NOTES for Eph 2:11-22
For the apostle, Christ is the destroyer of all barriers. On the one hand, He destroys the wall that separated the fallen world from God; on the other, the wall that separated the Jews as the people of God from the pagans, and therefore from all the rest of humanity. The 'Torah of commandments,' the external Torah, Jesus removes by His own example, becoming the living Torah, no longer reducible to any system of religious prescriptions.
The text of the letter is most likely speaking precisely of an example or model, not of a 'teaching,' although the corresponding Greek word dogma could also be translated as 'teaching.' Yet when borrowed into Hebrew and Aramaic, this word came to mean not teaching, but precisely example or model, and Paul evidently understands it this way, although he writes his letters in Greek. Jesus overcomes the external Torah, the Torah in its legal, moral, and religious aspect, by becoming the living Torah and showing the living Torah to the world.
If the external Torah separates Jews and pagans, the inner Torah, on the contrary, can unite them, all the more if the issue is the living example of the living Torah, to whom one must become similar regardless of whether one is a Jew or a recent pagan. But the very possibility that the living Torah appears to the world as a path now opened to every seeker is connected with the Kingdom entering the world. The living Torah is possible only in the Kingdom, where there is no place for sin; in the fallen world, where sin rules, it is unrealizable. Before the coming of Christ, the Torah was a path that divided the world into the realm of the sacred and the rest of it, which was not sanctified and with which those walking the path of the Torah had better not come into contact.
Now the path of the Torah has become the path of the Kingdom, whose King has shown the world the example of the living Torah, so that the whole world has now become part of the process whose axis is the path of Christ, the path of a person's becoming in Christ a living Torah. This path unites Jews and recent pagans into one people, for now they have all become subjects of one King and inhabitants of one Kingdom. The barriers are gone; the world again becomes the Kingdom, as it was on the first day of creation, and the human being becomes the undistorted image of God, moving toward the fullness of his transfiguration.