How Jesus’s Death on the Cross is Paradigmatic for Christians’ life of love: Love of Christ in Ephesians 3:14-21
The NRSV reads, for verses 18-19a:
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge
This Love of Christ in verse 19 apparently informs the “as you are being rooted and grounded in love” in verse 17: Christ’s love ought to shape our manner of loving.
The “love of Christ” in verse 19 could be read in several different ways:
1. The love that Christ feels: we should know how much Christ feels love for us. The implication is, that we should experience love in a way what approaches the love that Christ experiences
2. Christ’s act of Love: Namely, the cross. Christ’s act of love on the cross defines for Christians “love”
I am arguing here for the second: that the second reading accords more than the first (which is not a un-biblical reading) with the stream of argument that Paul here is making.
First, an extended quote from Richard B Hayes, The Moral Vision of the New Testament:
For that reason, the visible unity of the church is crucial. In the church, God has “broken down the dividing wall” between Jews and Gentiles. Indeed, the primary effect of the death of Christ is to bring this division to an end:
For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity on place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to god in one body through the cross, thus putting to death the hostility through it.
As a result of Christ’s death, Jews and Gentiles alike now have “access in one Spirit to the Father” (2:18). This is God’s secret wisdom that the church now proclaims by its very existence. The long meditative introduction to Ephesians is, then, a prayer for the church’s imagination: the apostle prays that his readers will find the “eyes of [their] heart” illuminated (1:18) to grasp the overwhelmingly glorious significance of God’s plan about the reconciliation of the whole universe in and through Christ’s cosmic body, the church (cf. 3:14-19). Chapter 3 concludes with a doxological acknowledgment, however, that no matter how empowered the church’s imagination may be, it will never grasp fully the scope of God’s power and grace:
Now to him who by the power working among us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever, amen.
After the end of chapter 3, Paul segue’s into the exhortation: explaining just how the church reflects Christ’s Reconciling action’s on the cross in its corporate life. So, this passage marks, in the structure of the letter to Ephesians, an important bridge; it should come as no surprise that here the author summarizes his position. As Hayes no ably noted, Paul is arguing for the centrality of Christ’s death in effecting the reconciling of the cosmos, so reading “love of Christ” as a reference to his death in particular ties the first half of this letter and the second together in a way that the more common reading does not.
The next question must be: “Why, according to the author of Ephesians, does the death of Christ effect such reconciliation” OR “how is Christ’s death definitive of the concept ‘love’ for Christians?”
1. Christ’s death was a peace-making act: it “broke down the dividing wall of the hostility.” Christ’s death was an act of reconciliation: by dying he entered into the conflicts that fracture human relationships and created in that place shalom.
a. His reconciliation was an act from the inside: he did not use armies but his own body
b. His reconciliation was predicated by self empty-ing (cf. phil. 2)
2. Christ’s death was a gracious act: it does not require remuneration. It is because of God’s graciousness and not by our own doing that we are saved. (cf Dt. 7:7-11).
3. Christ’s death involves us in the life and agenda of God: it is an act of inclusion.
Our love toward others must reflect these:
1. Love is peaceful: it is not divisive, nor does it avoid conflict. Rather, love enters conflict with the aim of creating shalom
2. Love is graciously given: The lover pours herself out without expecting return, God himself is the well-spring of our strength, and it is from him that we continue to be strengthened to love. (3:17)
3. Love looks to the need of others before self: (cf phil 2:1-11)
4. Love is an act of inclusion: It invites others into what god is doing.
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