“For to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace.” —Ephesians ii. 15.
The passage: Christ made one new man out of two, Jew and Gentile, and so made peace.
Last Sunday I considered why Jews and Gentiles both rejected the Gospel, and why St. Paul traced this dislike in both to their worship of the god of this world. Today I want to examine how Jews and Gentiles were brought into one Church or body by the Gospel. I think this too belongs to Epiphany, and may help us see why the Church prays on this Second Sunday after Epiphany, and with what confidence, that God will grant us also His peace all our days.
My text touches this directly. I have taken one clause from a longer passage, but I am not perverting its intention. St. Paul does not state the problem of Jew and Gentile as we might state it. We would ask how men raised in the shadow of the Temple, who trembled at the second Commandment, who had learned before all else that the Lord their God was one, could be brought into fellowship with men who found a god in every hill and fountain, whose broad toleration welcomed new gods anywhere, but whose temples were seldom shunned by wrongdoers out of awe of some unseen Ruler. We might wonder what convictions each side had to sacrifice, what devices could stop their unyielding principles from perpetual collision.
St. Paul instead treats the Jew as an incomplete man until he found the Gentile, and the Gentile as incomplete until he found the Jew. He does not speak of adjusting opinions, of arrangements or compromises, but of each being raised to a new level, the level for which he was always intended but had never reached, where they could become one body. The Hebrew of the Hebrews, circumcised the eighth day, of Abraham’s stock, a Pharisee touching the law, discovers that with all these advantages he is a maimed, dwarfed creature unless he can claim fellowship with those outside the Covenant, whom the Law has cut him off from, whom his own eyes tell him are given to idolatry. He must stand level with the Gentiles, eat with them, assert their right to every spiritual privilege — or become an unworthy descendant of those who bore witness against false gods. So that the law may not be dead to him, or worse, a hateful oppression, so that he may keep and delight in the Commandments as never before, he must become all things to all men, living as one without law.
I connect this first with St. Paul himself, since we can hardly feel its force without such a personal case. The two partial men who make the one new man cannot be reduced to mere notions; we must see, in one instance, how each felt his need of the other. The clearest test would be someone who had shut himself up most tightly in his own inherited form of life, and most despised the opposite one. But though Paul illustrates his own principle vividly, the principle is general: the Gospel declared the true humanity which had until then appeared in two seemingly irreconcilable forms. Let us ask what the Jewish mind, as such, and the Gentile mind, as such, were characterized by.
No novelties are needed to settle this. St. Paul’s words — that the oracles of God were committed to the Jew, and that the Gentile was seeking God, feeling after Him if he might find Him — go to the root of the matter. The first phrase, from Romans 3, is carefully chosen. Paul does not say the Jews received a revelation while the Gentiles had none — that would contradict his teaching in the first two chapters of Romans, that God did reveal His righteousness in the Gentile conscience, and that the sin of idolaters was in not liking to retain God in their knowledge. He maintains equally that some Gentiles, by patient well-doing, sought glory and honor and immortality, while some Jews were contentious and disobeyed the truth. The distinction, then, was not in God’s partial giving or withholding of light, nor in men’s accepting or rejecting it. It was that God had spoken distinctly to the Jew, had set him apart so that speech could be understood, had made him aware through discipline of the difference between Creator and creature, and of his own tendency to confuse them. This Paul defends as his people’s privilege and glory, the measure of their guilt, and the task laid on them for all lands. He acknowledges, as patriot, apostle, and man, how they failed to grasp this calling — and declares that God’s purpose in choosing them was not frustrated, that he himself, once the great persecutor, proved it fulfilled: God bid him show all nations, “Behold your God.”
Here then is one picture: a Jew starting from God, His covenant, law, and word; standing fast in the covenant, delighting inwardly in the law, feeling the word as a fire, counting it his glory to witness to God’s righteousness, longing for God’s reign and the fall of every rival. Here is another picture, of the same race, perhaps the same man degenerated: God shrunk to His own oracles, which speak only of favored recipients of gifts denied others; the Covenant a sentence of condemnation on the rest of the world; the Law a cause for self-exaltation by those who do not keep it; the Word no living fire but a text to argue over, an excuse for sects each claiming sole possession of its meaning and cursing every other reading. Contemplating these two images, I think we see that the true Jew must have longed for a fellowship with all God’s creatures he had not yet found — his whole divine education inspired this longing — while the false Jew, never having felt it, cultivating instead all that was alien to it, was losing the very thing peculiar to him, ceasing to grasp that any oracles had been given him at all.
