Ephesians 2:14, “For He Himself is our peace…”
Christ as our peace…..He is peace not only between man and man, and man and God, but also—as Colossians 1:20 tells us—between all things in heaven and on earth. In Christ, all things are reconciled, all things are set at peace. In Him all of creation is reconciled to God…..what a thought.
In Ephesians 2, though, Paul’s emphasis is on the peace wrought in Christ between Jew and Gentile, or, perhaps more accurately, between God’s covenant people and “the nations” who were not His people. This is the greatest division that can exist between humans. To be His people or not, to be in His covenant or not. And it is this division that Jesus over comes by fulfilling and so setting aside the dividing ordinances of the OT Law (v.15) and creating a new humanity in Himself. Then, with all peoples made one in Him, He reconciles them to God through His body on the cross, offering Himself up as the sacrifice for their sins, spending Himself under the wrath that all who are in Him deserve. In this way He makes peace. The hostility is killed, the division is overcome, and all people receive access to God as Father in the risen Christ through the indwelling Spirit.
And the logic of the passage would lead us to conclude that if this greatest of human divisions (Jew v. Gentile / His People v. Not His People), if this greatest division has been over come in Christ, how much more every other division? Christ is our Peace…not only between Jew and Gentile, but wherever there is division, wherever there is strife, wherever there is opposition, CHRIST is peace. He is Peace for the modern-day Middle East, He is Peace for the warring tribes of Africa, He is Peace for the drug cartels and gangs in South America, He is Peace for the fractured culture of Europe, He is Peace in this polarized American moment, He is Peace in the ethnically charged tensions between black and white, in the social charged tensions between rich and poor…..He Himself is the harmony to every dissonance. Whether recognized or not, wherever we see strife, we see a wound to which the crucified and risen Jesus is the only healing balm.
There can be no peace apart from Christ who is peace. So, what of those who are not in Christ? What of those who are still outside of Him, still opposed to God and others? And what of the divisions within Christ? How can it be? How can it be that those who claim to be in Christ would be so terribly divided? How could the horrors of the pre and post reformational in-martyring of the Church possibly happen? What do we make of these things, how do we deal with these things? My answer would be that those who are in Christ must live as Christ….must live out of an abiding in and imaging of the Father’s Name as it is manifest in Christ (John 17:11)—this will be our unity. Love one another, that is how we are to pursue the unity that has been forged in Christ’s blood and sealed by the Spirit. It may not seem to work. It may get some crucified. But we have been given no other “strategy” than this—to abide in the One who is our Peace and to live as the One who is our Peace.
