Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Ephesians 5:8-14

Living in the Open Takes Practice



The world out of which the Gentile converts had come – and which remained the public norm - was a closed world in time. Those converts to Christ were used to a pagan world governed by various kinds of cycles for which the spiritual elements that govern that world must be placated to insure things like fertility, good crops, and prosperity. Or to bless human cravings. Joseph Kreitzer has made the case that there is a good likelihood people in the Ephesian (and Colossian) congregations were familiar with pagan religious festivals that used obscene language and rites to manipulate certain deities into granting good crops and fertility.* Such practices illuminate the extent to which those people were prisoners to those mythic creation cycles and the spiritual powers that controlled them. Religion was the business of magical incantation and liturgical stagings that might force the hands of the powers of the elements. Or at least keep them at bay.

Old habits are hard to break. Religion, even our own, is still tempted to see its praxis as some species of God-manipulation. Liturgy as leverage. That sort of thing. But at the end of the day such practice is a denial of the sovereignty of God over all of life. The cross of Christ unequivocally exposed religious manipulation for what it is. God is utterly public. Even in the deepest darkness God's purpose is altogether known. Altogether light. The horizons of time itself are flung back before us as we enter a world in which our life - and our God – is found, through that cross, in the open.

* "Crude Language" and "Shameful Things Done in Secret" (Ephesians 5.4, 12) : Allusions to the Cult of Demeter/Cybele in Hierapolis?, Kreitzer, L Joseph. Source: Journal for the Study of the New Testament, no 71 S 1998, p 51-77.

© 2011 Andy Gay