Ephesians

Believers Church Bible Commentary

Thomas Yoder Neufeld

• Editorial: Herald Press
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780836197969
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Commentaire biblique

Ephesians presents readers with a volatile mix of assurance, exhilarating worship, and forceful exhortation—a bracing challenge to today's church. The letter convinces Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld that the grace-gift of faithfulness leads to worship. Power, peace, and new creation are gifts of grace equipping the church to participate in God's reconciling embrace.

This commentary guides readers to a life-changing encounter with Ephesians, probing interpretations, refreshing Christian teaching, and calling everyone to "walk" accordingly, with a song in heart and throat.

Ephesians 1:1-2

Address and Opening Greeting

PREVIEW

Ephesians opens like any other ancient letter: “Sender to Addressee, Greetings!” But, as is typical of Pauline letters, the opening becomes a vehicle for making key assertions about the sender and the addressees. The sender is a messenger of Jesus Christ, commissioned by God. He addresses a community of faithful saints (holy ones). As a greeting, the writer invokes upon them the grace and peace of God the Father and the Lord Jesus.

These features are typical of letters bearing Paul’s name. The only real surprise is the difficulty in the first sentence regarding the place name Ephesus.

OUTLINE

Greeting, 1:1-2

Addressees, 1:1

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Greeting 1:1-2

Sender and Addressees

From the beginning of his writing career, Paul adapted the typical letter form of his day and culture, including the opening, to suit his apostolic purposes [Pauline Letter Structure]. He intended his letters to be personal but also official communication at the behest of Christ, indeed of God. Ephesians 1:1 is typically Pauline. The author identifies himself as Paul, an apostle (messenger) of Christ Jesus, a commission he received by the will of God. What follows should therefore be read as carrying the authority of an important messenger—Paul, of the one who sent him—Christ Jesus, and finally of the one whose will it is that he carry that authority—God. So whether it is directly Paul or one of his followers who carries the message we know as the letter to the Ephesians (see Introduction and Essays) [Authorship] [Pseudepigraphy], the letter is to be given the full measure of respect accorded the ultimate sender, God.

Pauline letter openings often include terms or concepts that play an important role in the following letter. So also here. As in Ephesians generally, stock Pauline emphases are treated like windows through which the wondrous mystery of God’s grace can be glimpsed.

This letter is addressed to the holy and faithful ones (TRYN). Holy ones is usually rendered saints. The term holy ones has taken on a range of meanings over biblical times. Sometimes it refers to members of the heavenly court (for possible allusion to heavenly beings, see 1:18, notes; cf. Deut. 33:2; Ps. 89:5-7; Dan. 7:21), at other times more generally to the people of God. Paul loves to call members of his congregations “holy ones.” For Paul the Jew, this was an act of great generosity, given that his audience was predominantly, though not exclusively, Gentile.

After all, the term holy ones carries with it connotations of special status, but also of separation and difference: “You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine” (Lev. 20:26; cf. Deut. 7:6; 14:2). In chapters 2 and 3, the writer celebrates the Gentiles’ inclusion into the realm of holiness, the inclusion of those who once defined the limits of holiness by being outside its sphere. Those who were once outside the wall now make up the walls of the new holy of holies, as it were (2:19-22).

Faithful (pistos) is a common but loaded term in Pauline usage. The Greek pistos can mean faith-full as in “believing” (e.g., Acts 10:45; 2 Cor. 6:15; Gal. 3:9; the noun pistis is most often translated “faith”). More frequently it means faithful as in “trustworthy” and “obedient” (e.g., 6:21; cf. Matt. 25:21; 1 Cor. 4:2; 2 Cor. 1:18; 3 John 1:5). So also the Greek noun pistis can mean “faithfulness” (as in, e.g., Rom. 3:3, 22; Gal. 2:16; 1 Tim. 6:11; cf. James 2:1426). Given the letter’s emphasis on good works in 2:10 (expanded upon in chaps. 4-6), we should read the phrase here not primarily as “believing in Christ” (as do Best, 1998:95; Lincoln: 6), as true as that is, but as acting faithfully in and through Christ.

