NOTES for Eph 4:1-16

When Paul speaks about the unity of the church community, he clearly has in mind more than organizational or doctrinal unity. For him, the unity of the church community is first of all evidence of the normal and full spiritual life of the Christians who belong to it. The apostle understands perfectly that unity is not an end in itself and not even a means for solving particular tasks facing the church. The unity of the community is the natural consequence of normal relationships among Christians as inhabitants of the Kingdom. If God is truly not only "over all," but also "in all" and "through all" (v. 6), then the unity of "all" is implied by itself; there can simply be no other relationships among people who live in the Kingdom and breathe one breath with God.

But for a person who has not yet been transformed completely, it is easy to lose the Kingdom by making concessions to his own sinfulness. That is why Paul urges the Ephesian Christians to preserve unity (vv. 1-6). On his lips this appeal sounds like a call not to forget the Kingdom and spiritual life. Paul judges church ministries from the point of view of how much they bring those who serve closer to the fullness of life in the Kingdom. For him, the very concept of grace is inseparable from service; it is given to a Christian for service, and it is given as an inseparable part of the relationship that binds him to the Risen One (vv. 7-10). For Paul, service is also inseparable from the spiritual life of the one who serves. If the Church were an ordinary religious organization, everything would be simpler: future ministers would simply be trained the way people in our still untransformed world are trained for any work requiring special knowledge and skills, and after their training they would be sent to their ministries like young specialists going to work after completing their studies.

But in the Kingdom everything is different. Here it is impossible to learn anything or prepare for anything without being rooted in the life of the Kingdom and without transforming one's own nature, so one has to learn service in the process of serving. The life of the Kingdom is so whole that it cannot be separated from service in the narrow, concrete sense of the word, and no one is ready for it, above all because one can learn to live in the Kingdom only by entering it. The ministries of the Kingdom can be learned only by living in it. Life in the Kingdom itself becomes service, and service becomes part of the life of the Kingdom. It is no accident that Paul considers the main meaning of all church ministries to be the building up of the body of Christ, and the main task of those who serve to be the attainment of that fullness of spiritual life which, in familiar language, can be called adulthood, when a person becomes so mature in every respect that any task can already be entrusted to him, as it is entrusted to an adult and responsible person (vv. 11-16). The Church is a community of inhabitants of the Kingdom, and only the Kingdom can be the means, goal, and meaning of any church ministry.

The apostle Paul does not merely ask—he implores. He implores all of us to walk worthily of the name of Christ's disciples. And what does it mean to walk worthily of the Christian name? For Paul it means “maintaining the unity of the Spirit.” We keep thinking that what matters most is some extraordinary virtue (which, admittedly, we do not possess either, but never mind—we will strive for it). Yet everything turns out to be so simple... and almost impossible. Preserve unity. Is this possible in today's world, where not only different Christian denominations are divided, but often even the admirers of different priests within a single parish? And what will this unity consist in? It is perfectly clear that none of us, nor even all of us together, can reunite the divided Churches. Paul has probably already given the answer: unity lies in humility, meekness, and patience, in bearing with one another in love. In other words, it lies in accepting the other person with love despite the fact that he is different.

Paul's words about one body, one spirit, one faithfulness, and one baptism sound like one of the early Christian creeds. In those days there was no single creed; there were, apparently, several. And although no one formally canonized these creeds, in fact they played their role: they allowed Christians to formulate briefly and capaciously the main credo of their faith and life. And at the foundation of the formulation offered by the apostle in his letter lies the Church as one body and one spirit, united by one hope, the only hope for all.

The issue is precisely the Church with a capital letter. Not an earthly community founded by people, but a spiritual reality. As a spiritual reality, the Church is always the Kingdom on earth. If a Christian is by definition an inhabitant of the Kingdom, then the Church is by definition the representation of the Kingdom on earth.