Now look at the Gentile’s condition as the same Apostle describes it. He senses God somewhere near him. Where? He reaches this way and that. In the sky? The air? Below? Nearer still — with us in birth, in the farmer’s work, the physician’s, in father and mother, brother and sister, in judge and lawgiver, in the priest who offers blood as a pledge between man and man? Must not nature speak of Him, and glorious man speak of Him even more? Here is that feeling after One not far from every one of us, which Paul speaks of with such sympathy — the confession rising from countless hearts that in Him they live and move and have their being. On Mars Hill, before idol temples, to a frivolous people who had largely lost all but the outward sign, Paul, the disciple of Jewish lawgivers, did not shrink from speaking richly of the thoughts hidden beneath the wood, stone, gold, and silver he said could never be God’s likeness.
Why did he speak so — he who knew better than anyone the horror of idolatry, where it led even these clever Athenians, into what moral corruption and incapacity for heavenly light? Because he, a Jew entrusted with God’s oracles, had a message for the God all nations were seeking, and knew that message was meant to reach them through his own people. And why did he go beyond mythology into philosophy — quoting Aratus, calling men the offspring of the gods, using language about the Living God that verges on Pantheism? Because he recognized philosophy’s great inquiries as genuine, prompted by a higher Wisdom than the philosophers themselves possessed; because he saw how barren those inquiries proved when philosophers pretended to manufacture the Being and Unity they were seeking, destroying the finer instincts that idol-worship, corrupt as it was, had not wholly crushed. Because he knew he could tell the Athenians that Aratus was right — they were the offspring of God, and knew in whom.
So we come to a word in my text I have not yet addressed: “to make in Himself of twain one new man.” Some editors read “Him” instead; the sense is hardly weakened either way, since it is hard to find any subject but “Christ” for the whole sentence, so “in Himself” seems most reasonable. Yet Paul may have written with the Father in mind, making peace through the Son — that form of language was so habitual to him, so implied throughout, that he may not have remembered which he had used, and may have assumed it even where strict grammar did not require it. Such departures from technical rule, common to every practical writer, sometimes yield valuable theological hints; I cannot say whether this is one, and prefer the familiar reading.
Either way, both readings illustrate what I said last Sunday: the Gospel, for Paul, is not a set of propositions but the manifestation of a Person. As he told the Corinthians of the glory of God shining in the Gospel through His Image, so he tells the Ephesians that this same manifestation makes the one new man of two. If our account of Jew and Gentile drawn from Paul’s other writings is right, you can see why nothing but this could explain the reconciliation of Hebrew and Greek — achieved despite fierce mutual reluctance — when the sect once called Nazarenes became the Church of Christ.
Unless the Jew could feel that God was actually speaking by him and to him, his calling was forfeited; he would not become a fuller man but simply lose all that was precious in his inheritance. Unless he felt this, he could not overcome the sectarian spirit of a degenerate age, which arose from supposing God had ceased to act and live, His words locked in a book for Pharisees and Sadducees to dispute over. Unless God now spoke more directly and personally than ever before, coming forth from behind law and prophets to reveal Himself, none of the promises that had sustained waiting Israelites could be fulfilled, and none of the narrow, selfish hopes of false Israelites could be dispelled. God speaking in a Son, revealing Himself in a Man, answers every expectation that had sustained the worshipper of Jehovah in his deepest awe — when he most felt that if the heavens could not contain God, still less could earthly temples; when he most feared to confuse God with anything seen or thought. Then the full vision that had sustained the heroes and martyrs of his land burst upon him: every thought of Creator, King, Judge culminating, without dissolving, in the confession of a Father; the idea of a Will wholly good rising in clear light behind the law that had come from thick darkness; that Will seen perfectly fulfilled in One who delighted to do it; out of the weakness of death, the full revelation of divine power and wisdom, because of divine love.
But having reached this point, must not the seeker after God — who felt God must be close at hand, present everywhere, most fully discoverable in man — have found in such a Person the only answer to his own longing, the only fulfillment of his own anticipations? The actual Friend of Man who met actual human sorrow — hunger, palsy, leprosy, blindness, madness, the grave — bearing the burden to overcome it: this was the God-man they had been feeling after, whom they had tried to picture in a thousand forms, knowing each form distorted and diminished Him. He who stilled the winds and waves, who entered the dark formless world and brought His body back from it, who ascended on high — did He not vindicate their claim to be God’s offspring? Did He not justify the glory they had placed on man? And did He not equally justify the tragedian’s darker insight — that man’s true posture is humiliation, safe only in bowing before a Will above his own? And did the same revelation not confirm the philosopher’s certainty that somewhere there must be an Ideal of truth, righteousness, and beauty which men do not invent, but which is the image of the eternal Substance, and which He enables them to grasp?