Being faithful in Christ Jesus captures the heart of the vision of this letter. In Christ appears in one form or another more than twenty times in Ephesians (regarding in Christ, see 1:3-14, notes). Ephesians as a whole might well be seen as a wisdom treatise on the implications of being in Christ. This distinctive Pauline idiom expresses the conviction that the life of believers takes place on the basis of what God has done through Christ, that their actions are thus shaped and empowered by that identification, and that their good works are participation in what God is continuing to do through Christ to bring the world to wholeness [“In” (essay)].

Greeting

In verse 2, instead of the conventional “Greetings!” (chairein), the letter pronounces a blessing on the readers: Grace and Peace! [Pauline Letter Structure]. All of Paul’s letters open with this blessing, a majority of them with identical wording. Recognizing it as a stock Pauline greeting does not at all diminish its significance (Mauser: 106-9). Grace and peace reemerge in the closing blessing as well (6:23-24), and these two blessings frame this letter’s profound explorations of grace (e.g., 1:6; 2:8; 3:8; 4:7) and peace (e.g., 2:14-17; 4:3; 6:15).

The source of the blessing is God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This familiar vocabulary again carries great freight. In Ephesians, the term Father comes to signify God’s relation to creation, care, nurture, salvation, and the bestowal of identity (e.g., 1:3; 2:13; 3:14; 4:6; 5:20).

The divine parent bestows all this on creation and its inhabitants through the Lord Jesus Christ. Markus Barth translates Christ Jesus in 1:1 and elsewhere in Ephesians as the Messiah Jesus, drawing attention to the role of Jesus as the agent of God’s reconciliation (Barth, 1974:65). Such a translation also correctly emphasizes that the appellation Messiah or Christ is fundamentally Jewish. It draws attention to the distinction between God as Father, as divine parent, and Jesus as God’s Son, as God’s Christ.

Even so, the remarkable degree of identification between God and Messiah in the minds of Paul and his students is indicated in the use of the term Lord to refer to the Messiah. Lord, the preferred Jewish way of referring to God, is here as elsewhere in the Pauline writings applied to Jesus in immediate proximity to God (in addition to opening and closing blessings/greetings, see 1:3, 17). In short, what is celebrated in the great christological hymns in Philippians 2:6-11 and Colossians 1:15-20 has taken root in the greetings and blessings of early Pauline communities.

Lord is an expression of respect and worship. To call Christ Lord also acknowledges fealty (intense fidelity) to him. In addition, to identify Christ as the source of grace and peace means pledging oneself to respond appropriately to that gift, to be faithful to and through that Lord.

Addressees 1:1

Ephesians 1:1 presents us with some difficulties. First, the usually most reliable manuscripts (codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, as well as Papyrus 46, the earliest known collection of Paul’s letters) do not contain a place name at all. Did the letter originally not have a specific address? That would fit the popular hypothesis that this was not a letter to a specific place but an encyclical, a circular letter intended from the outset to present Pauline teaching to a wider circle of churches (Introduction).

The grammar, however, appears to demand a place name. In Paul’s letters, the words who are (tois ousin) are always followed by an address: “… in [place name]” (e.g., Rom. 1:7; 2 Cor. 1:1; Phil. 1:1). Could it originally have been in Ephesus, as the majority of manuscripts read? The problem is that in this letter it appears that Paul’s readers did not know him well (3:1-7; cf. 1:15). That hardly fits Ephesus, where he had spent three years (Acts 20:31; cf. 19:1-22). Of course, if the letter was written some decades after Paul’s death, then it is possible that the Ephesians needed a reminder of their great apostle and his teaching.

Ephesus as address makes most sense, then, if the letter was written a considerable time after Paul’s death. Even so, the place name may have been suggested by Paul’s long association with Ephesus, or perhaps because Tychicus, the bearer of this letter, was identified with Ephesus (6:21-22; 2 Tim. 4:12; Perkins: 34).

An alternative suggestion, made already by Bishop Usher in 1654, is that the place name was left blank and that addresses were inserted as required, perhaps by Tychicus. In the mid-second century, for example, Marcion seems to have known the letter as addressed to Laodicea. A major difficulty with this otherwise attractive theory is that we have no other examples that encyclicals of the time were handled in such a way.