Its members are united among themselves by one breath, the same for all, the breath of this Kingdom. And they are bound by one common hope: the hope that the day of Christ's return in glory will come, when the Kingdom will be revealed to the end and in fullness, including and transfiguring the whole world. Therefore all Christians have one Lord. In this case precisely Lord with a capital letter. King. Sovereign of His Kingdom. The very Kingdom into which one enters through baptism, which is also one. Of course, if there were many churches, there would also be many baptisms. But the Church with a capital letter is one by definition.

Therefore baptism is also one, if it is real: it brings a person precisely into this Church with a capital letter, not into some earthly community. Or it brings him nowhere at all, but then the word "baptism" should be put in quotation marks. And the faith of all Christians is also one, if only they are Christians. Faith, of course, as faithfulness to Christ, not as various descriptions of numerous versions of a Christian worldview. And one God over all and above all. And in all. For only God's presence can make the Church the body of Christ and the world the Kingdom. In this is the hope of Christians. If, of course, we are speaking of real Christianity.

From the time of the apostle Paul to our days one of the main tasks for Christians is their unity. It is not incidentally Jesus prays in particular of it in His last prayer with the followers (Jn 17). We all understand humanely, how difficult it is - to live in peace with somebody. And there is even no need to remember the experiences of the community housing and of hostels: in our own families we are desperately divided one from another.

The reason is like evident: we are simply different; it seems to us that we could have easily found common language with someone like us, although it is illusion. But our differences disturb all the time. Apostle Paul’s logic is different. For him, all Christians must not be identical; he says we have something common, which is much more important than these differences that divide us.

Paul presents a logical chain, showing how the corollary (unity of the body and the spirit) results from the cause (God’s uniqueness). If God is indeed unique, then the important unity of our faith is in that. If Jesus Christ is the only God, then the union of each of us with Him (baptism) - is equal for all. If the Heavenly Father is the only one, then equal is our title of children of God, identical is our hope in God's love.

The only faith and the only baptism in Christ make us one body - the Church, filled with one spirit - the spirit of love poured out on us by the Father through the Son. Brothers and sisters, until when will we put our differences in confessional formulae, in the practice of the liturgy, in the structures of church higher than this crystal-clear logic of the unity, higher than the cordial desire of Lord Jesus-Christ?

Paul's words about one Lord, one faith and one ablution ("baptism") call back a certain early symbol of faith, which in the early Christian Churches, basing on what we know today, was many. It is not surprising: because in those days the observation of commandments was for the Church more important than the unity of the opinions on whatever theological questions. And all the same, sometimes appeared before the Church even in those days, the necessity to formulate a common opinion on the most important, fundamental questions, connected above all with the relation to the personality of Jesus Christ. The expression "one Lord, one faith, one baptism " becomes on the lips of the apostle a concentrated expression of this relation. By "Lord" we doubtless understand the Savior Himself, Who in the time of His earthly ministry didn’t refuse this title.

As seen, in this case it is about His recognition as the King of this Kingdom, which He brought into the world. For Paul such recognition is very important: because the messianic conceptions in the Judaism of that period were few, and the Christian conceptions couldn’t be attributed to the traditional conceptions. They were also far enough from mass popular representations of the Messiah, and before all, exactly in the understanding of what the messianic Kingdom is, and how it is. The indication of the Messiah, as King of the Kingdom, about which spoke Jesus, in such a situation became a kind of identification mark, according to which one could distinguish the followers of Jesus from the representatives of a multitude of the other messianic movements.

Faith in such a Messiah and in such Kingdom really became the foundation of the spiritual life of every Christian: because it is in particular the inhabitant of this Kingdom that Jesus wanted to see. As seen, the symbol of faith was necessary for the first Christians not only and not so much in order to separate theirs from the foreigners by some external signs, but in order not to get lost on the spiritual way leading to the Kingdom.

