Grace is Offensive

Ephesians 2:1-22

The Gospel of the Lord! Ephesians 2. Wow. I love this passage.

“We were once children of wrath,” writes Paul, but “God made us alive together with Christ.” BY GRACE WE HAVE BEEN SAVED. AND IT IS NOT YOUR OWN DOING BUT IT IS BY THE GRACE OF GOD. Period. Full stop. You were children of wrath but God has saved you by God’s grace. You were dead but now you are alive. And it is not by your works, your effort, your prayers, your trying or your doing; it is not because you’re awesome or even because you’re just “not terrible,” but it is God’s grace that resurrects you—that makes you rise from the ashes of all that separates you from God and from your fellow human beings. Because of this, Paul tells us that we are created in Christ Jesus for good works, so that while our works do not save us we were nevertheless created to be and do good—to be little Christs to the world. This is the best of all worlds: We are saved by grace so that we need not feel the burden of sin, wondering if we are OK after all, because Christ has given us that promise that there is nothing that can separate us from his love—not least anything we can do to ruin it. Then, because we are always wondering what then, Christ turns around and says, “Since you are saved by grace… since you have this promise that you are a resurrected phoenix of a human being… now you are created to do good for the world. Now, you are disciples. So go out and make the world a better place!”

That gets us through the first part of the Ephesians reading but we’re just warming up, because having given this promise of salvation to you Jesus turns around and offers it more widely than we would expect. For Paul, he was astonished to discover salvation not just for the Jews but also for Gentile sinners who could not know God before Jesus, who were separated by rituals and practices and often skin tone and always family history. No, in Christ even Gentiles like all of us here, who were not of Jewish ancestry, are brought into the promise. As Paul says, Christ “has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” But there’s more. He says something truly revolutionary. He says, “He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.” This is astonishing, breathtaking, revolutionary: When Jesus dies on the cross he doesn’t just save us; he destroys the law itself. There is no longer anything that divides us. Anything.

You could fool me some days. Because we all see people who are in the business of separating; we all know those who are treated as less worthy because of factors outside of their control. This happens in our communities, in our world, and far too often in our churches where Christ tells us exactly the opposite. Paul says Christ has abolished the law and yet we use that self-same law to tell others they are less worthy of being part of the body of Christ—first they must repent. Fair enough. Fair enough if the behavior in question breaks the two laws that Jesus himself lifted up as the two that remain: Love God. Love your neighbor. We need to repent of those behaviors when we fail to love God and fail to love other people. We need to recognize the ways we all fall short of that standard. However, in Christ the rest of the law is made moot. Nobody is less worthy because of who they are—there are no longer Jews or Greeks. In Romans, Paul reminds us also that there is also no longer slave or free, or even male or female—to denigrate others based on simple facts about who they are is an affront to God’s word because we are not living in a world where God’s people need to be separated in order to keep their identity any longer. Our identity is in Christ and not in our heritage.

Love God. Love others. The rest is truly just commentary. So, when Christians engage in debates that ostracize others in the name of religious orthodoxy I wonder what orthodoxy they are defending. A pre-Christ one, perhaps, but Christian Orthodoxy? I don’t think so. Paul’s is the first testimony we have to the new order established following Jesus’ death and resurrection. He lays the foundations for what it means to be Christian—there is no truer source to look to in order to find what it means to be a Christ-follower, and he says unequivocally: You are saved by grace, not by anything you do, you were created to do good and now because of Christ you can and must, and the law is not the reason for you doing good things because the law is over. Rather, love God; love people. There is nothing to divide us any longer.

It isn’t that complicated. It really isn’t. I look at the kinds of things people debate about Christian beliefs and practice and often I just shake my head. If there is no evidence of the love of God given to us in Christ Jesus in the way we struggle to live together as Christians then I doubt we are being Christians at all. Disagreement is fine, but the church must continue to preach grace even, perhaps especially, when it offends people. It should offend people, because it matters. And things that matter offend people. Especially things that center on God’s love, which is so much more perfect than our love. The love of God really does offend people, even good Christian people, because it is love that is totally, completely, utterly unearned. You aren’t loved because you are super attractive; you aren’t loved because you’re super smart, or super witty, or because of your amazing personality. You are loved not because of anything you do at all.

And that’s offensive.

Grace is so offensive to us that we-human beings like to create divisions to make ourselves feel superior to others even where those divisions don’t exist. That is sin. Paul says in verse 19 that in Christ we are no longer strangers or aliens, but some of us spend a lot of time making sure that others remain strangers and aliens to us. We love God, but loving our neighbor is a step too far because we have decided that certain others are not our neighbors at all. It’s what allows us to have philosophical debates about them—always keeping our common humanity at a distance. If they remain “others” then we won’t have to deal with the fact that God is calling us to love them like we love ourselves. Or we’ll talk about loving the sinner and hating the sin, even though the sin sometimes seems of our own creation—a thing that makes us far more uncomfortable than it does Jesus, who seems concerned only with loving God and one another.

Some of this comes down to power. Who do we really want to be in charge? And a lot of it comes down to fear. But this is why Paul offers this good news the way he does. By grace you have been saved through faith! You are saved first. Do Not Fear. You were once a stranger and an alien to God because of sin, but through Christ you are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. SO DO NOT FEAR! This household is built upon the foundations of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. So do not worry about the law. It is perfected in Christ, and the foundation of your Christian life is fulfilled by virtue of something you cannot control. Then, lastly and most importantly of all, the whole structure of the apostles and prophets, of whom you are debating and worrying over, is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Which means that you are connected with one another, as you are connected with God, in deeper ways than you can imagine. You are not just “you”—you are not an individual in the way you think you are. You share a cornerstone in Christ with all those others with whom you disagree. There is no male or female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, because Jesus brings you together in his death to break down the walls that divide us.

It’s a crazy promise. And though it might not always be clear; though the nations rage and the children of wrath inside of us still comes out far too often, still we have this assurance that we are heading not just to destruction but through destruction to a place beyond loss, beyond death. For by grace you have been saved. And whatever happens next will not change it. But you are freed indeed to share that grace and pass it along. That’s loving God and love neighbor; it’s what Jesus was after. More of that. More of the one body.