NOTES for Eph 6:10-24

From the theme of social relations Paul moves to the theme of Christian ministry and its place in society. He immediately proclaims that Christians do not struggle against people, even if those people are in power. Following Jewish usage, he calls people "flesh and blood." The aim of their struggle is the spiritual forces that determine the condition of the fallen world, which he calls "rulers," "authorities," and "controllers of this present darkness" ("world rulers of the darkness of this age"), connecting with them "the breath of evil that is under heaven" ("spiritual hosts of wickedness under heaven," v. 12). The goal of Christians, as we can see, is not the seizure of power or social change as such, but the lessening of the influence of those forces of evil which, while acting mainly through people, are not themselves human, using the human person only as an instrument. Of course, a person can become such an instrument only by giving consent to it.

In saying this, the apostle was probably warning those who were carried away by ideas of religious-political messianism, which were widespread in those days in synagogue and near-synagogue circles. And any struggle for power in general, if it becomes an end in itself, by no means lessens the measure of evil in the world; it gives the spirits of darkness the broadest scope for their activity. Only the Kingdom entering the world can lessen that measure, and therefore the Christian's main task is witness to the Kingdom and to salvation, as well as to the One who brought it into the world. But for this witness to be adequate, the witness needs faithfulness ("truth") and righteousness, without which one cannot share in the Kingdom (vv. 14-15). And the main weapons of the witness in resisting the evil in which the world lies are trust in God ("faith"), righteousness, which is the best witness to the Kingdom, and the Torah, the word of God, which makes it possible to distinguish good from evil and to make the right choice in the difficult situations in which the witness sooner or later will find himself (vv. 14-17). On that choice, in the end, will depend not only the fate of those to whom he bears witness, but also his own salvation.

‘…and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God…’ Saint Philaret (Drozdov) writes: ‘A soldier girds himself to bind his clothing, brace his body and thus act with greater strength and freedom. Truth must be your girdle. Come to know the truth, hold fast to the truth, bind your thoughts, inclinations and desires with the truth. Girded in this way, you can act spiritually with strength and freedom, without growing weak through sloth, stumbling over temptation, wavering because of false teachings, or falling into sin and vice. A soldier puts on armour so that the enemy's weapon cannot wound him even if it strikes him. Let righteousness, honesty and virtue be your armour. An upright conscience will keep you inwardly unharmed even if slander or injustice assails you outwardly. By putting on his footwear, a soldier becomes ready to advance against the enemy without injuring his feet. In place of footwear, let yours be a readiness to go forth not to attack and strike—for that is not what your warfare consists in—but to proclaim the good news of peace: the peace of Christ that overcomes all enmity and strife. A soldier takes up a shield to keep the enemy's arrows from reaching his body. The invisible enemy also directs arrows at you, sharp and wounding, fiery and burning: sometimes the less visible arrows of thoughts that oppose God, of doubts, of inflamed passions and lusts; sometimes the more visible arrows of false accusations, insults and even persecutions at the hands of the enemies of truth and virtue. But if your heart is covered by the shield of faith, even the sharp arrows will not pierce it, and the burning ones will be extinguished without doing harm. A soldier protects his head with a helmet against wounds, especially dangerous in this part of the body. You too must protect your mind with the helmet of salvation or, as the apostle explains more fully in another epistle, the helmet of the hope of salvation (see 1 Thess 5:8). Whatever difficulties or dangers you may encounter, hope in God must not let the spirit of despondency enter your soul, for deadly despair could follow it. By striking the enemy with his sword, a soldier renders both the enemy's strength and the power of his weapons ineffective. In this same way, and still more victoriously, acts the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. With this weapon our Commander Himself, the Lord Jesus, fought a battle that is an example for us and won a victory over the prince of evil that brings us good. It is written, He said, man shall not live by bread alone... It is written: you shall not put the Lord your God to the test... It is written: you shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone (Mt 4:4, 7, 10). And, pierced three times by the sword of the Spirit, the enemy left the battlefield exhausted. Arm yourself too, Christian, with the sword of the Spirit, with the word of God; keep it in your memory and in your heart; train yourself to turn its point against every word of lawlessness—and no evil will be invincible for you, no power of the enemy fearsome, no stratagem of his impenetrable, and all his weapons will be shattered and brought to nothing.’

At different times in Yahwist, as also in Jewish and Christian, history, the power of God was understood in different ways. The earliest idea was not very different from a pagan one: God possesses a power stronger than any power in our world, and therefore no one can resist Him.

Abraham, to whom God revealed Himself by the name El Shaddai, meaning literally "God of power" and usually translated "God Almighty," may have thought this way, and so may Jacob, who so wanted to receive at least some part of this power on the eve of meeting Esau, when he wrestled with his God all night.

