The scriptures referred to are Ephesians 1:3-14 and John 1:1-18.
The world is so large and complex that it is impossible for any one human being to comprehend it all. So early peoples attributed control of each aspect of nature to a different deity. If you wanted good weather you prayed to one god. If you wanted your crops or your spouse to be fertile you prayed to a specific goddess. If you wanted healing you went to the shrine of a particular god who had that power.
In addition every city and nation had its own god. When nations fought, it reflected a cosmic battle between the gods. If it sounds chaotic, it was. There might be a chief god but he couldn't always control his family of gods. And he usually wasn't the creator god or goddess. In fact, the chief god might have fought the creator and the earth may have been made out of his or her body. Basically the chief god got to his position the way a human king might have: by overthrowing or murdering his rival. Often this was the chief god's father or mother. That's how polytheism worked. The people of earth were violent and divided and they projected that onto the powers that controlled the earth.
The God revealed in the Bible is different. He both created everything and is in charge of everything. The disunity of peoples is not attributed to various competing gods but to the sinfulness and short-sighted attitudes of humans who compete with one another over God's gifts instead of cooperating for the good of all.
So what does God do to restore things to what they should be? Because he gave us the ability to choose, he must use persuasion. He chooses to work through a man and his descendants. As he says to Abraham, “In you will all the families of the earth be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3) Seeing how a people committed to a covenant with God lives that out is supposed to convince the world to come around to the one true God.
Of course, the repeated failures of the people of Israel to honor their part of the covenant and demonstrate righteousness, justice and compassion for the poor and oppressed is a constant theme throughout much of the Old Testament. So God resolves to make a new covenant, one where, as he says in Jeremiah, “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds. I will be their God and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33) This is the covenant God makes through his son, Jesus Christ. That sets up the main theme of Paul's letter to the Ephesians.
One of my favorite YouTube channels is Disciple Dojo, in which Bible scholar James Michael Smith does deep dives on scripture and theology. He brings in other Bible scholars, reviews books and study Bibles, and answers viewers' questions. When he looks at a particular book of the Bible or passage, he goes into the original Greek or Hebrew behind the text. But you don't have to be an expert yourself to follow what he says. This last year, in discussing the letter to the Ephesians, he pointed out something I had never noticed before, namely, how often the phrase “in Christ” pops up in this letter. In the 11 verses of our passage alone, the phrase “in Christ” or “in him” occurs 8 times. It occurs another 11 times in the next few chapters.
What does the phrase “in Christ” mean? This varies a bit depending on the context but generally it means “in our union with Christ.” The theme of Ephesians is that the one God wants to bring all peoples into one community united by their trust in Jesus. That has been God's plan all along.
And as he promised, being united in Christ brings blessings. God chose us in love to be holy and blameless before him, to be adopted as his children, to be redeemed through his blood and have our sins forgiven, to know his plan to gather up everything in Christ, to obtain an inheritance, and to be marked with the Holy Spirit. He does all of this out of the riches of his grace, God's undeserved, unreserved goodness toward us.
Paul calls God's plan a mystery. Paul is probably playing off of the idea of the mystery religions that were popular in the Roman empire. Like various cults we have today, these mystery religions appealed to people's desires to have secret knowledge about the world that others didn't. They had initiation rituals and some had levels through which initiates had to pass to rise within the religion. Basically it comes from the idea that knowledge is power and this secret knowledge, kept from the duller, ordinary people, makes the members of the mystery cult superior to the uninitiated.
But Paul is essentially saying that the “mystery” revealed by God is in fact an open secret: the gospel of salvation. Not only do Christians not have to keep this good news a secret, they are to proclaim it to the world. Because ultimately God wants to redeem the world and restore it to what he intended it to be. As it says in 2 Peter, God “does not wish for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) The gospel is not exclusionary; it is not for the elite or for people who are smarter or better than others. All people are equal before God. (Proverbs 22:2; Romans 2:11; Acts 10:34) We all have been created in God's image. (Genesis 1:27) Yet we have decided we know better than God and so we fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 2:12; 3:23) And Jesus died to redeem all of us, whether we know it or acknowledge it. (1 John 2:2; 2 Corinthians 5:15)
After coming to Jesus, no one is superior to others. In another letter Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female—for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) The oneness Paul is talking about is unity, not uniformity. Elsewhere he compares us to parts of one body, all with different features and functions yet none of us is nonessential. (1 Corinthians 12:12-27)
And that is what we are talking about in verse 10 of today's passage. God's plan to gather up all things in heaven and on earth in Christ does not mean we are all mashed together like a ball of clay or that we lose our individuality like a drop of water when it falls into the ocean. Instead we find our special place in God's universe. We use the unique gifts he has given to each of us to serve him, each other and the whole of creation with love.
