Prime real estate

The book of Ephesians gives hope when Christ’s body is not functioning properly.  Have you ever been in a church that split?  Or been emotionally wounded by a pastor or fellow parishioner?  Perhaps you are on the outside of Christianity looking in: how could God allow all these divisions in his body?  Ephesians says there is a God who is not distant, disappointed, or dead—he sent his Son “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10).  The book itself is a prayer for life to fill the body of Christ.  The church will always need it this side of heaven.  He will always supply.  Paul deepens the metaphor of the body of Christ by saying that it is also the temple.

I would like to live there! I don’t care how drafty it is.

The temple is prime real estate. COVID-19 has caused the housing market to sky rocket in the States. Bidding wars are the norm now… with cash offers. This gives a new layer of insight into what it means when Jesus says forgiven sinners are his temple. Jesus is the prime real estate. And he views you and I and all the other suffering people he redeems to be his dwelling place. He in turn makes us his prime real estate. The Healer’s home is with the broken.

There was disarray in the church at the time.  That’s why this book is so relevant to us now!  The Gentile Christians were mad at the Jewish Christians for not welcoming them, wives were being passive aggressive against their husbands, husbands were taking their wives for granted as possessions rather than lovers, fathers were being harsh with their children, and Christians were enslaving other Christians.  The ligaments were torn.  The tendons shredded.  You could see the bruise.  What does God do?  He sends his teachers, his preachers, his prophets, his evangelists, his shepherds to uncover falsehood and build up the body (4:11).  It’s often messy.  Always imperfect.  But Christ himself is behind it.  He will bring you back into grace through faith in his death on the cross for you come hell or high water.  He has attached you to his forgiven people.  (And if they aren’t pointing you to his grace, then perhaps he will use you to convict them - just wait until you have enough anger to be “baptized for the cause” ;)!

Paul gives another powerful metaphor for how Jesus is uniting all people to himself - not only as his own body but also as his temple.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”  (Ephesians 2:19-22)

depiction of the Temple of Artemis

As Paul wrote this there were two Temples standing: the Temple of Artemis and the Jewish Temple.  The Temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the world.  It worshipped the goddess of chastity and the hunt through a powerful economic engine of idolatry, sexual prostitution, and male castration (see Ephesus Now post).  The culture was so dependent on this economy of idolatry that there was a riot when Christians stopped buying idols of Artemis (read about it in Acts 19:21-41.)  Artemis gave women a sense of power in a male-dominated world.  But it was not for reconciliation - the male castration is proof.

a depiction of the 2nd Jewish Temple rebuilt by Herod the Great, destroyed in 70A.D.

The Jewish temple, rebuilt by Herod the Great, had once been filled with God’s glory (2 Chronicles 7:1 ).  Yet it was a symbol, a placeholder for what was to come.  Its architecture kept women and Gentiles out of the inner sanctuary.  God’s dwelling place was to be with his people.  Yet not in a temple built of stone.  God’s glory had left that temple (Ezekiel 11) and did not return until it announced Jesus’ birth to the shepherds (Luke 2:8—20) and then surrounded Jesus on the mountaintop with Peter, James, and John (Mark 9:2-8).  Jesus is God’s glory.  Jesus had been in that temple and the leaders had not recognized him.  They crucified him.  John Stott says it well: “Two temples, one pagan and the other Jewish, each designed by its devotees as a divine residence, but both empty of the living God.”[1]

Through Jesus, God has made us into his dwelling place.  His redeemed people are his home on earth.  This temple is not yet complete—it “grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:21).  He is adding more and more people each day.  In the new heaven and new earth God will announce its completion: “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men and women” (Revelation 21:1-5).  You are not strangers anymore but fellow citizens of God’s kingdom and members of God’s family.  You are no longer stuck in your social status quo but rather freed by Jesus and built together by him to be God’s dwelling place. 

This is a radical vision of reconciliation for Paul’s context.  Aristotelian political ideals infiltrated the Greco-Roman world.  Kurt Schaefer describes Aristotle’s influence in Jesus’ day in his exposition on Peter’s letters to churches in Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave.  Schaefer explains that Aristotle’s family unit, the “oikos,” (not just the name of Greek yogurt in the grocery store) comes together to form the community of households in the “polis,” the Greek city-state.[2]  Aristotle held that the polis must be governed by men who rule their oikos with “total kingship:”  “Marriages must consist of two parts: a rational, thinking (male) part that must command, and a sensual, appetitive (female) part, weak in deliberative and rational faculties, that must obey”[3]… likewise a child must obey a parent and a slave must obey a master.  Hierarchy, patriarchy, sexism, slavery, and male-dominated governance is interwoven in our democratic Greco-Roman history.  Every time the New Testament writers address a minority group: women, children, slaves, they are treating them as rational, valuable equals in the family of God.  In fact, they are part of Christ’s own body (Ephesians 1:22).  Paul wants them to be educated, to be shrewd, and to be reconciled to God in Jesus and then to one another.  This is very different from the Aristotelian oikos, or household.  Schaeffer illustrates the degrading nature of this Aristotelian context:

“Romans, like Aristotle, emphasized that justice is based on equality (that is, treating equals equally).  Thus justice can exist only among those who are friends… “there is no justice in the equal treatment of those who are fundamentally not equal.  Males and females, or masters and slaves, or fathers and children, as unequals, must be treated differently in order to maintain justice… it is difficult for anyone to enter into any role in this system while retaining one’s humanity.  The nature of the arrangements is to degrade, humiliate, intimidate and exploit.  In the end, the person ostensibly at the top of the pyramid, the paterfamilias, becomes the most animal-like and subhuman creature in the system.”[4] 

When Paul gives this vision of being built together as a holy temple in the Lord, he is dismantling this Aristotelian ethic.  Peter also uses this vision of God’s family as his temple in 1 Peter 2: 4,5: “As you come to him, a living stone, rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”  Here Peter is encouraging the believers who are suffering for their faith.  He breaks from the secular culture by saying “all believers—slave, free, male, female—are inheritors, equal co-inheriting children, in the countercultural oikos which is the church, the ‘household of God.’”[5] 

Jesus chooses you to dwell in.  He gathers you to his other family members, forgiven as you have been.  He builds you together as a living temple, not one built on laws to keep sinners out but on blood to wash sinners clean.  To every unseen, undervalued, and abused person in this hostile world, Jesus sees you, chooses you, and makes you alive (Ephesians 2:22). 

[1] John Stott, The Message of Ephesians, The Bible Speaks Today, (Nottingham, England: InterVarsity Press, 1979), p. 24); William Barclay, The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians, The Daily Bible Study Series (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976) p.110.

[2]Kurt C. Schaefer, Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave: Peter through Roman Eyes. Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018, p. 35.

[3] Ibid, 36.

[4] Kurt C. Schaefer, Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave: Peter through Roman Eyes. Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018, p.96.

[5] Kurt C. Schaefer, Husband, Wife, Father, Child, Master, Slave: Peter through Roman Eyes. Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2018, p.99.

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