NOTES for Eph 3:1-13

Speaking about his own ministry, Paul especially mentions his witness to the Church as a new, united people of God, including both Jews who accepted the good news and recent Gentile converts (vv. 1-7). He apparently considers it a most important part of the more general witness to Christ and to the Kingdom (vv. 8-13). At first glance, such attention to a question that would seem not to be the most important in the context of messianic witness may appear to be only a tactical necessity, connected with the fact that the Ephesian church, like most other churches outside Palestine, was mixed, including both Jews and recent Gentile converts. But the matter is not only that.

On the one hand, the ancient prophets had already said that with the coming of the Messiah and the arrival of the messianic Kingdom, many Gentiles would turn to the God of Israel, becoming part of the people of God, and Paul, like many of his fellow countrymen and fellow believers, saw in the conversion of the Gentiles the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. But for the apostle, as can be seen, something else was also important: he understood that the very possibility of uniting two formerly unjoinable parts of humanity into one people bears witness to the essence of the Kingdom better than any words. For traditional ideas, widely held in rabbinic circles in Paul's time, assumed that Gentiles seeking the Kingdom must first become Jews by accepting Judaism. Such an approach assumed that the Jews themselves had no need to change anything fundamental in their spiritual life, that as a people-community they were fully ready to enter the Kingdom.

Paul, however, as can be seen, paints an entirely different picture: the Jews are no more ready for the Kingdom than the Gentiles, despite all their religiosity, which in this case cannot help them at all. Therefore both will have to change their spiritual life. In addition, no one can count on having some special means for paving his own road into the Kingdom: only the Savior himself can open it to those who seek. Such a picture, of course, contrasted rather sharply with traditional ideas, but it was precisely this picture that made it possible to understand what the Kingdom was, whose nearness Jesus bore witness to.

What do we first remember about Abraham? The fact that he "believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness." "Believed" in this case means nothing light and simple. The faith of Abraham is one work and exploit. He gathered the family and left where God called him. Nobody could stop him, he listened to nobody. He so believed God that he was ready to sacrifice his only son.

He received God in his own house; he is the first to experience a relation with the Trinity. And all this took place with him not because he was by himself righteous. On the contrary, he was a sinner and the Bible describes not only his faith, but also all that doesn’t combine with faith at all. But Abraham's righteousness did not become the fulfillment of all the ritual prescriptions, but an unconditional trust.

Paul calls believers sons of Abraham. Not far descendants, but the following generation. It means that we inherit from Abraham his main features, if we believe. Yes, sin is still strong within us. But the faith in God, Whom we serve, for Whom having fallen we get up again every time, with Whom we continue to live, - exactly this faith will become justification for us.

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.