148. Year A - Epiphany - "The Mystery of Christ"

0:00You are listening to Seeking the Hidden Thing with Cryptos. Epiphany. We talked about this last week. It's kind of a funny word, one that we don't use that much, but what is epiphany? Well, the word itself means a sudden profound realization or intuitive understanding. It is that experience when you finally understand something that moment kind of when it all comes together and you say to yourself, oh, now I get it.

1:09So this is what epiphany is about. It is what we are celebrating. So we're celebrating the moment where we realize, maybe not just us, but the world began to realize who Jesus was and the significance of his life. During most of the three-year cycle of election area, the text vary from year to year on the important dates. So you'd have year A, year B, year C, and they're different for each of the years. Now, there are a couple of Sundays, Christmas being one of them, but epiphany is one of those dates that doesn't change from year to year, which tells you that in the life of the church, this was considered a very, very important moment in sort of the yearly cycle of worship for believers. So the texts from year to year remain the same. So the Old Testament text is Isaiah 60, one to six, you know, a rye shine for your life has come. And then Psalm 72, which talks about the coming king who will bring the justice of God.

2:25Then you also have Matthew 2, one through 12, the story of the magi bringing gifts to the newborn king in a sense, the nations are coming and declaring to the world who the king is. And then also there is this passage in Ephesians, which talks about the mystery of Christ now made known to us. So the grand history of the church is saying to us in asking us to meditate on this passage year after year after year, the same passages are saying this passage is really, really important to us and to the life of the church in its life of worship that we should come back to it again and again and again. It's something important is going on here in this text. And we're talking about, I mean, the main thing that Paul talks about here is this thing called the mystery of Christ. So this is that sense of, you know, epiphany, the aha moment, the mystery of Christ is being revealed and made known to us.

3:31So what is the mystery of Christ? Well, what's interesting when Paul begins in verse 14, and if you have your Bibles open, it's interesting. Paul begins, you know, saying, for this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus, for the sake of the Gentiles. And then it happens in the Greek too here in the English, but Paul basically stops mid-sentence. It's like he's writing and then something pops in his mind and he has to talk about it right away. And you'll notice in verse 14, he picks up the same language for this reason I kneel before the Father. So that's verse 14 is sort of what he was about to say in verse 1. He continues and picks it up in verse 14 again after this short interlude where he just sort of breaks off mid-sentence to talk about this thing that all of a sudden popped in his mind and is very important for him and for the Ephesians people. This great mystery of Christ. So he begins by saying, you know, surely you have heard.

4:32Basically what he's then saying is that among the churches that I have preached and where I have gone, everybody kind of knows this. Surely you have heard. This is sort of common knowledge. Well, what have they heard? Well, he talks about the administration of God's grace. Now, here the Greek word is Oiconamine, which from which we derive the word economy. But in ancient times it referred to the administration of a household. A good word to capture this is, you know, steward or stewardship. So Paul sees himself as an administrator, a steward or something of great value that he has been asked to sort of take care of. And this thing that he has been asked to take care of was the mystery of Christ that was given to him in revelation. And this is important because it's very foundational for us as a life of the church. We don't often think about it, but much of who we are as believers comes because of these key moments of revelation from God.

5:42So you now have Moses going up the mountain, Moses meeting God at the burning bush, you know, then you have, you know, like stories like Elijah outside of the cave with the small still voice. There's these moments where God speaks to his people, speaks to representatives of the people, and then gives his revelations directly to them. We talk about Christ as, and we've talked about this before, being the image, the representation of the invisible God. So in Christ himself as a person in his words and as being who he is, this is sort of the final ultimate revelation. But much of our faith is also grounded in, determined by its foundation, is this idea that we accept that God really did, speak to Paul, you know, on the road to Damascus and elsewhere. So what Paul is saying here is that God spoke to me directly. Christ spoke to me, he met me, and he gave me this revelation.

