NOTES for Eph 4:17-32
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.