Serving with love is the key part because God is love. (1 John 4:8) God sent his Son to us out of love. (John 3:16) But this doesn't mean Jesus was merely an instrument. Instead what we see in him is the whole goal of creation. He is the organizing principle. That is what is meant in our passage from John's gospel in which he is called the Word.
Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish contemporary of Jesus who tried to reconcile Greek philosophy with Jewish theology. He seized upon the idea that the divine principle that brings all things into existence was called the Logos by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And in Genesis God brings all of creation into existence by his word. “God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light!” (Genesis 1:3) And God calls into existence all the other aspects of the universe by speaking. Now the Greek term for “word, speech and reason” is logos. Philo called this Logos, which was common to both Jewish and Greek thought, “the first-born of God.” The Logos was the design for creation, which also pervades the world and supports it. The Logos was the “high priest” who expiated sins and is the mediator and advocate for humanity before God. The Logos interprets and “announces God's designs to humankind, acting in this respect as prophet and priest.” The Logos illuminates the human soul, “nourishing it with spiritual food, like the manna...” (Thanks to Wikipedia as the source of this paragraph.)
Philo's Logos is just an philosophical idea for tying together the great thoughts of the Greeks and the Jews. However, the gospel of John says that the Logos is not merely an abstract notion. Yes, the Logos or Word of God was in the beginning and all things were created through him. Yes, the Logos is the light that illuminates all people. But “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.” (v.14)
How does the Logos or Word reveal God's glory? If a person is honest, his word reveals who and what he is. God's Word is the expression of who and what God is. In Jesus we have the fullest revelation of God. God, as we said, is love. To be in love with someone is to be in harmony with them. We were created in the image of the God who is love. When we choose to love him back, we come into harmony with him. When we come in harmony with God, we come into harmony with the other people created in his image and redeemed by his Son. And we come into harmony with the rest of his creation.
That's God's plan. We keep trying to replace his plan with our own plans. We keep trying to replace his love with money or technology or power over others. It's like trying to replace a good diet with junk food. In 2012 a British teen was hospitalized for breathing problems, anemia, vitamin deficiencies, and malnutrition. And the cause was that she had been eating nothing but chicken nuggets, fries, chips and toast for 15 years. We may not be as bad as this teen but our society does eat a lot more junk food these days. The problem is it doesn't do the job properly and it degrades the health of the people who are trying to survive on it. The same is true of all the things we try to nourish and fuel our lives with other than the love of God.
Colossians is another letter that takes a cosmic view of Christ. In it we read “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for all things in heaven and on earth were created by him—all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers—all things were created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and all things are held together in him. He is the head of the body, the church, as well as the beginning, the firstborn from among the dead, so that he himself may become first in all things. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son and through him to reconcile all things to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross—through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven.” (Colossians 1:15-20)
In both of these letters the point is not merely to reveal interesting theological ideas. Paul goes on to say, “And you were at one time strangers and enemies in your minds as expressed through your evil deeds, but now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death to present you holy, without blemish, and blameless before him...” (Colossians 1:21-22) In Ephesians we see the same theme of being reconciled to God and to one another. To a church made up of Jews and Gentiles, Paul says, “For he is our peace, the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the middle wall of partition, the hostility, when he nullified in his flesh the law of commandments in decrees. He did this to create in himself one new man out of two, thus making peace and to reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by which the hostility has been killed.” (Ephesians 2:14-16)
In his prayer before his arrest, Jesus prayed for the church, saying “Holy Father, keep them safe in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one....I am not praying only on their behalf, but also on the behalf of those who believe in me through their testimony, that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you....” (John 17:11, 20-21) Just earlier that evening he said, “I give you a new commandment—to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples—if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)
There aren't a bunch of gods but one God, who is love. And there aren't a bunch of human species but one human race. But how are people to know that if we don't act that way? How are people to know the good news of God's love revealed in Jesus Christ if those who say they are his followers don't show that love? Jesus didn't say we had to agree on absolutely everything. We just need to agree on the essentials of who he is, what he has done for us, what he is doing in us and how we should respond. As for that response, he said we have to love one another the way he loved us—self-sacrificially. He took up his cross for us and we need to take up our crosses daily for him. He came to reconcile us with God and with each other. The church needs to demonstrate that unity, that coming together of people of every tribe, nation and language into one body, the body of Christ on earth, carrying on his mission until the day when God's plan to bring everything back together will be fully realized and “Christ is all in all.” (Colossians 3:11)