The biblical teaching about a personal God is often contrasted with pantheism as a pagan teaching. Indeed, pantheism is characteristic of the pagan world, while pagans rarely speak of a personal God. Still, one cannot say that they do not speak of Him at all. But a pagan's personal spiritual experience often truly has a pantheistic character. This is no surprise: for full communion with God, revelation is necessary; to know God as a Person, He must reveal Himself to the seeker. Pantheism is another matter: God's presence in the world is a reality, and this reality is accessible to every seeker.

It is no accident, therefore, that the path of spiritual searching often led many first of all to pantheism, which strengthened their paganism: from pantheism it is easy to move to the deification of the cosmos. The possibility of such deification was one of the reasons why the authors of all the biblical books without exception treated pantheism with great caution. Still, pantheism found a place on biblical pages: there is a certain truth in it, though not the whole truth.

If God's presence in the world is a reality, then pantheism has a right to exist, without claiming, of course, to be the final truth. And in the context of the New Testament revelation, the revelation of the Kingdom, it receives a new dimension. Indeed, pantheism is possible insofar as God's breath, God's presence, permeates the universe, and has done so from the very beginning, from the moment when, according to the Poem of Creation, "the Spirit of God spread His wings over the water."

And this very presence makes possible the transfiguration of creation, the qualitative change of its nature that will free the world from the power of the evil that entered it at the fall. But for such transfiguration to become possible, the fullness of the Kingdom had to enter the world from within, through a human being, more precisely, through the God-Man.

And now that this has happened, pantheism acquires a new quality. Before, it reminded us of God's presence in creation; now it reminds us of creation's presence in God. Not in the depth of God's person, where there is and can be nothing created, but in the process of God's existence, of which His Kingdom is part. God immersed in the life of the world, in its very depth, and the world included in God's life insofar as that life is open to it: this is the Kingdom. And God's own life is "over all, through all, and in all."

The apostle Paul says to us today that the purpose of teaching in the Church is so that we all come " in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ". Sometimes we think that the knowledge of Christ is for the elected ones, for the teachers, the monks...

The Church exists indeed for that - so that God opens Himself to us. So that He opens Himself in sacraments, in His word, in the doctrine of the Church and in the brotherly relationship. God gives His gifts for each of us to use them - not only to the one, to whom the gift is given, but also to all those, who are near this person. And each of us is called to aspire to the knowledge of God, knowing that even if I have no gift of understanding or teaching, somebody in the Church has this gift, and it is given to him for me also.

At first sight, this text is horrible. Can any of us say of himself that he is Apostle, prophet, Evangelist, minister or teacher? The word "Apostle" means in reality in the Greek translation the "messenger", and each of us, if he listens to God, can be God’s messenger among other people. A prophet is not always someone who knows the future. Certain prophets spoke about past or present in the Old Testament, but they saw and listened otherwise, since listening to God was in the first place for them.

And we can in that imitate the prophets of the Old Testament and become also prophets. If we listen to God's word and are able to transmit it to others, by words, or by our own life - then we prophesy. Evangelists are not only the ones who wrote the four Gospel. It is also all those who bring into the world the Good News about salvation, the Kingdom of God, Eternal life, about happiness. Each of us, if capable of sharing the Good News giving to him by God – becomes Evangelist.

The pastor is not only the priest, the bishop, a certain head of church. It is every person answering for somebody else in faith. If somebody is entrusted to us, someone younger - we are already for him a pastor and we assume the responsibility for him before the Face of the Lord. A teacher is not only someone who was specially trained to teach about faith to others, but it is also every believer, ready to share his faith with the one standing on the Church’s steps.

The ministry can be of any kinds, we can simply do the dishes for "the edifying of the body of Christ ". If we understand we make that being it in the Church, in the unity of faith, and if by making the works which was entrusted to us we aspire to the knowledge of the Son of God, then God will change us and will make us grow; because our goal - is to become such, as God conceived us, created us - grow " unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ", imitate Him, love Him, be like Him.

