The passage: Paul prays that the Ephesians may know the immense greatness of God’s power toward believers — the same mighty power God exercised in raising Christ from the dead and seating him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above every ruler, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that can be named, not only in this age but in the age to come. God has put all things under Christ’s feet and made him head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Romans and Galatians can be called the Epistles of the Resurrection: they show that God, by raising Jesus from the dead, justified us from what the law’s works could not justify us from. The Reformers turned to these letters for instruction and comfort in the sixteenth century, and found exactly the message they needed — a message to the burdened conscience, telling every sinner enslaved to sin where to find his Deliverer and true Master.
In time these references to Christ’s Resurrection were heeded less. They came to be treated merely as expositions of justification by Faith — “the Resurrection was a general act; how could it justify a particular sinner?” And if it didn’t, what did justify him? The answer brought back a subtler self-righteousness than the one the Reformers’ preaching had freed people from: justification by works was disclaimed in words as Popish, but the Faith now demanded was itself a work — a painful one — as good a foundation for self-glorification and self-torture as the works it replaced. This real danger can only be escaped, I have tried to show you, by returning to the Apostle’s exact words: the resurrection of Christ from the dead is God’s witness of our justification. If we do not receive that witness, Faith has nothing to rest on; if we do receive it, we acknowledge God as the Justifier and give up boasting of our own acts, outward or inward.
Trusting the Bible’s own wisdom this way means treating justification as much broader than Luther’s modern followers would allow. But if this rescues his doctrine from its worst inversion, shows what Faith really is, and explains why Paul joins justification to his Gospel for all nations and his protest against Jewish exclusiveness, that compensates for the latitude we introduce under his authority. It also lets us see the connection between Romans and Galatians and the Epistle to the Ephesians — a letter the Reformers valued less, which some of their modern followers deny to Paul altogether because it doesn’t proclaim justification in the terms they think their Lutheran apostle should use. I believe Ephesians can rightly be called the Epistle of the Ascension. Read this way, it confirms everything Paul drew from Christ’s victory over death elsewhere, and gives full force to the hints of humanity’s glorification, as well as its justification, that those other letters contain but don’t develop.
I have tried to show in recent sermons that we Englishmen, faithful to our own vocation, must give even greater importance to Paul’s doctrine of Justification than Protestants elsewhere do — it is the bulwark of our national existence and morality. To confess God as our Justifier is to confess he has made us a righteous people, and that our wrongdoing is a departure from that state. To stop confessing him so means our acts lose reference either to him or to our fellow-citizens; we make our own code of duty, and God becomes the ground only of certain special religious acts done to recommend ourselves to him or better our own prospects, not of our common life. But a Justification that concerns a nation cannot rest on individual faith; it must rest on acts God has done for men generally. If a sinner refuses to accept these as the warrant for his faith — if he will not humble himself before the love and forgiveness they show to him and his race — Scripture, his own conscience, and in time his own acts will testify against him. He may call himself a believer, but his belief will bear no fruit, or bad fruit, and no one will glorify the Father in heaven for seeing his works.
On Christ’s resurrection by the Father’s will, then, our English faith and whatever right acts flow from it must stand. But last Sunday I showed that these acts also point to an Ascension. Using the fifteenth Psalm, I argued that the highest communion with the King on Zion’s holy hill, which an Israelite could know, was tied to the most ordinary civic morality — communion was impossible without that morality, and communion made the morality permanent by grounding it in God’s own Nature. The Church’s choice of this Psalm for Ascension Day let me apply its lessons to English Christians. I said it was not lack of some sublime devotion, but our indifference to truth and honesty in ordinary dealings, that unfits us for communion with God. We will not repent of dishonesty, or become better citizens, until we believe God exalted his Son to his right hand so that we might draw near to him, the God of Truth, and be freed from what keeps us distant from him and each other. And I said the Ascension vindicates national morality and unity because it proclaims a universal Morality and a perfect Unity — it may help us in England to be true subjects of our King and true defenders of our land, tongue, and institutions, because it reveals One clothed in our nature who is “far above all principality, and power, and might, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come,” One “who is Head over all things to the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”
I. Since I find here the realization of the widest Catholicism, the most Catholic Church men have ever dreamed of, I want you to notice the connection between these later words and verse nineteen, my text’s opening words. Paul wants the Ephesian Christians to know “what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe.” I can imagine someone accustomed to speak of believers’ privileges until he thinks of them as separated by their belief from the rest of humanity, exclaiming, “That clause settles it — whatever glory follows is unfolded only to these separate persons.” Very well — I am glad to think so too. So let us ask who these persons were, and what he wanted them to know of their condition. They were a very small society, alien to the Synagogue, alien to the Gentile temple, scorned by those they met in the marketplace, forced to live mostly within their own circle, with every reason to think it dangerous to wander beyond it, to think that all outside breezes should be shut out and every opening onto the world outside stopped up. It is to these people that Paul speaks of a fellowship with no limits. The reward of their faith was that they could not separate themselves from any creature bearing human form — to do so was not to believe in Christ. To believe in him was to acknowledge One who represented mankind at the Father’s right hand.