6:51And so much of our faith is dependent upon accepting this idea that God really spoke to Paul. And much like when Jesus, you know, taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, opening their eyes to the scripture, so to Paul had his eyes opened and was taught directly by Christ through this revelation. This is sort of resulting in his conversion, this radical, and then he meets God, meets Jesus on the road to Damascus. And then immediately after, you know, Ananias comes and the scales are dropping from his eyes after three days of meditation and prayer, what does Paul immediately begin to do? He goes into the city of Damascus and begins to preach Christ Jesus. It was only later in his ministry when he goes back to Jerusalem, because people have been hearing rumors about things he's been teaching, that he talks with the other apostles about what he is teaching. And they concur that they both are preaching the same gospel.

7:54And Paul makes a point of it elsewhere saying he says, this is although my gospel is not dependent upon them telling me, you know, confirming it, but just in case you want to know, the apostles in Jerusalem did confirm that we're preaching the same thing, but I, you know, the truth of what I'm saying doesn't rest on there approval of it, it comes directly from God. And this is what Paul is saying again here. Now, the mystery that he's revealing to us was revealed to him directly by Christ on the road to Damascus and elsewhere. And Paul sees himself as a steward of the mystery made known by revelation. Paul says here in verse four and five that this specific teaching about the Messiah, the Christ was not made known to other men in past generations, but has been made known by Christ and the Holy Spirit today in this time in this era. Jesus himself says, you know, that the Holy Spirit will teach us all things. And this seems like the kind of things that Jesus had in mind. So again, what is this mystery?

8:57Verse nine, the mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body and shares together in Christ Jesus. Now, you're thinking that doesn't seem like all that big a deal, you know, that all were one body, but we today tend to intellectualize things. Everything is rational, it's all ideas, and we tend to operate in the world of ideas. Oftentimes when we talk about, you know, faith in God, faith in Christ, we often are talking about believing the idea of God, the idea of Jesus Christ, and the teachings about Him that we give intellectual ascent to a certain number of ideas. So often we are worshiping the idea of God, not so much God Himself, or we're interacting with the idea of God. And so what we have here is not a set of ideas primarily, but we have a reality, and we're not interacting with sort of an idea of a body, a concept that we're all kind of one body.

10:05But we're talking about something real that's actually happening, and this is important. We reflected on this indirectly last week when we meditated on Hebrews 2. When we talked about us being of one flesh with Christ, this was important for Christ and that he, when God became man, he became one with us in the flesh. We symbolized this in communion, you know, we take his body into us, and this was important because we know that as a human being, he faced all the same temptations that we did, and as a result, we know that he knows what we're going through, except he didn't do it with, he didn't sin. And so Christ shows us the path through, and because we share the same flesh and body, and we continue to, you know, celebrate this in communion, and to celebrate that we are one body with Jesus Christ. Now here, the same spiritual reality is extended in a different way. So in the same way that we are one body with Christ, sort of flesh and blood with Christ became one with humanity, flesh and blood with humanity, the Old Testament promises were all made to Israel.

11:21We have to think about what was Israel. Israel were a people joined together as a great tribe. They are all descendants of one ancestor, Jacob. There are large extended family. Jacob had 12 sons, and the nation of Israel, as that came into the promised land, were all descendants of this one man. They were like a large extended family. They were all shared a same, like, they were all, like, basically distant relations to each other. They are all sharing, you know, the same blood, the same ancestors. They are the same family. And Jacob, who was named by God, Israel, sort of founded this great nation, that God took this people to himself. When he took it to himself, he divided the world into the Israelites, who were the keepers of the promise of God, the law of God, the temple worship. They were a people set aside from the nations to be a light to the nations, but they were also separate from the nations.

12:37So they were a holy, and that's what a sort of holiness means. They were separate from the nations. So you now divide the world into the Israelites, who worship the one to God, and the pagans, the Gentiles, who worship the false gods, who we know are fallen angels, who often refers to the powers and principalities, and here he talks about them as the rulers and authorities in this passage. So what Paul is saying, and he'll talk about this elsewhere in Ephesians, so what Paul is saying is that this dividing wall of ethnicity, of God interacting with one large extended family group, the nation of Israel, is now being broken down in Christ through faith. And he's forging himself, for himself, a new people whose body is the body of Christ. And we've talked about that, we are the body, Christ is the head and we are the body.

