is forgiven."

After the coming of Christ, a person is indeed never again left alone before God with his sin. He can always ask the Savior to intervene in the situation, and then his sin ceases to be only his own problem and also becomes Christ's problem, which He resolves together with the person, taking upon Himself the consequences that otherwise would have fallen on the sinner's own head.

But even with such intervention, the situation can be changed radically only when the person repents of his sin and renounces it, not when he considers himself entitled to go on sinning in the hope that "Christ will settle everything," appealing to the fact that sin is unavoidable until a person is fully transformed. Meanwhile, judging by the apostle's words, one can think that in the Ephesian church there were also people who treated sin rather lightly. Paul addresses mainly them, reminding them that Christ's help in freeing a person from the consequences of a committed sin does not in any way remove that person's responsibility for the sin itself. One cannot continue sinning as before, living in the customary pagan way of life, and count on being able, later, at the end of one's life, to repent of everything at once and then somehow have everything work itself out.

The point is not that on the last day of earthly life it is too late to repent, but that a person who was not afraid to sin throughout his entire life will very well be unable to repent on his last day on earth. Of course, a miracle is always possible, but it is hardly worth rejecting the path of righteousness and sinning in the hope of a miracle at the end of life. This is what Paul reminds those Ephesian brothers of his who either forgot what he had told them or never knew anything of the kind.

Very often we simply do not think about what we are doing. Everything happens by itself, automatically. We act as though asleep. In today’s reading, the apostle quotes an ancient Christian hymn: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead.” It turns out that this familiar and peaceful state is actually death. We live with our eyes closed, in darkness. But Christ’s light is so bright that it is no longer possible to keep our eyes closed. If we decide to step into the light, we will have to look at our life and see what is happening. In Christ’s light we see what is not pleasing to God. We can no longer pretend that everything is all right, and so all our sins are made manifest. At first it becomes frightening, and we very much want to hide again where it was dark and we did not have to think... The light hurts our eyes. But if we risk remaining in the light a little longer, our eyes will begin to adjust and it will become clear that it is impossible to continue living as we did. Then the Holy Spirit will have the opportunity to act within us: by accepting the truth about ourselves, we will be able to begin living in God’s truth.

When speaking about spiritual life, Paul never tires of repeating that the fullness of the Kingdom is incompatible with any sin (vv. 3-7). Such persistent reminders of this obvious fact were evidently connected with the fact that for many Christians (and, perhaps, not only in Ephesus) it was not obvious at all. Judging by some of the apostle's instructions in his letter to the Ephesian Christians, they were evidently already prepared to accept as normal that sin would remain, to some extent, part of their life (vv. 1-3, 15-21).

This was connected to the fact that many in the Ephesian church looked at Christianity not as life in the Kingdom but as a new religion, perhaps as a distinctive form of Judaism for Gentiles. In that case one would have to make peace with the presence of sin in the life of the faithful, because there are no sinless people, and Judaism never required the impossible from a person. It required only the absolute exclusion of sin committed consciously and voluntarily, not every sin in general. The latter was an unattainable ideal toward which one could and should strive, but which could not be demanded of anyone as the norm of life.

Apparently the Christians of Ephesus looked at the matter in the same way, accepting as a given the sins of some of their brothers. Paul, however, understands perfectly that Christianity is not a new religion at all, but precisely life in the Kingdom, and therefore he insists on the ideal that in the Kingdom can and must become reality. He knows that for a Christian sin means not only deviation from the path of righteousness, but also the loss of the Kingdom, which is not always noticeable at once only because the Kingdom has not yet been fully revealed in our transforming but still untransformed world. The one who sins truly finds himself in that outer darkness which the Savior Himself contrasts with the Kingdom, and if he does not always realize it, that is only because he still has the opportunity to avoid both the final choice that he will have to make at the Last Judgment and the full consequences of the sin he has committed, consequences that remain hidden from a person until the end of time.

But Paul calls his readers to look at the situation through the eyes of a person for whom the end of time has already arrived, and to evaluate each of their actions accordingly, so as to become inhabitants of the Kingdom in full measure here and now.