NOTES for Eph 4:30

Speaking of sin, Paul calls the addressees of his letter not to grieve, as the Greek text says, God's breath ("the Holy Spirit of God"), whose seal they received on the day of their baptism, which the apostle calls the "day of redemption." These words are often understood allegorically, meaning that every sin committed by a Christian grieves God approximately as it would grieve a person striving to conform to certain moral and religious norms. It is then assumed that God too expects such conformity from a person and, not receiving it, becomes upset.

But this is still far too human an image, created by a human measure and a human assessment of what is happening. Of course human sins truly do not rejoice God. But the issue here is not morality as such. God does not expect perfection from fallen man; He knows better than anyone with whom He has to deal. Something else is important. God sent His Son into the world so that He would bring the Kingdom into the world and make it accessible to every seeker. The Kingdom is permeated with God's breath, in which, through Christ, everyone who trusts Him can share.

Such a person who trusts can truly live one life with Christ, the life of His Kingdom. But there can be no place for sin in this life. The breath of the Kingdom not only surrounds the person who shares in its life. It also enters within the person, into the depths of his heart. The Christian's heart becomes the door through which the breath of the Kingdom enters the world, transforming it. The world and the person are transformed by the same breath of God that permeates the Kingdom as well. And sin interferes with this process, slowing it down.

Sin nesting in the heart interferes with God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, abiding in a person. It also interferes with the sanctification of the world. Figuratively speaking, the ability of a human heart poisoned by sin to let God's breath pass through it decreases just as the ability of a water pipe to let a stream of clean water pass through decreases if the pipe is clogged with debris.

God's breath, oppressed by grief, is a beautiful image describing this reality. Every sin diminishes the measure of the fullness of God's breath abiding in the Christian's heart. And this means it diminishes the measure of that heart's sanctifying effect on the world. Ultimately, it postpones the day of the Kingdom's full and final triumph and Christ's return in glory. And therefore the day of the sinner's own salvation as well.

The key word in today's apostolic reading is “therefore.” In the preceding lines, the apostle says that we should be renewed in the spirit of our minds and put on the new person, since we have come to know that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, the Christ. Then, in the end of the fourth chapter of Ephesians that we read today, the apostle lists the consequences of this fact.

We cannot fail to notice that the traits he describes concern a Christian's relationships with other people. Briefly, they can be expressed like this: a Christian does not lie or steal, forgives others rather than abusing them, and brings peace and comfort through words. In theory, such a person would be very easy to live alongside. Christian apologists of the second and third centuries often drew the authorities' attention to the fact that society had no better citizens than Christians. Yet being like this is difficult, because such people irritate us. Against their background, what we ourselves are like becomes all too obvious. But that is precisely why the Lord told His disciples: you are the light of the world.

Listing things that are commonplace in the world but unacceptable for Christians—anger, theft, foul language, and lying—the apostle urges Christians not to grieve the Holy Spirit with them. The point is that the Spirit's voice, sounding in human hearts, can easily be drowned out by the voice of the flesh. This clearly shows that the gift of the Spirit abolishes neither human freedom nor responsibility. It is also clear that such simple things as refraining from foul language, lying, and theft can express love for the Spirit who has sealed us.

Calling the Christians of the Ephesian Church to new life in Christ, the apostle Paul explains in detail the causal connection between faith and what we would today call a person’s moral character. He says that the ignorance and hardness of heart of the pagans lead to a darkening of the mind. This is what alienates a person from the life of God. Moving ever farther from Him, the person reaches insensibility. The Greek word used here can be translated as “anaesthesia, the inability to feel pain.” The Vulgate, St Jerome’s Latin translation, uses a word meaning desperation or hopelessness. In essence, this is the state in which a numbed human mind cannot hear the voice of its own conscience, cannot feel pain because of its own actions, and cannot share another person’s pain. Above all, this insensibility deprives us of the ability to see what agonising pain our vile acts cause the Creator. Because of this, says the apostle Paul, a person gives themselves over to extreme, unrestrained debauchery and impurity. Its driving force is the inner emptiness that arises because an insensible heart has been deprived of communion with God. Debauchery and impurity cannot fill this emptiness, and so, says the apostle, we pursue all this insatiably and greedily. This is the ultimate fall: a death from which there is no return. A way out of this hopeless fall opens because Truth itself appears to the person in Christ. We leave the state of ignorance and hardness of heart that, as the apostle showed above, leads us to hopeless death, and receive as a gift the opportunity to begin again. That is why he calls us to put off—literally, to take off—the old self, to be renewed in the spirit of our mind, and to put on the new self. Everything therefore depends on our choice. It is also essential that in this way we share in God’s life and, instead of insensibility, become capable not merely of knowing the truth but of feeling it with our whole being. Instead of pagan anaesthesia, a person acquires the ability to see the suffering of the Crucified One and, through it, to choose the truth. Always to choose the truth.

Calling the Ephesian Christians to a normal, full spiritual life, Paul speaks of their need to be renewed by the "breath" ("spirit") of the mind so that they may become different, new people, capable of living a righteous life in accordance with God's plan for humanity and its purpose. This new life is what the apostle considers Christian life in the proper sense of the word (vv. 20-24). Such an appeal fully corresponds to the ideas about spiritual life generally accepted in Paul's day in the rabbinic environment. Their quintessence is expressed in the well-known command to love God "with all your heart, with all your being ("all your soul"), and with all your strength" (Deut 6:5). A person's spiritual life is determined by the choice of the heart, which in the language of the Bible denotes the center of the human person where choices are made and decisions are taken that determine a person's relationship with God and with people, and where the system of values that determines his whole life is formed. In Greek, already from ancient times, this center came to be called the "mind," and the Greek philosophers connected with the concept of "mind" what the biblical authors writing in Hebrew placed in the concept of the "heart." It was precisely the spiritual influence ("spirit") of this "mind-heart" that renewed a person, and first of all his inner world, what the Bible usually calls the "soul," by which here is meant not the personal principle familiar to us, but the inner life force.

In this sense Paul speaks of the "renewal of the inner man," which is no surprise: a person's spiritual renewal always begins from within, although in the normal case it is never limited to his inner world alone. And the apostle, speaking of the renewal of the "inner man," also believes that it must be followed by a change in the whole life of the one who has turned to God. It is no accident that he contrasts two ways of life: the former one, which many Ephesian Christians evidently lived before their conversion (vv. 17-19), and the new one to which Paul calls them (vv. 25-32). But if before Christ came into the world the matter was the choice or rejection of the path of righteousness, now the matter is the choice or rejection of the Kingdom and salvation. And the apostle once again calls the faithful to remain faithful to the end, having chosen the Kingdom.