Such a faith — carrying them above appearances, contradicting their natural understanding, overcoming their strongest temptations — could only be attributed to a Divine Operation on their spirits. That it could be awakened and kept alive in them proved the exceeding greatness of God’s power. But Paul cannot measure that power by this manifestation alone, wonderful as it is; he can only explain any individual’s faith by saying it follows “the mighty power” the Father “wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him on His own right hand in heavenly places.” This is the measure and standard of God’s working, the complete manifestation of which every other case is only a subordinate part. The power that kept the Son trusting as he passed into death, the power that raised him from the dead, is the very same power that kindles faith in any single soul, enables it to confess its relation to God and its brethren, and lifts it out of its own solitary hell. The power that raises any man into the largeness and freedom of fellowship with God and the universe is the power that exalted Christ to the right hand of the Majesty on High. This conviction explains countless passages in God’s dealings, brings order to our confused thoughts, and can save us from despair when our own faith or others’ seems weak. It makes us feel we are members of a body into which all life flows from the Head. And it shows how completely we invert God’s method, destroying the very root of personal faith, when we put that faith before the acts of Christ that reveal God’s universal will and purpose.
In the previous verse, Resurrection and Ascension explain the principle of faith; in the verses that follow, they are its object. The world had quailed before many powers, visible and invisible — taskmasters demanding bricks without straw, more cruel taskmasters demanding they please an invisible master who reaps where he has not sown, shapes born of their own guilty consciences, tyrants who could kill the body and do no more, subtle tempters who sought to destroy both soul and body in hell. Before these men trembled and offered accursed sacrifices, even their firstborn, even themselves. Paul declares that far above all these — imperial and priestly oppressors, cruel gods, evil spirits men had worshipped — was exalted the One who had been meek and lowly, the Good Shepherd who sought the stray sheep and gave his life for them. Everything that had trampled on man proved poorer and weaker than this Deliverer; the one who wore a crown of thorns proved to be Prince of all earth’s kings, and having descended into hell, triumphed openly over hell’s powers. This, Paul held, was the true Christian faith, distinguishing it from every rival faith, whether these dimly and imperfectly pointed toward such a Conqueror, or were merely the assertion of some intolerable tyranny men wearily but not hopelessly resisted. There may be honest believers who don’t grasp what their confession implies — had they fully understood it, they would not have needed an apostle’s teaching or his prayer that their eyes be enlightened to know the grandeur of their calling. But if such believers actually prefer a faith for themselves alone to a faith for the whole Universe, they must in turn learn to say: “We do not believe that he rose the third day, or ascended into heaven, or sits at the Father’s right hand.”
Paul’s language had been so sweeping and yet so precise that it seemed to close every avenue by which the subtle Spirit of Unbelief might enter: “He may be mightier than earth’s rulers, but what of the rulers of the air? Mightier than the visible, but what of the invisible? Mightier now, but what of the age to come?” Paul knew all these objections and had answered them all. Yet he is not satisfied.
Inferiority may not mean subjection — Christ may be greater than the powers of evil, but who can say they are put under his feet? Paul dares to say so. Paul, who had been beaten three times, who had barely escaped the mob at Ephesus, who was now in Nero’s hands at Rome — this Paul tells his disciples the powers of the world are put under Christ. Paul, who in this very Epistle says he and his brethren are still wrestling with principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places, here declares without qualification that these too are put under Christ. And he knew what he meant: he — or whoever wrote Hebrews — explains it against the very facts that seem to contradict it, quoting the Psalm that all things are put under Man, sheep and oxen and beasts and birds, then adding: “Now we see not yet all things put under him. But we see Jesus, who for the suffering of death was made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour.” He could not have said it more plainly. As far as we are concerned it is an unfinished struggle — we are still in the midst of it, every event showing how desperate it is; our bodies show visible oppressors still sitting on thrones, our spirits bear worse scars from their blows. The animal does not yet everywhere submit to the yoke of the man; rather the man continually bears the yoke of the animal — and often a yoke worse than animal, for the malice, falsehood, and hypocrisy that possess him come from neither birds nor fish. But One who bore our nature did, we believe, establish the lordship of the human over the animal and over the devilish; and having that nature, he also proved his claim to another Nature, of which ours is the image. He is crowned with glory and honour, at God’s right hand, binding us to God. His Ascension declares that all things are now put under him — the warrant of all future hope. The Apostles’ confidence that the kingdoms of the world had truly become the kingdoms of God and his Christ explains their longing for Christ’s final unveiling, and their zeal to keep that longing alive in their disciples. They could not set limits to the conquests of One who ascended on high to fill everything. Would any part of his creation, willing or unwilling, remain independent of him? Would not all confess him Lord, to the glory of God the Father?
