Ephesians 2:1-10
The Protestant Reformation is associated with certain New Testament texts. Among them are the books of Galatians, as a whole, and Romans, especially the opening verses of its first chapter. However, the first paragraph of Ephesians may be the clearest of Protestant texts. Protestantism is especially convinced that (1) all that in us might have been Godly has been annihilated by sin, (2) sin dominates our lives, and leads us to adhere blindly to the ways of a Godless world, (3) humans are powerless to do anything about it, (4) we are oppressed by fear and other violent reactions in the face of the dangers of life, (5) God’s abundant mercy and love are showered upon all, particularly those who have turned from God and thus do damage to themselves, (6) deliverance is granted to us by a pure gift, sola gratia, (7) Jesus lives and dies in solidarity with us,(8) we may receive that solidarity joyfully by faith, by trust, by entering into God’s entry into Godlessness, especially on the cross, (9) “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast,” and (10) a word emerges from these deeds, the word that declares the wonder and glory of God’s faithfulness to God’s faithless creatures, “the immeasurable riches of [God’s] grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”
The good news in these verses has drawn desperate people out of self-destructive patterns of life, again and again. Protestants are perhaps quite right that all of life is to be understood and performed in its light. That there is hope for the hopeless is news that we’d do well never to let grow old, that we’d do well never to grow tired of hearing with surprise and delight. And yet, Wesley and Bonhoeffer are surely also right that if we do not think this good news with nuance and complexity, it may be easily coopted by British genocidal imperialism or German genocidal nationalism. That is, this passage is not an ode to “cheap grace.” If its first nine verses don’t make that abundantly clear, its tenth verse certainly does: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
Of course, the phrase “good works” is dangerous, too. This paragraph had already declared unambiguously that good works will “save” no one. Insofar as they are performed in self-protective reaction to the dangers of life, to protect us from harm—as a fearfully growling, lunging, and biting dog might, or one cowering in trembling submission—we are “children of wrath,” children controlled by their own violent emotions. The good works of Ephesians are works that step into the arena knowing that we don’t have to survive.
And what kind of gracious God is praised in this paragraph?
The answer to this question is, as is true of every question about the gospel, a question about the God who raises the mutilated body of Jesus from death and damnation. The question concerns the Holy God of Israel, the God who led the Hebrew Children from Egyptian bondage to the Promised Land, by a Pillar of Cloud by day and a Pillar of Fire by night. This is the God whose very holiness—a holiness that all of Israel had been taught could never come into contact with the unclean, particularly a dead and utterly defiled interred body—came graciously to inhabit the body of the crucified Jesus as it lay lifeless on its borrowed slab. This is the God who bursts through expectations and shockingly loves (“dwells with”) those whom noble persons of integrity would never countenance. That is, this is the God who loves the body of Jesus, dis-integrated as it is, and through its opened flesh there opens a way even for those “dead through [their] trespasses and sins.”
That “salvation” here is the resurrection of the body of Jesus has massive implications for those who find themselves seized by the gospel and constitutes the reason that this paragraph in Ephesians ends with a call to “good works.”
We tend to think of bodies as objects that are available for observation or manipulation, for use or abuse. They are there and we are here. However, in a world lived close to the ground and compelled day to day by the challenges of life to work alongside and with others, a body (mine or yours or theirs) is a system of life, a configuration of expending breath and food and drink, of tasks to be done and from which to be nourished.
A body is a movement of work. For you or me or us or them, to live is to work. When James says that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20), he is saying that only the dead do not work. Faith is a performance granted by God’s good pleasure, a performance of a body that, as a body, can only perform, can only work. To be alive is to work. The only question is, what kind of work are you going to do?
The gospel redefines perhaps the most primal of ideas for people like us who are captivated by “value”—that is, as it redefines everything, it redefines “goodness.” Jesus appalls the honored champions of “value” during his time, the emissaries of Jerusalem’s temple and Rome’s empire. Jesus, unimpressed by “honor,” utterly rejects the value of Rome and ruptures the value of Jerusalem. Rome finds the gospel insane and Jerusalem finds it grossly excessive, overwhelming. What is taken as “good” in the gospel is not something generic, something discernible by any perceptive and intelligent researcher, but what God is disclosed in Christ as being about, what God is doing in the world, what comes by God’s good pleasure, namely, the “New Jerusalem.” We are bodies, we have been laid hold of by God’s mercy, love, and grace, we have been resurrected with Jesus (however, fragmentarily), and thus we are set to work. The work we are to do is the work of the New Jerusalem, the work of mercy, love, and grace, the mercy of spacious glory, of embrace and joy and hope, of light and beauty, of food and drink, of good air and good friends, of rich soil, flowing streams, and abundant harvests, and, so, of an extraordinarily good work.
And since bodily work (to put it redundantly) is never private, never truly lonely, it is the work of workers (in the plural), the work given in the expenditure of the energy of good food and good drink, the work not for profit, but as a gift, a gift toward the New Jerusalem and for the workers who do and have done and will do the good work of this grace, of God’s good pleasure and thus of ours. The word for this work is “liturgy,” a term best illustrated not by objects and scripts, prominently displayed on a Sunday morning, but by the deeds done on ordinary work days among those who live under the shadow of hopelessness, even if doing work among them in particular endangers the quality or longevity of the life of the worker. Even the bread and the wine of the eucharist are to be understood within the drumbeat of the liturgy that is performed day in and day out, say, on a Thursday afternoon or a Saturday night. The bread and the wine, the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus, are food for the workday.
The word “liturgy” was used in the Ancient Mediterranean world for a kind of service a citizen was expected to provide to and for the nation, without pay, simply as a gift of gratitude for all the nation provided them. Life in the church, where its nation, the New Jerusalem, is partially and fragmentarily disclosed from time to time, is also to be the work of gratitude, gratitude to the God who raised the poor body of Jesus from the tomb, the gratitude that looks to the redemption of our bodily stories, our histories, that looks for strong legs and open space across which to run, for sweet air and water. The task in doing this strange liturgical work is to let go of all that we are tempted to believe our works might accomplish. There is to be no boasting here. As John Wesley writes in his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, good works are to be released to God as soon as they are performed, in order “to unite ourselves to God, in whom the soul expands itself in prayer, with all the graces we have received, and the good works we have done, to draw from him new strength against the bad effects which these very works may produce in us, if we do not make use of the antidotes which God has ordained against these poisons. The true means to be filled anew with the riches of grace is thus to strip ourselves of it; and without this it is extremely difficult not to grow faint in the practice of good works” (25.Q38.8).