NOTES for Eph 3:8-9

Paul makes special mention of the fact that his task was to bear witness to the unity the Savior brings into the world: the unity between God and the world that reveals itself in the Kingdom, and the unity between Jews and Gentiles that reveals itself in the Church. But this unity is not theoretical, theological, or doctrinal. The apostle reveals it first of all through his own person, in his life and in his testimony. A Jew by birth and by tradition, he became living proof that the barrier between Jews and those recent Gentiles who had entered the Church truly no longer existed.

The best confirmation of the seriousness of Paul's testimony was the fact that, in his own words, he became “a prisoner of Jesus Christ for the sake of the Gentiles.” To go all the way, one must of course take one's testimony with absolute seriousness, as something without which one's own life is inconceivable and impossible. Yet such testimony became possible for Paul only by grace, because he himself had encountered the risen Christ, who opened to him the way into the Kingdom. All the apostle's subsequent ministry was inseparable for him from his own life in the Kingdom.

A man 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 himself, as a Jew seeking the way of righteousness, and anyone seeking the way of Christ. As an inhabitant of the Kingdom, Paul realized that in the Kingdom it truly matters little what a person was before coming to its threshold. This became not merely the apostle's conviction but an integral part of his own spiritual experience, something he could no more disregard than what he had once experienced on the road to Damascus.