13:41And this language is not meant to be just sort of images and symbols, but as we saw last week, this is reality. Christ became flesh and blood human so that we could be bonded to Him in one body, in one flesh. This is the mechanism through which salvation works. So in a similar way now, in faith, new believers are now bonded to the body of Christ. And in this sense, we all share one flesh. And this is the mystery. This is the great mystery, he says, that all of these people through faith are now joined as one body. So God is now in Christ, sort of reconstituting His people. We are becoming a nation, an extended family, we're being bonded in blood by Christ blood, by Christ sacrifice as symbolized again in the community.

14:44This is where Paul talks about seeing correctly the body of Christ. So not are you seeing like Jesus own body, but you're seeing in the communion that we are bonded together as one body. And this is really why discipleship is more important in many ways than sort of filling the pews because this bond that we're supposed to have is meant to be real. And so how do you teach like, you know, families have things like they have traditions, they have teachings, the way we do things around here. So discipleship is a way of taking somebody in the outside who's now in faith bonded with Christ and making that a sort of a living reality, bringing them in, teaching them all the ways of how we do things, what it's like, this is how we, this is what it means to be part of this family. We are now brothers and sisters in Christ and that's meant literally, not symbolically, we are brothers and sisters in Christ. We share the same father.

15:46See, all this language is very, very important. And then in verse 12, the payoff is really, and then like, why is this important that we're all bonded together as one? We get very distant from sort of old testament temple language in the way of thinking about it, but we have to kind of grasp that to understand the significance of what Paul is saying. He's using the language and the imagery of the temple that we can now approach God with freedom and confidence. I will look at those words more deeply in a minute, but he's using the imagery of temple and language. So we have to remember that the Gentiles were forbidden from temple worship. As were women, only Israelite men were allowed to come in and worship God.

16:50You were not allowed to approach God if you were not an Israelite male. There was the Gentile court on the very outside, then there was the woman's court, and then there was the inner court, and then beyond that there was the Holy of Holies, which was entered only by the high priest and only once a year. Symbolically, and really by walls, God was walled off from both women and from the nations. They could not come in and worship God. They could not approach God. They had no access to God. And that's what the temple said to the world is at the Gentiles. This is my holy people. They have access to me, and you do not. And so when Paul says that in Christ there's no Jew or Gentile male or female, he's not issuing sort of a modern day egalitarian manifesto that erases all the differences between men and women that removes the differences and roles that each have in a society.

18:04It doesn't get rid of the fact that some people are bigger, faster, stronger, or maybe smarter, or receive different spiritual giftings from God, or that men and women are different, and they have different roles in the life of a people and a community. It's just that all of these divide, he talks about the dividing wall of hostility. So the walls that were in the temple that separated from people from God were being broken down. And now everybody can approach God in freedom and confidence. No one is now excluded from worship. No one is now excluded from the presence of God. Everyone can go into the holy of holies. We can all approach God in Christ. We are now bonded together in flesh as one people, one family, in faith by means of the body of Christ. We are the body of Christ. We are one family. We are all children of the Father with the Son of God. He calls us brothers and sisters. That's what we talked about last week in Hebrews.

19:12So when Paul talks elsewhere about discerning the body of the Lord's Supper, this is what he's meaning. This is what you discern the Lord's Supper in the body. That together we are bonded in Christ into one real flesh and blood family. And once you grasp this, you know that you cannot be a believer without entering into a relationship with other believers. You cannot do the Christian faith on your own. You must participate in this great mystery. You must participate in the body of believers. You must be joined to the body of believers. You are now part of the people of God. Bonded in flesh as the body of Christ so that we might together as one body with no one excluded, come freely into the presence of God. And Paul layers this in verse 12 with two words. In the Greek, they are parasyon and prosagogaine.

