Le Mur de Séparation — Renversé

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Wall Was Real

Most readers take the middle wall of separation as a figure of speech. Paul's first readers would have seen the actual wall.

In the temple at Jerusalem there was a low stone barrier separating the outer Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts where only Jews could go. Set into it at intervals were inscriptions, in Greek and in Latin, warning that any foreigner who passed beyond it would have himself to blame for the death that followed.

This is not a reconstruction from literary sources. Two of those stones have been dug up — one found in the eighteen-seventies, one fragment sixty years later. The warning can be read today, in a museum case.

So when Paul writes that the middle wall has been broken down, he is naming a specific piece of masonry that was still standing while he wrote. Le mur de séparation.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — And He Was in Prison Because of It

Now the part that makes this letter almost unbearable in the best way.

Paul is writing from prison, and the reason he is in prison is that wall.

Luke records the arrest. A crowd seized him in the temple, shouting: this is the man who teaches everywhere against our people and the law and this place, and furthermore he has brought Greeks into the temple and defiled this holy place.

And Luke adds the reason for the accusation. For they had previously seen Trophimus the Ephesian with him in the city, and supposed that Paul had brought him into the temple.

Trophimus was from Ephesus. The charge that put Paul in chains was that he had taken an Ephesian past that barrier.

And this letter is addressed to Ephesus.

So a prisoner writes to the home town of the man he was accused of smuggling past the wall, and tells them: the wall is down. He never even points out what it cost him to say so.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — He Is Our Peace

The Greek puts a weight on the pronoun that English can only manage by repeating it. He Himself is our peace. Car il est notre paix.

Not He makes peace. Not He negotiated a settlement. He is it.

Which means the peace is not a treaty that could be broken by either party. A treaty holds as long as both sides keep it. A person holds as long as He lives.

And Paul then says how it was done: having abolished in His flesh the enmity. The hostility was not talked out or waived. It was killed — put to death — and the place where that happened was a body on a cross.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — One New Man, Not One Side Winning

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say the Gentiles were brought over to the Jewish side, or that the Jews gave up their heritage.

He says God made one new man out of the two. Un seul homme nouveau. The word is kainos — new in kind, not merely recent.

Which is a third thing. Not a merger in which the stronger party absorbs the weaker, and not a compromise where each gives up half. Something that did not exist before was created out of both.

And that is the only kind of peace that lasts between groups who have hated each other, because neither of them has to lose.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Access

Verse 18 is one of the quiet summits of the letter. Through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.

The word for access — prosagōgē — is a court word. It means the right of approach: being brought into the presence of a king by someone entitled to introduce you. Nobody walks into a throne room. Somebody takes you in.

And look at how crowded the verse is. Through Him — the Son. By one Spirit — the Spirit. To the Father — the Father. All three, in a single short sentence, doing one thing between them: getting us in.

Which is the exact reversal of the wall. The wall existed to keep certain people out of a courtyard. This sentence describes people being escorted all the way to the throne — and the two groups the wall divided go in together.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Four Legal Words, Climbing

Verse 19 uses four precise terms for a person's standing in a city, and they climb.

Not xenoi — strangers, outsiders with no standing at all.
Not paroikoi — gens du dehors, resident foreigners: people who lived there legally, paid their taxes, and had no citizenship.
But sympolitai — fellow citizens.
And oikeioi — gens de la maison, members of the household. Family.

Stranger, resident alien, citizen, family. Paul walks up all four steps in a single sentence.

And the second of those words is not abstract for this household. Paroikos is the precise legal status Le and Roger are about to hold in France — lawfully present, on the register, and not citizens. It is a real category with real paperwork.

Which is what makes the verse land where it does. In the country they are moving to, they will be paroikoi for some time yet. In the one that matters, they were promoted past that on the day they believed — concitoyens des saints, gens de la maison de Dieu.

Le read that half-verse on the eighteenth of August, on the road, and the sentence she left in this journal afterwards was: I have no address — but I have a citizenship, a place I belong.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Building That Grows

The last three verses mix two pictures on purpose, and the mixture is the point.

The whole building, being fitted together, GROWS into a holy temple. Tout l'édifice, bien coordonné, s'élève.

Fitted together is a mason's word — stones cut and dressed so that each one meets its neighbours exactly. And then Paul says the masonry grows, which no masonry does.

He is describing something built and alive at once. Which is why this is a temple and not a monument.

And notice the prefix that has been running through this whole passage, and through yesterday's. Fellow citizens. Fitted together. Built together. Yesterday it was made alive together, raised together, seated together. Paul keeps reaching for the same small Greek syllable meaning with, because nothing he is describing happens to anybody alone.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Dwelling Place

And the last word of the chapter. In whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Une habitation de Dieu.

The temple had a wall to keep people at a distance from where God dwelt. The chapter ends by saying the people are the dwelling. You cannot build a barrier around the place God lives if the place God lives is the people you would be excluding.

And the tense is worth having: are being built. Present, continuous, unfinished. Nobody in that building is a completed stone.

Which is a good thing to read this week, parked below a famous building and looking for an ordinary one. The house-hunting is real and worth doing. But the dwelling place in verse 22 has been under construction for two thousand years, and the household in the Benimar was moved into it long before they crossed the Pyrenees.