Epiphany
Eph
3:1-12
1/6/22
You are
citizens of the United States of America.
You can get a passport that can be used to demonstrate anywhere in the
world that you have this status. Now this is probably something that we take
for granted. After all, we were born here. We have always been Americans.
But the
actions of others should remind us that being a citizen of the United States is
in fact a very big deal. Last year,
808,000 people became naturalized American citizens. During the last decade 7.4
million people have done this. And of
course, we are also aware that many people attempt to get into the United
States just to be here, even if they do not have a legal status to do so.
The Feast of
the Epiphany of Our Lord is the yearly reminder that almost all of us take for
granted our status of being part of God’s people. We know that we are baptized Christians. We
know that we are sons and daughters of God because of Christ.
Yet this
attitude demonstrates that we are often quite oblivious to the fact that most
of us have no actual right to this claim.
Our status as God’s people is not like the manner in which we are
citizens of the United States. Instead, it is like that of naturalized American
citizens who have come in from outside this country. We have received something to which we did
not have a natural and rightful claim. We have received a gracious gift from
God.
In our text the apostle Paul speaks about a mystery. It is something had not been made known clearly in the past, but now has been revealed. He begins by saying, “For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles-- assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly.” Paul says that by God’s grace he knows a mystery that has been made known to him by revelation.
This mystery has a very specific
content. It is the mystery of Christ and
the apostle says that it “was not made known to the sons of men in other
generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by
the Spirit.” The Spirit has now revealed
the mystery, and Paul defines this mystery very clearly when he says, “This
mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the
same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the
gospel.”
Now to us, that doesn’t sound like much of a mystery. It doesn’t sound like something to get all that excited about. But the apostle Paul sees things very differently. He says, “Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.”
Basically, everyone here this evening
is a Gentile. We are not descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We are not descendants of the nation of
Israel which God brought out of Egypt in the exodus. We were not part of the
covenant God made Israel as he took them and made them his treasured possession among all peoples.
Paul has just stated this in very clear terms in the
previous chapter. And he has also expressed what this meant. He wrote, “Therefore remember that at one time you
Gentiles in the flesh, called ‘the uncircumcision’ by what is called the
circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands--remember that you were
at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of
Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without
God in the world.”
Paul says that we were strangers to
the covenants of promise, and had no hope as we were without God in the world. To be outside of the covenant was to stand on
our own. It was to be without the sacrifices by which God gave forgiveness to
his people. Paul describes out natural
condition apart from God when he says, “And you were dead in the
trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this
world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is
now at work in the sons of disobedience-- among whom we all once
lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the
body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like
the rest of mankind.”
Now it is not the case that God’s
intention to save all people had never been expressed. When Yahweh called Abraham, he told him, “and in you all the families of the earth
shall be blessed.” We hear in our Old
Testament reading that Yahweh had told Israel, “And nations shall come to your
light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” But the specific details of how this would
happen remained undefined and unclear.
What is
more, God’s Word warned his people Israel against intermarrying or becoming
involved with the other nations because they would lead Israel away from the
true God Yahweh, and into the worship of false gods. Important features of Israel’s life in the
covenant such as circumcision, food laws, the Sabbath, the Passover, and other
religious celebrations helped to separate Israel from the Gentile
pagans. They protected Israel and her descendants the Jews from the danger
these Gentiles posed.
But God did
desire all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. And in the Old Testament, God had given
witness to this fact, even if the way it would happen was difficult to
understand. God began to carry this out
as he sent his Son into the world, when Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy
Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
In our
Gospel lesson we learn that after Jesus had been born, magi from the east
showed up in Jerusalem looking for the king of the Jews. They had seen “a star when it rose,” and so
they were looking for the new born king.
They had seen some astronomical event that they took to be a sign. The Jewish scriptures that had been brought
to the east by the exiles, and these learned men had knowledge of them. Most likely they were prompted by the
statement in Numbers chapter 21, “a star shall come out of Jacob, and the
scepter shall rise out of Israel.” Certainly, God was directing these events,
just as he then actually guided them by this star to the place where the Christ
was.
At the very
beginning of Jesus’ life, we see that Gentiles come and bow down before
him. In this event caused by God, we see
that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Gentiles.
He is the Savior of the Gentiles. He is your Lord and Savior.
But this
fact would only become absolutely clear after Jesus had completed his saving
mission. Jesus was first and foremost Israel’s
Christ. When he sent out the twelve apostles during his earthly ministry he
instructed them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the
Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Jesus’ mission was to win forgiveness
for all people by dying on the cross and rising from the dead. In this letter, after describing how the
Ephesian Gentiles were not part of Israel, he went on to say, “But now in
Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of
Christ.” What is true for Jews is also
true for Gentiles – the blood of Jesus shed on the cross has given us
redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Yet a dead Christ would not have been victory for anyone, as we face the death that sin has brought into the world. And so, on the third day God raised Jesus from the dead. The risen Lord was with his disciples for forty days, and then was exalted as he ascended into heaven. In the first chapter of this letter the apostle refers to “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.”
After Jesus had risen from the dead,
he told the apostles, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given
to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have
commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the
age.” Our Lord said that they were to
make disciples of all nations.
However, the book of Acts describes how many Jewish Christians were slow
to understand that the Lord really did mean all nations. God had to act dramatically through the
events that involved Peter and the Gentile Cornelius to show that salvation was
for the Gentiles too.
God had called Paul as an apostle to the
Gentiles. He had given him the revelation
of the mystery of Christ – that he truly is the fulfillment of God’s promise
that in Abraham’s offspring all nations have been blessed. Paul’s description of this as a mystery that
had to be revealed hits us with the fact that this is not something we
originally had. It is a gift of grace that we should never take for
granted.
We were outsiders. We were Gentiles who had no claim to being part of God’s people. But because through baptism and the word the Spirit has called us to faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ Paul can say: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.”
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