In such a Person, then, the one new man reconciling Jewish and Gentile elements could be found — and only in such a One. If there were no such Being, of whom it could be said, He is the complete manifestation of God, the living center of all human beings and thoughts, I do not see how we could explain the history of the old world or its passage into the modern. And without Him I cannot see how there is ever to be peace in this jarring world. The Angels’ song proclaimed that His coming meant peace on earth and goodwill to men; He Himself proclaimed that His coming brought not peace but a sword, setting a man’s foes within his own house. History has explained the paradox: because He is the Prince of Peace, all the enemies of peace within man’s heart have been stirred up, finding a common cause in driving Him from His kingdom. Nor is that all: He does not come to make a solitude and call it peace, or to erase what is distinctive in nations or persons for a dead uniformity. He comes to rouse men from sleep, not to lull them. So the Jew becomes more intensely Jewish, the Gentile more intensely Gentile, before both consent to take their law from Him — and when they do, though it crushes their pride, it also fulfills the Father’s purpose in their particular destiny and education. We need not be surprised, then, at greater bitterness arising from the lusts of our members since Christ’s coming, nor that those best fitted to do His work and become peace’s truest ministers should firmly refuse to abandon any position or conviction truly won.
These reflections may help us if we are truly seeking, in our own day, to be Peacemakers, and so called children of Him who is the Peacemaker. It is worth noting that however many forms of opinion and feeling surround us, they resolve at last into Paul’s two great divisions. Search as we will, we find no classification so scientific and so useful as his description of Jew and Gentile as the elements of the full Christian man. Everywhere these elements try to assert themselves separately, in deadly hostility. On one side, a vehement dogmatism treating every fact and principle as settled by the oracles committed to us, and then strife among the dogmatists themselves over who holds those oracles and what they mean. On the other, a protest against authority, a restless search for what is or is not to be believed, ending in the most divergent conclusions, and for many, in utter despair of any answer. These surface signs are visible to all — the inconsistencies each temper breeds; the dogmatist’s terror of doubt and inquiry, his desperate effort to suppress them, his resentment when he cannot; the skeptic’s contempt for the dogmatist’s certainties, alongside his own weariness and despondency even while claiming faculties to solve the riddle of the universe — which remains a riddle still. But is there nothing beneath these surface phenomena? Is there not, in the heart of the hard, self-satisfied dogmatist, an irresistible faith that Truth must be revealed by Him who is Truth, and has been and is revealed? And is there not, in the heart of the weary, contentious denier of inherited belief, an equal faith that Truth can come only from God, and is worth waiting for, even dying for, rather than receiving falsely? If we grant this much to the people around us — if we can see God’s ways justified in them even at their most crooked — we begin to find, in all we read and see, evidence that men have never been able to do without these two convictions: that Truth must reveal itself, and that they must go on seeking it. There must be witnesses to each conviction, some in whom one predominates, some the other — often strangely mixed: heretical dogmatists as common as orthodox ones, Protestant as Romanist, atheist as Christian. There is a skepticism of the heart as well as of the mind: devout men often show as much impatient skepticism as the irreligious, and some turn to empty superstitions merely to escape their own doubt. It is commonly harder for people of the same type to understand each other than for opposites; there is often an unconscious pull of the skeptic toward the dogmatist, envying his confidence, and constant conflict between dogmatists themselves, and between skeptics themselves.
Where does this end? We have tried every remedy — persecution, accommodation, indifference — each attempted under the best conditions, by resolute people with every means to succeed. Still the question rises to Heaven: whence is peace to come, from the strife tearing at mankind, from the strife within our own hearts? Is there any fuller answer than the one given long ago — “He hath made of twain one new man”? There is a Center of Peace amid this endless struggle. Dogmatists miss it because they substitute their own conclusions for the manifestation of a divine Person, thinking we need something to hold rather than an Eternal God who holds us, knowledge of whom is eternal life. Skeptics miss it because they search Heaven above and the deep below for what is already close to them. But both, when weary of their own way, stripped of their different prides, may meet at last at the same Cross — finding that the manifestation of the Perfect God in the Perfect Man is the subject of all Revelation and the object of all human search; that in His Sacrifice lies the union of Godhead and Manhood, and so of those discordant elements in us, so long as we imagine God distant and forget that our seeking Him is only the consequence of His seeking us. Thus the only true peace we can desire for the world is not the repose of death but the fullness of life — His Peace, who called all things into life and by His Son overcame death. This is the Peace, His Peace and not ours, which we may ask Him who governs Heaven and earth to grant us now and always.