Even if we grant such a hypothesis, a puzzle remains regarding the verbal sequence who are and (see Schematic Trans.). One solution has been to translate and as meaning also (RSV: to the saints who are also faithful) But are not saints already faithful by virtue of being holy? Some translators simply do not bother with the conjunction (e.g., NIV: to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus).

Andrew Lincoln proposes that there was originally not one place name but two, in which case the conjunction and (kai) would combine two place names (Lincoln: 1-4, in some dependency on van Roon: 72-85). Taking into account the heavy dependency of Ephesians on Colossians, he suggests that Ephesians might have been sent originally to Laodicea and Hierapolis. (Colossians 4:13 says Epaphras worked in both places.) The original text of 1:1 would then have read, To the holy ones who are [in Hierapolis] and [in Laodicea], faithful in Christ Jesus. The place names would later have been deleted when apostolic letters were receiving wide circulation. (Some manuscripts delete “Rome” from Romans 1:7, 15, for example, suggesting that the same thing might have happened to that most general of Paul’s undisputed letters.)

This is only one attempt among many to explain the peculiarities of the grammar and textual history of 1:1 (for critique of proposals from Lincoln and others, see Best, 1998:99-100; 1997:1-24). However we explain the data, they point to the fact that this letter was viewed from the beginning as having relevance well beyond any specific group of readers. Ephesians is a letter for the church.

Ephesians 1:3-14

Opening Worship: “Ever Blessing, Ever Bless’d”

PREVIEW

Imagine this letter being read again and again in the context of gathered worship. No sooner has the author introduced himself than the audience is swept up in an act of grateful worship. With the exception of the blessing which opens 2 Corinthians (1:3-7), Paul’s letters typically begin with thanksgiving [Pauline Letter Structure]. Ephesians, however, contains both. It begins with an extended blessing, an act of corporate worship. A thanksgiving follows immediately in verse 15. This alone should alert us to the weight that the author gives to this opening blessing or eulogy, as it is sometimes called. God is blessed for blessing us, or as the hymn states so succinctly, “Thou art … ever blessing, ever bless’d” (Henry van Dyke, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” HWB, 71).

The blessing is lengthy and comprehensive. God is blessed for having blessed the chosen through Jesus Christ. Chosen before creation, the elect have been granted redemption, forgiveness of sin, salvation, and an inheritance guaranteed by the Spirit of God. The purpose of their election is to live for the praise of God’s glory. But the elect are only one part of God’s comprehensive plan to gather up all things in the cosmos in and through Christ. The scope of God’s saving passion reaches to the edges of space and time, and beyond. Verse 10 is without doubt the key to understanding the cosmic vision shaping this letter.

These verses are not easy to read in the original Greek. Lengthy cumbersome phrases, weighed down with chains of synonyms and nouns qualified by overloaded adjectives, are fused into one long sentence that carries the immense freight of most of the great themes of this letter. Ironically, one gets the distinct impression that the author is more than aware that language, even when pushed to its limits, is inadequate to do more than weakly express the wonder of God’s love and care for the cosmos and its inhabitants. Understatement would be out of character for such a euphoric blessing.

Translators as well as the editors of the Greek text have broken the difficult sentence up into several shorter sentences so that we will not get lost in the maze. The NRSV, for example, renders the section in six sentences, the NIV in eight. A price is paid for this ease of reading, however. We lose the experience of reading or hearing the passage as one long, unbroken, deliberately exhausting recitation of how God has blessed us. The sentence breaks rob us of the experience of running out of breath as we bless God.

An outline of this section should reflect the grammatical character of this remarkable sentence. Three main participles—having blessed (or who has blessed, 1:3), having predestined (1:5), having made known (1:9)—are the subheadings under which God’s many blessings are rehearsed. With recurring phrases referring to God’s pleasure, attention is drawn to God’s preeminence as first and last actor (1:5, 9, 11). Further, the frequent equivalent phrases in Christ, in him, and in whom help shape the passage by indicating that Christ is the one through whom God acts....