20:17We both of which are loaded with meaning. So parasyon, which is translated here as freedom, carries the meaning of the attitude of a free man as opposed to the attitude of a slave. It's often interesting, you know, that when we pray, we bow our heads. Really, we probably shouldn't do because bowing your head is the attitude of a slave who has to bow his head in front of the master. We are free man who can come in, lift our face, and we can look upon the Lord as a free man. We don't have to bow our heads in shame before God. It carries the sense that you can stand before God with your head upright, lifted in confidence because in Christ we are people set free from slavery and bondage. We are a free people and we can come freely into the presence of God. Prosagogaine means that we have access. We can approach God. We have access to God.

21:17And this is important because it's like as we talked about with the temple, not everyone had access to God. You know, thinking of those images of like, you know, you see of nightclubs with the big, you know, 300 pound bouncer and there's this red cord and he's got his hand on his corn, he's got a list of who can come in and who can't come in. Right? Well, we are being given access. So we come up, the bouncer lifts the cord and we go into the inner sanctuary. And what's in the inner sanctuary? Well, it's not a nightclub. It's the presence of God. This is the undoing of the curse of the garden of Eden. No longer are we cast out of the presence of God. No longer are we divided together in Christ and faith. We become a single body that can with heads held high with confidence. We can come into the very inner sanctum of the presence of God to be with him. And I want to meditate just briefly and fold in this passage in one Timothy three, which underscores the same language but in a different way.

22:23Here we're talking about, he says, we're God's household. God is the father. He is the head of the house. We are his children united together in one household. And as this household, we are the living repository. The language here is very, very bold. We are the pillar and foundation of truth itself. This household of God is the place where the presence of God dwells where we can call it the mystery but the wisdom of God is revealed to the world. We've talked a lot about this idea of wisdom, but this mystery, which is, you know, how do we as a people come to know God? It's found within us here. This is the repository of the place where we meet God, you know, wisdom is, you know, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, but it means coming into the presence of God, like Abraham going up the mountain and meeting God, like Moses going up the mountain and meeting God.

23:29We are able to, this is who we are as a people. We are the people who meet God and his presence, his, you know, his body. We are the revelation of the invisible God. We are the body of Christ. And so in a sense, truth, wisdom resides here among us as a body of believers. The full mystery of God is revealed in our presence as we reveal to the world the body of Christ, the mystery of Christ. There's this wonderful little hymn at the end of that passage. It's somebody says variously it could be a hymn or it could be an early creed or confession, but he appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world and was taken up in glory. There it all is, the great mystery, the bodyless, the bodyliness of Jesus, the cosmic implications of what he's done witness by the angels.

24:32In a sense, this is, you know, the declaration that Paul says in Ephesians that we're declaring it to the heavenly realms to the, the authorities and the rumors in the heavenly realms to all those other gods that people worshiped. We are declaring to them here now that God is present. To all of the angels, both obedient and disobedient, we become the declaration of the presence of God. God became man has been preached to the nations and in this body in his body is rooted the truth, the wisdom of God. This is who and what we are. We as believers, as a body, as a family, we live and reveal in who we are, the deepest truths of God. We are the body of Christ. We are one body and as one family together, we come into the very presence of God.

25:32We stand before the Lord and we sense bring back from the mountains, so to speak, who God is and we share this, this, this light, this great knowledge, this light to the world as it's embodied in us as a community. This is the core of what we do of who we are. We reveal to the world the great mystery of Christ by being that family of God, one flesh together, the body of Christ, who boldly comes into the presence of God and within whom the wisdom, the truth, the presence of the living God is a living and vibrant reality. So people come into here and this is that whole thing of not being hidden on a hill or whatever. This is what people should see when they come in here. All those deepest yearnings for us as human beings who have been cast out of the garden, alienated and cut off from God. In a world around us that just wants to turn everything into a technocratic slop of just completely devoid of any meaning, the machine, the nihilism of our age.

26:46People should be coming through this door and sensing even if they can't put a word on it. This is what I've been listening to. And then we can put an arm around them and say, well, let me talk to them. Let me tell you about who and what you could become by being a part of this body. Amen. Music