And each time it turned out that the power of God is not simply an instrument that, once received from God, can be used at one's own discretion, but an instrument of God's action, inseparable from Him and changing from within the person who has dared to receive this power.

It is not accidental that both Abraham and Jacob receive new names after their momentous encounters: a new name means that a person, while outwardly remaining the same, has changed inwardly, changed so much that the former person is no more, and the new one who has come in place of the former deserves a new name. If we want to receive God's power, it will necessarily change us ourselves: for it is inseparable from God's presence, and in that case our own heart must become the place of this presence, a heart that must change so God can enter it.

Later, in the time of the Judges and the first kings, the power of God was seen somewhat differently: it was seen where God enters human affairs, for example when He intervenes in the course of a war to change it in favor of His people.

Here the power of God is already perceived more spiritually; it is personal and inseparable from God's will, it cannot be separated from God and used at one's own discretion. But the initiators in this case are still people, not God. They undertake affairs that they consider right and necessary not only for themselves but also for God, and then ask God to join these affairs as a helper.

Meanwhile, God's power is needed by Him for the fulfillment of His plans, not ours. This should have become especially clear to the people during the Babylonian captivity, when everything human collapsed and God's nearness was nevertheless experienced more vividly than ever.

God gave these lessons to His people for a reason: without assimilating them it would have been hard to expect the power of God revealed to the world in Christ, and the breath of the Kingdom that Christ brought into the world, to be understood and received.

Paul, of course, does not describe the Christian's path as a path of spiritual warfare by chance. He particularly stresses that this is not a war against people, “against flesh and blood,” but against those spiritual forces that, from within this world, oppose the Kingdom entering it. The Kingdom enters the world through Christians, and so warfare is inevitable.

The apostle lists what can help a Christian in this warfare, comparing the Christian's spiritual equipment to the weapons of a warrior fighting earthly battles: a helmet, a sword, a shield, a breastplate (“armour”). The foundation of it all is faithfulness to the truth and righteousness: they are like a warrior's belt and breastplate, without which no battle is possible. Indeed, righteousness is the foundation of the Christian's path; abandoning that path makes Christian life impossible. The path itself was known even in the pre-Christian era: righteousness as the practice of building a conscious relationship with God was known as far back as the time before the exile, and it certainly did not disappear with Christ's coming. On the contrary, those following this path now found new possibilities opening before them, possibilities they could not previously have dreamed of. Naturally, however, if a person rejects the path, they also reject the new possibilities opening up along it.

The shield that protects a Christian in spiritual confrontation is faith—faith not as a conviction that certain propositions and principles are true, but as trust in Christ. It is this trust that will save us in critical situations when nothing else can help. Paul calls the word of God the sword. He is speaking not only of Holy Scripture, as this verse is usually interpreted, but also, and above all, of the living revelation that enables a person to live according to the laws of the inner Torah, striving to realize in Christ the ideal of the living Torah. This is how the apostle sees the path of the Christian who stands against the dark forces that have seized this world.

It is not always easy to understand adequately Paul's words concerning the spiritual fight. For us today "the principalities, the powers and the rulers of the world” designate either the representatives of the earthly power, or a certain spiritual hierarchy, of course of the darkness.

However, neither the “yahvisme”, nor the Christian tradition has ever tended to an excessive spiritualism. Certainly, the existence of the spiritual world wasn’t a secret neither for the Judaism, nor for the Christianity, but this world (in exception maybe of the sects with gnostic orientation) has never thought as something, completely separated from our world.

Besides, neither the Jews, nor the Christians have ever exaggerated the influence of this world on the human affairs, although they did not deny it. And under "principalities", "powers" and "rulers of the world", if Paul probably hinted at certain spirits of the darkness, then it would be above all only about the sense of their influence on the spiritual state of concrete people. But indeed, the apostle says concretely that Christians will fight not with people!

It is not surprising: indeed, the battle of concrete people (even if it is about representatives of the power) can hardly change something radically: to the replacement of some come others, no society can be without power, and there is no reason for hope that the new ones will be better that the old.

The only battle, to which are called Christians is the battle against evil, in which lies the world. And there is only one way to resist this evil: do in such way that the Kingdom spreads the most fast and most widely possible in the world, transforming it. Because only a complete victory of the Kingdom can end this evil, in which the fallen world is laying.