The apostle Paul tells us today that the purpose of teaching in the Church is that we all come “to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” Sometimes we think that knowing Christ is reserved for a chosen few, for teachers, monks... In fact, this is precisely why the Church exists: so that the Lord may reveal Himself to us. He reveals Himself in the sacraments, in His word, in the teaching of the Church, and in fellowship among brothers. The Lord gives His gifts so that everyone may benefit from them—not only the person to whom a gift is given, but all those around him as well. And each of us is called to seek knowledge of the Lord, knowing that even if I do not have the gift of understanding or teaching, someone in the Church does have this gift, and it was given for me too.

For the apostle every church service is above all the building up of the body of Christ. Churchliness means not belonging to some structure or even to some concrete church community, or at least not formal belonging. It is first of all a person's inclusion in the relationships between the Father and the Son, relationships that create the Kingdom and open it to everyone who seeks. Those who sought God in every age tried to establish living relationships with Him in many different ways.

Sometimes they succeeded in something, more often they did not. But now, after the coming of Christ, relationships with God must be established together with Him, at least if we are Christians. From this point of view Paul calls his Ephesian brothers to look at everything they do as Christians and as members of the Church. The issue here, of course, is not some formal discipline or the approval of each action or service by certain 'leading elder brothers.' The issue is whether the one carrying this or that service is aware of his direct relationships with Christ. There are many good works, and useful ones too.

The only question is whether Christ gave precisely us grace for the very work with which we are occupied at the present moment. Today we are perhaps more accustomed to look at grace as a kind of spiritual energy with which God strengthens us through Jesus Christ, giving strength for all good works that come into our minds and that we consider good. Or even simply for a pious life, which is also a good thing.

Paul connects grace with a concrete commission given by Christ in the context of the spiritual process connected with building the Kingdom, with building and strengthening His relationships with the Father. Such are all Christ's gifts, and according to the measure of the gift grace is given, the power to carry it out and reveal the possibilities given by Christ. Churchliness means the direct inclusion of the life and activity of a Christian in the process of building the Kingdom as the development and strengthening of the relationships between the Father and the Son. But the person himself, entering these relationships and participating in them, is changed, transfigured, and becomes an inhabitant of the Kingdom. In this way the Church becomes the body of Christ, full of love and life.

It would seem at first sight that there is contradiction here with one of the well known part of the Bible: we know that in Matthew 18:3 Jesus says "become as little children", and here Paul says to us - "be no more children". We shall still return to this paradox in a few days, but let’s notice today that Jesus says we cannot enter the Kingdom without "childishness", but He says nowhere we should remain children.

The apostle Paul explains that Christian life is an obligatory growth, and moreover in the foremost - in love. We don’t have to crawl, but have to go, go to Christ, and we must have in us for that a very solid "vertebral column" of faith, capable of resisting the wind of false doctrines, temptations, delusions, longing to mislead us.

It would seem at first sight that there is contradiction here with one of the well known part of the Bible: we know that in Matthew 18:3 Jesus says "become as little children", and here Paul says to us - "be no more children". We shall still return to this paradox in a few days, but let’s notice today that Jesus says we cannot enter the Kingdom without "childishness", but He says nowhere we should remain children.

The apostle Paul explains that Christian life is an obligatory growth, and moreover in the foremost - in love. We don’t have to crawl, but have to go, go to Christ, and we must have in us for that a very solid "vertebral column" of faith, capable of resisting the wind of false doctrines, temptations, delusions, longing to mislead us.

In the Letter to the Ephesians, from which we read a passage today, the apostle Paul formulates a view of human life that is very important for us: life as purposeful movement, a path directed toward God. He says that God builds up all the diversity of the Church's life so that we may all “grow to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” The apostle says that we are called to grow “into Him.” And one can move along the path of growth only through true love. This view makes every human life meaningful, which is important in itself. Even more consoling, however, is that following such a path frees us from dependence on the measures by which we assess earthly success: wealth, power, authority, and strength. According to the apostle, the one who acts in love puts on the dignity of Christ. Together with the call to growth, the apostle thus also proposes a new scale of values, a true gradation of good and evil whose starting point is God Himself.