by N. T. Wright
Ephesians is like that. It seems to be a circular; there are no personal greetings or mention of a specific church. The words “in Ephesus” in the first verse (“to the holy ones in Ephesus who are also loyal believers in King Jesus”) are not found in the earliest and best manuscripts, and it looks as though a scribe, perhaps sometime in the fourth or fifth century, puzzled by the absence of an address, added one. There might be a good reason for this. If the letter was indeed a circular, but if it was written from prison in Ephesus, it is very likely that a copy would have been kept by the church in Ephesus itself, or even that someone from Laodicea or Colossae made a copy that found its way back to where it started. So the scribe, finding no address but knowing that the letter was located in Ephesus itself, would seem to be doing the sensible thing by adding the words.
It isn’t only the absence of an address and greeting that make many people think the letter was a circular. Like the panoramic photograph, it covers a huge sweep of territory, with many different elements held together in a single view. There are stunning peaks and distant glimpses, but the point is that its author has stood back and tried to express it all at once. That is why some, even among those who are unsure whether Paul wrote it, have referred to it as “the crown of Paulinism,” the place where Paul’s ideas are put together in a single frame. A different kind of picture, indeed, but recognizable, I believe, as the work of the same man.
Ephesians has much in common with Colossians, so much so that some have thought that one letter was the model for the other. Equally likely in my view is that they were both composed at much the same time to serve slightly different purposes; Colossians has a specific focus for that particular community while Ephesians stands a bit farther back and lets the view speak for itself. Ephesians is where we can, I think, see Paul’s own situation and understand why this was what he wanted to say from his prison cell to the churches in the province of Asia. The letter combines two apparently quite different things, but when we think of Paul and his Ephesian crisis it makes sense.
First, there is the cosmic and global vision of the divine purpose and of the church as the agent and representative of that plan. This occupies the first three chapters, and they make a continuous flow of exalted prose (perhaps, indeed, “Asiatic” in their long sentences and florid expressions), a single stream of praise, worship, and prayer. It is all very Jewish. It offers a vision of Creator and cosmos, of heaven and earth joined together, of the powers of the world as subject to the creator God and to his exalted Messiah, the truly human being under whose feet the Creator has placed “all things.”39 As a result of his death and resurrection the new Exodus has occurred, the “inheritance” is assured by the down payment of the spirit, and “all rule and authority and power and lordship” is now subject to him, including—and everyone in Asia would know who was being referred to—“every name that is invoked, both in the present age and also in the age to come.”40
The second chapter speaks of the act of grace and rich mercy whereby God has rescued Jew and Gentile alike from sin and from the “powers” that feed off human idolatry. It speaks of the Messiah’s people as a new creation, God’s poiēma, the word from which we get “poem,” rescued in order to model and take forward God’s good purposes in the world. It speaks of the new Temple, long awaited by Jews of Paul’s day (especially those who knew perfectly well that Herod’s reconstruction of the Jerusalem Temple was an expensive sham); only now the Temple consists of the community of Jesus-followers, the place where the living God dwells by his spirit. Paul then explains in the third chapter where his own work and his present suffering belong on the map of God’s age-old purposes. The powers of the world are now, as always intended, being confronted by the power of God. On that basis, Paul prays that all those to whom he is writing would come to grasp “the breadth and length and height and depth”—this really is a panorama he is spreading out—and to know, in particular, the love of the Messiah himself, so that they may be filled with all the divine fullness.41
The first half of the letter is therefore all about power and unity—the power of God in the gospel and the unity of heaven and earth, of Jew and Gentile in the church.42 This will then give rise to the remarkable exhortations about the unity of the church through its many different gifts and not least the unity of man and woman in marriage.43 There are mysteries here, as Paul readily acknowledges. But the sense of the Creator’s plan for the whole creation coming to fruition and of the advance signs of that in Jew and Gentile and male and female is so clear—and for that matter so obviously Pauline, resonating with Galatians in particular—that the big picture, the panorama, ought not to be in doubt.
The second half of the letter is strongly and explicitly practical. The different gifts that God gives to the church are designed to bring it into a rich, variegated unity in which its members will be “growing up into the Messiah” as Paul had said to Philemon. And this gives rise to a sustained exhortation to live by the moral standards that diaspora Jews would recognize, particularly in matters of sexual ethics. That naturally leads to the delicate balance of relationship within marriage itself and so to another version of the “household codes.” But then there comes the surprise—though, in retrospect, we ought not to be so surprised.
One might have thought, reading the first three chapters of the letter, that everything in the garden was, if not already lovely, then heading that way. The grand vision of God’s redeeming purposes already accomplished in the Messiah; the church as the community that will now, by its life and unity, declare to the world that the One God is God, that Jesus is Lord, and that all other powers are in subjection to him—this might seem, and indeed has seemed to many in our own day, an impossibly grandiose, naive fantasy. But with the end of chapter 6 comes the reminder of the continuing reality. Believers are locked in a power struggle, and it is dangerous and unpleasant, calling for vigilance and for all the defensive equipment the gospel can provide.