V. But what witnesses to this constitution in Christ — what lives on to prophesy this ultimate victory? “He has given Him to be Head over all things to His Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” People often say how hard it is to find a satisfactory definition of the Church. I believe it is found nowhere but here. If this account seems inadequate to you, Scripture will not help you find another.
Scripture has taught us how God chose a family to testify of himself and his relation to men, then a nation for the same purpose, and finally sent members of that family and nation to invite people of all lands into covenant and fellowship with him — because he had set forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law; had given that Son up to die the common death of all men; had raised him from the dead in his human soul and body; and had exalted him in that soul and body to his own right hand. On that warrant men were invited to be baptized. Being baptized, they were to declare themselves adopted children of God because they were members of Christ’s body, and to say to all men: “This is your Head, as he is ours; you have as much right to your place in this Body as we do; if we say you are excluded from it, we cut ourselves off from it.”
This was the Gospel the nations received — the explanation of all Christian brotherhood and every act that has proved that brotherhood more than a name. If this society called Christian lacked the courage to say, “We are called to be members of a body whose glorified Head is Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and Son of God; we are actually one with him where he is, and he actually dwells with us where we are,” then it disowned its own history, renounced the charter its calling and privileges rested on, made itself something God had not made it, and to that extent made itself a curse to the world it was appointed to bless.
We cannot say this too strongly — it must be said more strongly than it has ever been said. All the blessings individuals have received from the Gospel, all the strength it has given the dying at sickbeds or at the stake, all the conversions from darkness to light it has caused, all the brave self-denying acts and earnest hopes it has kindled, can be traced directly to the belief our Communion Service expresses and pledges through the Sacrament: that we dwell in Christ and Christ in us, that we are members incorporate in the body of him who fills all in all. Take away that faith, and you do not take away some grand mystical notion — you take away everything that has made Christianity practical, dear to sinners and sufferers, and able to bind together men of different races, classes, countries, and ages. Without it, the Church becomes either a collection of individuals exalting themselves on their separation from the rest of mankind, proving by their jealousies, suspicions, strifes, and schisms that a bond of mere opinion is no bond at all; or it becomes a huge political system, a burden on the life of nations, families, and individuals, declaring by its acts and words that it must have some other head than Christ, that it does not regard itself as the body of him who fills all in all.
What is our duty, then, brethren? For the sake of the many in our own land who can find no peace in narrow societies bound by certain opinions and leaders, yet will not abandon what they learned there or exchange their leaders for ones we might prefer; for the sake of thousands groaning under our sins, who share our inward needs yet feel cut off from all fellowship, as if consigned to hopeless unbelief; for the sake of nations abroad who have struggled vainly, madly, for freedom, and feel chains on them mightier than those of unjust monarchs or evil laws; for the sake of all whom a religious system has driven into Atheism because they would not worship a tyrant-god, but who yearn to hear of a God who is a Deliverer; for the sake of all that is precious in history, worth keeping in the present, and hoped for by prophets and sages for times to come — let us assert the old faith of Ascension Day. Let us make members of sects understand we set up no opinions or leaders of ours against theirs, but wish to justify all that they and their fathers clung to in their darkest and bravest hours, all their leaders taught them when most indignant at our indifference to Christ’s Gospel: that what we preach is Christ, the one Head of a body no time or space can bound, the source and object of their faith and ours, the destroyer of all sects because he unites man to God. Let us make Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians understand we do not ask them to leave their churches for ours, or accept any English tradition not also theirs, or travel the path by which God led the Teutonic nations in the sixteenth century; nor do we urge them to throw off by sudden violence the spiritual despotism we believe hinders them from being, not Protestant, but Catholic, and preys on their moral as much as their national life. We only say: believe, as the Church in every age and country has professed, that Christ, the common Brother and Head of men, has ascended on high, and that all powers on earth and throughout creation are subject to him. Follow that faith into all its consequences, and chains no other charm could break will fall from your hearts, and you will be given power to set your countrymen free. If you seem at first a paltry, feeble band to your enemies, they will soon find invisible hosts on your side — not the relics of the saints but the saints themselves, and all who were refused that name on earth but whom God counts worthy of it, all who gave their lives for their land and for the Truth, will fight for you. He whose eyes are as a flame of fire, on whose head are many crowns, the Word of God, will go before you, and your tyrants, however mighty they seem today, you shall see no more forever.