Ressuscités Ensemble — Mais Dieu

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Ignore the Chapter Break

Le has brought a passage that runs straight across the end of chapter 1 into chapter 2, and that is exactly how it should be read.

The chapter divisions in our Bibles were added more than a thousand years after Paul wrote. He did not put one here, and this is one of the places where it does real damage.

Because chapter 1 ends by describing what God's power did to Christ — and chapter 2 says the same three things happened to us.

Read as one paragraph, the argument is unmistakable. Read as two chapters, most people miss it entirely.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Dead, Not Ill

Paul's diagnosis is blunt and it is deliberately chosen. Not weak. Not sick. Not heading in the wrong direction. Dead.

Which rules out an entire category of remedies. A sick man can be treated, a lost man can be given directions, a weak man can be trained. Nothing at all can be asked of a dead one.

And note that Paul does not exempt himself. He begins with you — the Gentile readers — and then in verse 3 turns and says all of us also. The apostle, the Pharisee, the man who had kept the law from his youth, puts himself in the same sentence.

This is the honest floor of the passage, and everything after it depends on the floor being that low. Grace looks like a courtesy to people who were merely struggling. It looks like resurrection to people who were dead.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Two Words That Turn the Page

Then verse 4 begins, and everything changes on two words. But God. Mais Dieu.

Three verses of diagnosis — dead, following, gratifying, deserving — and the whole weight of it is reversed by a conjunction and a noun.

Nothing in verses 1 to 3 improves. No one repents in them. The situation does not develop. What happens is that a new subject enters the sentence.

And notice the order of what follows, because Paul puts the motive before the action. Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy... Before we are told what He did, we are told why. The love came first, and it was directed at people described one verse earlier as deserving wrath.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Three Verbs, All Beginning "Together"

Here is the structural heart of the passage, and the French shows it where the English cannot.

Paul uses three verbs in verses 5 and 6, and he has built all three as compounds beginning with syn- — the Greek prefix meaning together with.

Made alive together with. Raised together with. Seated together with.

The Segond keeps it visible: il nous a ressuscités ENSEMBLE, et nous a fait asseoir ENSEMBLE dans les lieux célestes.

Now look back one paragraph, at what Paul said God did to Christ. He raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.

Raised. Seated. In the heavenly realms. The same two verbs, the same location, in the same order — first of Christ, then of us.

Which is why the chapter break is such a loss. Paul spent chapter 1 asking that they might know the greatness of God's power, and pointed at the resurrection as the measure of it. Then he says: and that same power was applied to you. Not power like it. The same act, extended.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — He Could Not Wait Until Verse 8

There is a small human detail in verse 5 that is easy to miss. In the middle of a long sentence, Paul breaks off and inserts a parenthesis: it is by grace you have been saved.

He is going to say it properly three verses later, in verse 8, where it belongs in the argument. He says it here anyway.

It is an interruption of his own grammar. The Segond keeps it in brackets, as an aside: (c'est par grâce que vous êtes sauvés).

Which is the same man whose grammar ran out of breath in chapter 1, and for the same reason. He cannot get to the end of a sentence about grace without stopping to say the word.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Why He Did It

Verse 7 gives the purpose, and it is not the one most people would guess. In order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace.

The stated reason is a demonstration. God saved us in order to have something to show.

And what is displayed is not us. It is the riches of His grace, expressed in his kindness to us. We are not the exhibit. We are the evidence.

Which is the same shape as the chorus Le read two days ago, three times over: to the praise of His glory. Every stanza full of things done to us, and every stanza ending by pointing away from us.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — What "This" Refers To

Verse 8 contains a question people have debated for centuries, and it is worth stating honestly rather than pretending it is settled.

And this is not from yourselves. What is this? Grace? Faith? The whole arrangement?

There is a grammatical clue. In Greek, this is neuter — while both grace and faith are feminine nouns. If Paul had meant faith specifically, the word would ordinarily have matched it.

So most readers take this to point at the whole transaction — saved, by grace, through faith, all of it. Not one component singled out as the gift, but the entire thing.

Which is the safer reading and also the larger one. It leaves nothing at all on our side of the ledger to be proud of — afin que personne ne se glorifie.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Prepared in Advance

Le read verse 10 on the eleventh of August, and the note that morning was about poiēma — the word behind handiwork, used twice in the New Testament: once of the universe, once of us. Son ouvrage.

Today the second half of the verse is the one that matters, because of what she is doing this week.

Good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Que Dieu a préparées d'avance, afin que nous les pratiquions.

The works are not commissioned. They are prepared — and prepared before we arrive. The verb pictures something laid out and waiting, like a road already made.

And Le said this herself two days ago, in her own words and about her own situation. All we do is show up.

That is verse 10 exactly. Not passivity — the works must still be walked in, and walking is work. But nothing has to be invented, and nothing has to be forced into existence. The road was made first, and then the people were created to walk on it.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Where This Was Read

The feed places the Benimar at Beauvoir, on the road to Mont-Saint-Michel — within sight of an abbey built on a rock in a tidal bay, begun over a thousand years ago and added to for centuries.

Which makes an odd and useful backdrop for verse 9. Not by works, so that no one can boast.

Generations of people built that place stone by stone, and it is genuinely magnificent, and Paul's sentence still stands over it. The most impressive thing human beings can construct is not on the same page as what is being described here.

Verse 6 says the seating has already happened, and it is not on a rock in Normandy. Nous a fait asseoir ensemble dans les lieux célestes. Past tense, done, and nobody laid a stone for it.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Watch the Pronouns Move

Le has caught the hinge of the paragraph, and Paul built it so that nobody could stand outside it.

Verses 1 and 2 are you — the Gentile readers, the outsiders, the people a Pharisee would have expected to be describing. Then verse 3 turns: all of us also. Nous tous aussi.

And it is worth asking who the us is. A man circumcised the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee — and by his own account blameless as to the righteousness of the law. If anyone in the New Testament had a case for an exemption clause, it was the writer of this sentence.

He writes himself into the indictment instead.

Which is exactly why but God works one verse later. The rescue has to cover the whole room, because the whole room was in the same condition. A remedy that only reached the obviously lost would have left the respectable exactly where they were.

And Le has said this from the beginning of these mornings, without needing Ephesians to tell her. Never a holy woman — only a forgiven one. Which is the only membership card the team issues, and it has the diagnosis printed on it rather than any merit.