This is exactly, we may suppose, the place Paul has come to after the terrible experience to which he refers in 2 Corinthians 1. His sustained meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus, rooted in his earlier prayer life, which, growing out of its deep Jewish roots, celebrated Jesus as the humble Servant, as the truly human Image, as the exalted Lord, as the place where “the full measure of divinity has taken up bodily residence”44—all this has helped him finally to climb out of the dark interior prison before he is released from the exterior one. But he has not forgotten the way in which the principalities and powers, so openly challenged in the early days of his work in Ephesus, were able to strike back. He sensed it, he smelled it, the whiff of sulfur surrounding the hard faces of the magistrates, the diabolical glee of the guards entrusted with whipping or beating their new prisoner, perhaps even the smug faces of people he had thought might be friends but turned out to be enemies. He knows, he has learned, that when you celebrate all the truths that he rehearses in chapters 1–3, particularly the truth that “God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety, was to be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places—through the church!”45 then the rulers and authorities are unlikely to take this kindly. As he explains in that same passage, his own suffering itself is making the point. The victory that was won by the cross must be implemented through the cross.
I think, in fact, that Ephesians 6:10–20, the passage on spiritual warfare, functions in relation to the whole of the rest of the letter much like 1 Corinthians 15, the long argument about the resurrection of the body, functions in relation to the earlier material in that letter. You might not have seen it coming, but when you get there it turns out not to be an appendix on an unrelated topic, but rather the deeper reality that makes sense of all that has gone before. In particular, everything Paul says in chapters 4–6 constitutes a rolling back of the frontiers in the world’s moral power struggles. To make widely differing gifts work for unity, not division, as in chapter 4, is hard enough. To retrain the imagination and the natural impu
lses to resist the murky short-term delights of the pagan world is harder still. To make and sustain marriages of genuine mutual submission is perhaps hardest of all. Compromises and second-best solutions are easy. To go for the full version of discipleship is to sign on for spiritual warfare.
So too with the first half of the letter. Paul knew, much better than many modern theoreticians, that there is no incompatibility, but rather an inevitable link between, on the one hand, the celebration of the One God and his work of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, and, on the other, the challenge to the powers of the world. It will not do to accuse Ephesians 1–3 of having too much of the “now” and not enough of the “not yet.” The “not yet” is there in chapters 4 and 5, and particularly 6, and it is there for a very good reason. Paul had come to Ephesus and had lived and taught the powerful victory of God. He had then discovered, first in Corinth and then back in Ephesus again, that as with the gospel itself the divine power could only be made known through human weakness. And so he offers this realistic warning and urgent appeal to the churches of Asia, not least the little communities in the Lycus valley, not to detract from what he has said earlier in the letter, but to give it its necessarily humble frame:
Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his power. Put on God’s complete armor. Then you’ll be able to stand firm against the devil’s trickery. The warfare we’re engaged in, you see, isn’t against flesh and blood. It’s against the leaders, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places.
For this reason, you must take up God’s complete armor. Then, when wickedness grabs its moment, you’ll be able to withstand, to do what needs to be done, and still to be on your feet when it’s all over. So stand firm! Put the belt of truth around your waist; put on justice as your breastplate; for shoes on your feet, ready for battle, take the good news of peace. With it all, take the shield of faith; if you’ve got that, you’ll be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is God’s word.
Pray on every occasion in the spirit, with every type of prayer and intercession. You’ll need to keep awake and alert for this, with all perseverance and intercession for all God’s holy ones—and also for me! Please pray that God will give me his words to speak when I open my mouth, so that I can make known, loud and clear, the secret truth of the gospel. That, after all, is why I’m a chained-up ambassador! Pray that I may announce it boldly; that’s what I’m duty-bound to do.46
Paul has learned the hard way that the powers will strike back. Every line of this warning says, “This is what I’ve had to do.” And, though he has now come, through sustained meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus, to a fresh sense of trust in “the God who raises the dead,” he knows very well that there are at least two major challenges still ahead. Ultimately, he wants to go to Rome. Later, he will even think of Rome itself as a stopover on the way to Spain. But the two challenges mean that he can hardly be planning those journeys just yet.
First, he has to go to Corinth, without any idea of what sort of a reception will await him there. (Titus has still not returned; surely, Paul thinks, that is a bad sign right there . . . ) Then he hopes and intends to go to Jerusalem, and though he will be taking with him the collection that, he hopes, the largely Gentile churches have raised, that may simply make matters worse. What will the Jewish traditionalists think of this battered wreck of an apostle, coming with his pagan friends and his tainted money to taunt the traditionalists in the Holy City?
