EPIPHANY 2012 -- 8 January 2012
Ephesians 3:1 - 13

Celebration of Epiphany was a major event in the early Church calendar, predating Christmas by 300 years.  The famous three kings from the east symbolize the universal nature of Christ’s message, and represent all non-Jews.  We don’t know where they were from in the East, and they are purely symbolic. The word “epiphany” means the showing forth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all humanity.  Greeks and Roman, Jews and Gentiles, all are included in the Gospel.

Today’s lesson is from the pauline Epistle to the Ephesians, and the entire letter is undergirded by the concept of the universality of the message of the Gospel.  Like Colossians, the epistle probably was written late in the first century, by the time Paul’s language and ideas had developed over two generations.  (The writer mentions no friends in Ephesus, as is always the case in authentic letters of Paul.  Also, the style is diffuse, as opposed to the concise pauline language of the Philippians.)  Ephesians was probably a late first century work, compiling Paul’s theology for circulation in the churches in Asia.  While Ephesus was not the destination of the letter, Paul spent almost three years in the great metropolis that was the city at that time.  Indeed Ephesus was one of the three great cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Antioch and Alexandria being the other two.  Like New York City, it lay on the bank of a great river leading into a major harbor, and therefore it became a central transportation junction between east and west.  Roman Ephesus became a huge melting pot, and the major center of the Eastern Mediterranean.

King Croesus of Lydia, in the sixth century B.C., as well ask King Cyrus of Persia and Alexander the Great, all left their mark on Ephesus.  Its great amphitheater held 30,000 people, and the road from the theater to the sea was paved with marble.  Asiatic people, Ionians, and Westerners made up a cosmopolitan city of many languages and cultures. The Romans took over in 190 B.C. and The Lydians bequeathed to the people of Ephesus the religion of Artemis, which the Romans identified with their goddess Diana, a religion in which fertility rights and orgiastic festivals were part of the liturgy. Prostitution was legal.  The temple of Artemis/Diana was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.  In a word, Ephesus was ripe for Paul’s teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, wherein the message was universal and the ethic patterned on Jesus’ teachings …  the Jesus whom we know as the Man for Others.

(Jesus’ teaching was so compelling that one Dimitrius organized a mass action against it on behalf of the silversmiths of Ephesus. Silver was used in large quantities to craft statues of Diana.  The demand for silver Diana dropped sharply after Christianity took over.)

The Roman rulers of Ephesus accepted Paul during his three years there, because his teaching made so much social progress against the local orgiastic cult of Diana.

After Paul’s visit, Ephesus had the biggest and best churches in Asia.  And by the end of the century, Ephesus had begun a long line of prominent bishops and Priscilla and Aquila were important leaders.  Some documents refer to Bishop Priscilla.

The cosmopolitan people of Ephesus responded positively to Paul’s teaching and way of life: showing kindness to others and forgiveness in daily affairs.  The Christian gospel won over the Diana/Artemis religion, but Paul didn’t write Ephesians.

So why talk about the city?  Paul lived there longer than any other church that he founded, and his gospel won the peoples’ hearts and minds.  Ephesus was the gateway to Asia and the West  --Greece, Rome, Spain.  Paul’s message was honed and developed by the cosmopolitan life of a great city. It had an enormous effect upon the city, and the city must have had a parallel effect upon Paul: his thinking and sophistication broadened and deepened.

Paul first developed, and his successors refined, the universality of the gospel:  the ultimate purpose of God is the union of all humanity in Jesus Christ; the unity and meaning of the universal Church.

The Church of Jesus Christ should be seen as an extension of the incarnation:  Ephesians. 2:19  “So then, you are no longer strangers and sojourners but you are fellow citizens and members of the household of God.”

This message was addressed to everyone in Ephesus, Asia, and the whole world.  God’s ultimate purpose is to unite all mankind.  God’s purpose is to unite all of the conflicting forces of the world into one body.  This is the Kingdom of God, a kingdom which is present but, we have learned, still coming. This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  We know each other by our love for each other, by our acceptance of differences, by our kindness, by our understanding and by our mutual service.  We are not the source of that love.  It was not dreamed up by some philanthropist.  It was sent into the world at Bethlehem, and is God’s love incarnate, for all humanity.  To realize this harmony is God’s final purpose for a disordered world.

Imagine!  Not only our own petty differences, but all conflicts, all personal hostility, all fanaticism, all suspicions, banished forever through God’s action in that paradigmatic person, the Man for Others, Jesus of Nazareth.

Iris Murdoch caught something of the universality of Paul’s Gospel, when she said:  “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”.

The message of Ephesians is that God wills us to overcome, through God’s love, the natural gap between you and me, no matter what our differences and no matter what our status.  Our differences might remain, but we are not alienated by them; God’s love unites us in a common humanity.

This is a radical gospel:  the other is not only real, but embraceable  through God’s love, no matter what our differences.

Amen.