God in Christ creates one new humanity

In the reading from the Letter to the Ephesians  which we heard this morning there is a stand out phrase ‘so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace’. What God does in sending Jesus Christ into the world is to create one new humanity thus making peace. We might look around the world and shrug our shoulders and say ‘Oh yeah, really?’ So much seems to suggest that this is a false or empty claim.

But….. Christianity makes fundamental claims about God, God’s purposes for the world, the reason God has created a world at all, what God has done and what are the implications for the human race. The fact that we are here this morning suggests that something of what God is up to has rubbed off on us and it’s worth being here.

Back to Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. He says that in Jesus, God has made one new humanity out of the two. What’s this ‘two’? It is the Jewish people, Israel, and the other nations, the Gentiles. Paul was a Jew, Jesus was Jew, the earliest Church was Jewish. And yet in Jesus, God had brought all the world’s people into the family of God. The Acts of the Apostles in particular tracks this development.

The Gentiles are brought in, grafted into the God’s people, Israel, to become this new humanity. Remember how Jesus met with the Syro-Phoenician woman (a non-Jewish woman) whose daughter was gravely ill. Although not Jewish, she had faith in Jesus and her daughter was healed. Jesus says in John’s Gospel that when he is lifted up, that is crucified, he would draw all people to himself. The risen Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel tells his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations through their teaching and through baptism.

All this is the fulfilment of the Old Testament’s hope that the Gentiles would come to worship Israel’s God. Paul quotes the Old Testament, Psalm 117, at the end of his Letter to the Romans, ‘Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people’ and ‘Let all the peoples praise him’. God’s purpose is to create one new humanity and so create what is God’s final purpose: peace, shalom/peace/justice/human flourishing for all.

Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is probably a circular letter designed to be sent around Christian communities in what is now Western Turkey. These communities would be tiny. They lived, worked and worshipped surrounded by the signs of the mighty Roman empire, their statutes to the gods, the corpses of crucified bandits hanging from crosses by the road side, and coins with the image of the godlike emperor stamped on each one. What hope for these tiny communities, believing that Jesus had created one new humanity? Was their hope that God had changed everything and brought in a new order of peace/shalom/justice, human flourishing for all – was this hope a futile dream?

Paul in this letter teaches that this new Jesus-shaped humanity is not just an item of belief or a mere wish, but a comprehensive way to live your life. This is what the Church of Jesus Christ is, a people who believe and live out a new way of living based on Jesus himself.  This is why Paul, particularly in his First Letter to the Corinthians, calls the Christian groups, the ‘body of Christ’.

Remember two striking of phrases in his Letter to the Galatians: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ This tells us who we are.  Also, ‘… it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.’  This tells us how we live.

If all this is true about the Church, then is has consequences for how we behave. How we behave to each other in the Church, the Body of Christ, and towards the wider world, the wider community. I remember the first time I listened to a sermon in a prison, preached by a prisoner. I remember clocking ‘this is is someone serving a sentence for a crime and they are preaching the Word of God to me’. It was a moment of awakening to what it means to be together in the Body of Christ. An awakening to the radical equality we have as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ and the humility that is required towards each other. We minister Christ to each other. So, as Paul writes in the Letter to the Ephesians, ‘In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord’.

Last Sunday I was taking the service at another Church in Peterborough. It’s always instructive how, as a relative stranger, one is  met. I approached, and there was someone standing outside the church, ready to greet me, which he did. His duty that week was to stand outside the church to welcome anyone, anyone who was coming to the church that Sunday. It’s a little picture of how each and every church should relate to the wider world. All are to be greeted and treated as Christ himself. ‘Christ the stranger’ is phrase to ponder on.

Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel teaches that we are a ‘light to world’. A people at home in the light that shines even in the hidden places of our hearts. Light bearers in the darkness of the world. The Church is not an end itself, not a club for like-minded people, not an escape from the world. It is light to the world so that God’s Kingdom of peace may come. This is the calling of the new humanity, the Body of Christ.

One new humanity in Chirst. Not a vain hope, but a truth of faith. In each of our lives, whatever it looks like, and in each and every church whatever they are like, the new humanity shines out so that, in the words of the Book of Revelation, ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.’

Service: Canon Bill Croft. 23rd Jluy 2024. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)

Readings: Ephesians 2.11-end; Mark 6.30-34, 53-end