Ephesus to Corinth
12
Corinth II
THE TANGLED DIFFICULTIES into which Paul and the Corinthian church had tumbled are matched by the convoluted investigations of those researchers who have tried to figure out exactly what happened next. The second letter to Corinth is not only, as we saw earlier, quite different in style (at least for several chapters) from Paul’s other letters. It is also jerkier in its overall structure, with what appear to be false starts, extra paragraphs injected into the argument, sudden resumptions of earlier themes, and not least a sudden change of mood toward the end, as it goes from the agonized and halting early chapters to a sudden combative, teasing, and upbeat conclusion. As with Galatians, we wish again and again that we could hear the other end of the telephone conversation. Since we cannot, the letter has been a magpie’s nest into which all kinds of bright little theories about Paul, his opponents, his motives, and his theology have been stuffed. Every so often the extraneous collection of oddments needs to be shaken out of the nest, so that the bird can perch there again. Since this book is not the place to engage in the relevant scholarly debates, I propose to take a fresh run at the whole thing and try to maximize the sense the letter makes within the story of Paul as we have been following it.
The starting point must be the mingled sense of shock and relief when Paul was released from prison. (I date this to sometime in middle or late 56.) Imprisonment leaves a lasting scar; we today are sadly familiar with the techniques used to break the spirit of “detainees,” and we should not imagine that they were all invented in the last hundred years. Paul was used by now to bodily suffering, but in Ephesus he had experienced torture at a deeper level. His emotions, his imagination, his innermost heart had been unbearably crushed. The fact that someone comes along one day, flings open the prison door, and tells you to be on your way doesn’t mean you can take a deep breath, give yourself a shake, and emerge smiling into the sunlight. The memories are ever present; the voices, both outside and inside; the nightmares, ready to pounce the minute you close your eyes. The mental scars remain after the physical ones have healed.
He took those scars first, we can be sure, to Colossae. Philemon’s guest room was waiting for him. Perhaps he spent some weeks there, slowly allowing the nightmares to subside. But, to be sure, his main purpose was to head for Corinth, and he was not going to risk doing what he’d done before, taking a ship straight across the Aegean. He did not want to appear suddenly at Cenchreae, the eastern port, and have the church in Corinth startled at his unheralded approach. He wanted to know, well in advance, what sort of reception he might get. Would they, after all, be loyal to him?
This involved meeting up with Titus. After the debacle of the “sorrowful visit,” Paul had written the “painful letter,” no doubt rebuking the church members for the way they had treated him (Was it one or two people in particular? We don’t know.) and urging them toward reconciliation. Had they really suggested—he could hardly believe it, but it still rang in his ears—that if he wanted to come back, he’d better get some new references? Had they really told him that his personal presence and public speaking style were out of line with what they now wanted in a leader in an up-market city like Corinth? And had they really been so annoyed by his switching of his travel plans that they were now saying they couldn’t believe a word he said?
Yes, they had said all those things—or so we infer from the letter. But the letter we call 2 Corinthians seems itself to have been dragged out of Paul in bits and pieces. It stops and starts and changes gears abruptly, and it’s not hard to see why. It isn’t just that Paul is writing it in bits, on the move around northern Greece in late 56 or early 57. It isn’t just that any early exhilaration following his release from prison and his recovery of freedom has worn off or that the painful memories still haunt him every night. It is also that he is genuinely anxious; he still doesn’t know if the “painful letter” has simply caused more trouble, or if the Corinthians have abandoned their hostility toward him and now want to be reconciled. Titus had taken the letter, but where was he?
So Paul traveled north to Troas, nearly two hundred miles, hoping against hope that he would find Titus there. The little group of disciples in the city was eager for him to stay and preach the gospel; he calls it “an open door waiting for me in the Lord.”1 But he couldn’t rest. His spirit was troubled.
If the nightmare from Ephesus was fading, the older one from Corinth was still there. He played it through in his head again and again, the scenes he never expected to see from the people to whom he had sent that wonderful poem about love: angry faces, raised voices, people he considered friends now looking the other way, people with whom he had once prayed and wept now either absenting themselves or telling him to his face that he was out of line, no longer required. He was desperate to know how things now stood. What would he find when he got there? And—even more troubling—what would now become of his great project, the collection for Jerusalem? The northern Greek cities would contribute, he was sure of that; but they were poor. Without a contribution from Corinth, it might look meager, a small gesture that would be scorned because of its size as well as suspect because of its source.
So he pressed on to Macedonia, to Philippi and Thessalonica. “Don’t worry about anything,” he had written to the Philippians not that long before.2 That, he knows, is easier said than done; it was always a goal to be striven for, not a permanent condition of smug spirituality. Now, arriving in Philippi, he was “troubled in every way,” with “battles outside and fears inside.”3
We have a sense in these clipped, tortured remarks that we are privy to a man’s inmost feelings in a way paralleled in few ancient texts. There are occasional flashes in the letters of Cicero or Seneca, perhaps, though they are written with a conscious polish and display. The urbane Marcus Aurelius projects his cool, studied Stoicism. The nearest we come might be Augustine, four hundred years later. The normal modern perception of Paul as a strident, overconfident moralist will not do. Not only is he physically and emotionally battered; he doesn’t mind if the Corinthians know it. That, in a world where leaders were supposed to be socially respectable, exemplary characters, is exactly the point.
