NOTES for Eph 3:8-9

Paul especially mentions that his task became witness to the unity the Savior brings into the world: unity between God and the world, which manifests itself in the Kingdom, and unity between Jews and pagans, which manifests itself in the Church. But this unity is not theoretical, theological, or doctrinal. The apostle reveals it above all through himself, in his life and in his witness. He, a Jew by birth and Jewish by tradition, became a living witness that the barrier between Jews and the recent pagans who had come into the Church truly no longer exists.

The best witness to the seriousness of Paul's witness was the fact that, in his own words, he became 'a prisoner of Jesus Christ for the sake of the Gentiles.' To go to the end, of course, one must take one's witness absolutely seriously, as something without which one's own life is unthinkable and impossible. But such witness became possible for Paul only by grace, because he himself had met the risen Christ, who opened to him the path into the Kingdom. And all the apostle's subsequent service was inseparable for him from his own life in the Kingdom.

A person for whom the barrier between the world and God had disappeared suddenly saw with complete clarity that another barrier had also disappeared: the barrier between him as a Jew seeking the path of righteousness and anyone seeking the path of Christ. As an inhabitant of the Kingdom, Paul realized that in the Kingdom it truly is not so important what a person was before he came to its threshold. This became not simply the apostle's conviction, but an inseparable part of the experience of his own spiritual life, which he could no more neglect than he could neglect what he had once experienced on the Damascus road.