The words of the apostle about the faith that allows "to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked", seem at first sight, too optimistic. In fact, there are few believers, to whom to quench these very fiery darts does not succeed too much, in spite of their faith! But maybe we do not understand adequately the words of the apostle? What does he want to say, by speaking about faith? For us today, faith is above all connected to the known convictions, the main part of which consists of the fact that God exists and can intervene in our life, if we ask Him for that. Besides, as Christians, we can also believe in other things, but which in our personal consciousness are above all connected with our views and convictions. And however in the biblical language, faith means above all faithfulness, and not conviction. Faithfulness to God, faithfulness to Christ, faithfulness to the Kingdom. That’s when everything falls in place. Of course, convictions and views in themselves can also exercise an influence on the life of man, if of course man is coherent in his convictions.

But not the same, as faithfulness to a concrete person or to God; if of course God is a reality for man, and not a theological abstraction. And it is not surprising: because views and convictions are rather often connected to the intellectual activity of man, who, before coming to a particular conviction, thinks about many and weighs, coming to the corresponding conclusions. And the intellect, in spite of all its importance, does not define in itself the spiritual life of man.

It is defined by will, intention, decisions taken by man and the choice made by him in a concrete situation. The will is not based on the intellect, although sometimes it may seem to us that way. It uses the intellect only for its purposes. And the will is based only on the relation, on the relation with another person or with God. That is why faith, as faithfulness, is surer than faith as conviction. Such a faith can really be a reliable protection against temptations, what we can’t say about the faith based solely on conviction in the correctness of certain views.

In today's reading, the apostle Paul asks the faithful to pray for him. How often we forget to pray for those who, in our opinion, are doing fine already. Our prayers for priests and bishops—if we pray for them at all—are a few words spoken mechanically, because that is what we are supposed to do.

Yet Paul says that this prayer is necessary even for those who have already been given much. Did not the apostle himself proclaim the mystery of the Gospel openly and boldly? He did... and yet he needs the prayer of the Church. For this prayer is one of the means by which the unity of the Body of Christ is built up.

We have a rather strange custom of connecting certain life situations with certain prayers, of turning for help in prayer to particular saints depending on the difficulties we are experiencing. The word of God gives us no basis for this. On the contrary, in today's apostolic reading the apostle Paul says: pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and supplication. What is essentially important in prayer, according to the apostle's word, is faithfulness to God, expressed in the fact that we turn to Him at all times, and not only in a difficult moment.

It is also essential that the apostle calls us to pray in the spirit. The Greek original has no capital letters except at the beginning of periods, and therefore these words allow a double interpretation. First, prayer must come from the very depth of the human person; prayer in the spirit is far from limited to the prayer text we pronounce with our lips. Second, it is probable that the apostle means prayer inspired by the Holy Spirit, and not only the babbling of which a person is capable by himself. The matter is by no means special gifts of the Spirit, such as prayer in other tongues. Yet if we believe in the reality and effectiveness of the sacrament of chrismation, in which the Lord through the Church gives us not manifestations of the Spirit, but the Spirit Himself, then our capacity for meeting the Almighty in prayer is limited by our will and only by our will.

What is prayer? The simplest and clearest answer: the communion with God, the words that we tell him hoping to hear the answer. So; but it is when we are alone. For example, on a desert island. And there everything is not also simple: because people leave all the same inhabited places to arrive to the deserted islands. This definition would be completely exhaustive only in case if in all the universe there was only one person.

But such was never the case and will probably never be it. And the problem is not even there, but in the fact that a person, according to God's word, "is not complete" (" It is not good that man should be alone", as transmits it God's words the King James Version translation). And if man is not alone, then his communication with God will be not only his personal affair, no matter how much the communication itself is personal. Indeed, the relationship of man with God and his relationship with other people are interrelated things. And if we made another step and looked at the situation, how it develops in the people of God? Here already it is not any more simply a human community, here is a community connected with this God's presence, sanctifying each of his members, action which makes of the people of God what it is.

And with such an influence, when it is in particular God's presence which unites the people and makes it one whole spiritual, the prayer already does not just cease to be a private affair of the individual, but becomes directly a matter of divine-human. And in the church all these relationships and interdependencies still strengthen: because the Church brings to the world the Kingdom, and in the Kingdom sanctifies already not simply God's presence, it is directly quite penetrated by the breath of God, which transforms and sanctifies everything. And the prayer of every inhabitant of the Kingdom wove into this breath, by becoming its integral part.

So the prayer of a person becomes the prayer for all the people of God, becoming at the same time the prayer of these people. And, perhaps, God only knows, which place occupies such a prayer in the construction of the Kingdom, in the creation of this spiritual unity, which constitutes the fabric of the Kingdom. But, be that as it may, the prayer is already here not simply the communion with God, but also the edification with God. And every of such prayer of course brings near the day of the final triumph of the Kingdom, which the Savior brought into the world.