The Dividing Wall Demolished

Today's Reading

Read Ephesians 2:11-22 slowly. Read it twice. This is one of the densest passages in the New Testament about ethnic reconciliation, and it deserves to be read as a single argument, not a string of devotional verses.

"Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called 'the uncircumcision' by what is called the circumcision... remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility..."

Then read Galatians 3:26-29 and Colossians 3:9-11 ("Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all"). End with John 17:20-23, Jesus's prayer the night before the cross — that his people would be one so that the world may believe.

Reflection

Ephesians 2 is the passage we most often quote about ethnic reconciliation, and the passage we most consistently underread. The familiar second half — "for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing" — is one of the great Reformation verses. We tend to stop there. But Paul does not stop there. He keeps going for another twelve verses, and what he says next is what the rest of the letter is about.

The image is concrete. In the Jerusalem temple of Paul's day, there was an actual wall. It separated the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts. On it were inscriptions — archaeologists have found them — warning Gentiles, on pain of death, not to pass any further. A real wall. Real stones. Real signs in Greek and Latin: cross this and your blood is on your own head. Paul's readers, many of them Gentiles, had walked past those signs and felt them. They had stood at the edge of God's house and known they were not allowed in.

Paul says: that wall is gone. Not, "we should try to get rid of it." Not, "in heaven it will be." Gone, now, in the flesh of Jesus Christ. When his body was broken on the cross, the dividing wall of hostility was broken with it. The temple curtain tore (Matthew 27:51) — the same point made by Mark and Luke — but Paul, in Ephesians, sees the implication: the whole architecture of separation, the whole system of "us inside, them outside," collapsed in a single death. There is no longer a court of the Gentiles, because there is no longer a court for anyone. The temple has been replaced by the body of Christ, and in that body Jew and Gentile stand on the same floor.

This is what the cross did, Paul says — not as an afterthought, not as an application of redemption to social life, but as a constitutive part of what redemption was for. He repeats it three times in the passage, with different verbs: he made the two one (v. 14), he created in himself one new man in place of the two (v. 15), he reconciled both to God in one body through the cross (v. 16). Three times. Paul is not subtle.

And then, the verse that should haunt every segregated church on Sunday morning: "For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father" (v. 18). One Spirit. One Father. One access. If two Christians cannot find a way to worship together because of ethnic difference, they are denying — with their bodies, in the gathered assembly — the very thing the cross was for.

Tim Keller used to preach Ephesians 2 with a particular emphasis: the gospel does not just save individuals. It creates a new people. The early Christians were sometimes called, by their pagan neighbors, the third race — neither Jew nor Greek but a strange new category, gathered out of every old category. That description was not a slogan. It was a sociological observation. Something genuinely new had happened in the world. Slaves and free, Jews and Greeks, men and women, were sitting at the same table, eating the same bread, calling each other brother and sister. It looked, from the outside, like a different kind of humanity.

Bonhoeffer, writing Life Together in the late 1930s as the German church was being torn apart by ethnic ideology, named the deeper truth: Christ is the mediator between people. Not just between God and us, but between us and one another. Two human beings cannot, by themselves, reach each other. We are too damaged, too defended, too afraid. We need a third party who has stood in both our places and is at peace with both of us. That mediator is Christ. Where he is, we can meet. Where he is denied, we cannot. The reason racial reconciliation in the church is not finally a matter of better techniques or more sensitivity training is that it is, at root, a matter of Christ standing between us. Without him, we will not get there. With him, we cannot avoid it without denying him.

This is the high ground Galatians 3:28 is staking out: there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Notice that Paul does not say these distinctions are erased. A Greek does not become a Jew. A woman does not become a man. The categories remain — God made them, and Revelation 7 says they will be there at the end. What Paul says is that they no longer divide. They no longer determine access. They no longer rank human beings before God. The cross has demoted every other identity to second place behind union with Christ.

So the question that Ephesians 2 puts to the American church is brutal in its simplicity: do our Sunday mornings look like the cross worked? Or do they look like the dividing wall is still standing, and we have just stopped putting up the signs?

For most American congregations, the honest answer is something in between. The wall is lower than it was in 1955. It is not gone. The cross broke it; we keep half-rebuilding it. We worship in monocultural churches, by inertia, by preference, by the simple drift of who lives where. We are friendly. We are not unified. The one new man is still mostly two old men sitting in different buildings on the same Sunday morning.

This is not a problem the cross failed to solve. It is a problem we have failed to receive what the cross did.

Going Deeper

Look at your own congregation this Sunday and ask Paul's question: is the dividing wall down here? Not, "are we welcoming?" — many segregated churches are warmly welcoming. Ask, instead: is the architecture of the place — leadership, music, preaching, table fellowship, friendships outside Sunday — actually that of "one new man," or is it that of one ethnicity at peace with itself?

If it is the second, the answer is not to manufacture diversity. The answer is to repent of treating Christ's reconciling work as a metaphor and ask him to teach your church to be what he died to make it.