The Epistle reading for today from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 14 to 22 begins: “For [Christ] Himself is our peace.” Now St. Paul is writing about peace between Jews and non-Jews. He is writing about how Christ (and I quote) “made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall.”

Children, walls are things that separate people—that stop them from being friends. What kind of things stop people from being friends? . . . Yes, pushing them, getting angry, not listening. Jesus tears down walls between people so that they can become friends.

St. Paul continues by quoting from the Old Testament book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 57, verse 19, which reads in its original form: “Peace, peace to him who is far and to him who is near, says the Lord, and I will heal him.” As often happens when an author of a book in the New Testament quotes from memory a passage from the Old Testament, St. Paul changes the passage from the Old Testament slightly to “And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near.” St. Paul changed the word “him” to “you.” He preached peace to you. The meaning is clear: St. Paul wants both the Jews who are already near to Christ with their belief in God to receive peace, just as he wants non-Jews, who are far away from God, but listening to him in Ephesus, to receive peace.

What I find fascinating about this passage is that St. Paul is writing this letter not only to the Jews and non-Jews in the first century but also to each of us. He has written this epistle which the dictionary defines as “a letter, especially a long one, dealing with important matters.” The important matter is how each of us, whatever our previous beliefs or actions, can find out that “Christ Himself is our peace.”

I don’t know the full answer to that question. How can I be one with Christ? How can I or you discover that Christ Himself is our peace? I would very much like to live my life in complete peacefulness with Christ and everyone around me—those who are close to me and those who are far away from me, but I don’t know how to do it fully. So I turned to the early Church Fathers to see if they thought it was possible to live with Christ as their peace.

Having lived in England for some fifty years now, I’ve learned a little about cricket. Consider this sermon as a cricket match with me as the bowler, and various fourth century Church Fathers coming up to bat to try to score a six—to knock the ball out of the cricket ground by firmly communicating to me and to you how to live with Christ as their peace. The opening batsman who faces me is not well known, but he can hit the ball really well, as is true for all good opening batsmen in cricket. He’s a poet and Biblical scholar, Mairus Victorinus from Marseilles, now in France. Marius said about this passage, and I quote:

Christ by His own mystery, His cross, His passion and His way of life destroyed this wall [of separation between people]. He [Himself] overcame sin and [He] taught that it could be overcome [by us]. .  . He took away the wall in the midst [of people]. . . The work is not ours. We are not called to set ourselves free. Faith in Christ is our only salvation.

That’s powerful, isn’t it?  Christ is a mystery. He Himself overcame sin; and He taught us that we can each confront our own sins and overcome those sins. How? Because (and I quote Marius) “the work is not ours. We are not called to set ourselves free.” We are only called to believe in Christ. In other words, we do have free will, but we do not know whether the work we try to do in our lives will be successful. Our task is simply to try to live as we think we should and to believe in Christ. Marius Victorinus is not a saint—he is a person, who, like each of us, is trying to follow Christ. He offers us an important insight—being aware that “the work is not ours” removes anxiety. We simply try to do the best we can.

Second batsman, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Bishop of Nyssa, whom I have mentioned in an earlier sermon, but his words keep coming back to me: “It is not one thing to seek and another to find, for the gain from seeking is the seeking itself.” In other words, we each try to find Christ. What we gain from that search is up to God, not up to us. The work is not ours. We can rely on God to give us what we need in each of our lives. Now what we think we need and what God thinks we need may or may not be the same. In fact, often we are right in what we think we need in life, but it takes much longer to achieve than we think it should.  Why? Because the Lord guides the lives of each of us according to His will and His timing. We do need to seek—to try our best, not simply to be passive—but what we gain is up to God, not up to us.

Third batsman, St. John Chrysostom (and I quote): “Some say that the wall [is] that of the Jews against the Greeks. . . I do not think so. Rather I think that the wall between them is common within both. It is . . . the [wall] cutting them off [from God], as the prophet [Isaiah] says, ‘Do not your sins stand in the midst between you and me?’  .. . Don’t you see?” adds St. John:

The Greek does not have to become a Jew. Rather both enter into a new condition. His aim [that is, the aim of Jesus Christ] is not to bring Greek believers into being as different kinds of Jews but rather to create both anew. Rightly [St. Paul] uses the term create rather than change to point out the great effect of what God has done.

The issue is clear: we cannot change ourselves, but God can create us as new persons. As St. Paul writes in verses 14 to 15 of today’s reading: Christ “Himself is our peace” who has “create[d] in Himself one new man from the two”—Jew and Greek. Verses 20 to 22 link the creation of this new person to the building up of the Church:

Christ Jesus Himself [is] the cornerstone in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.

Christ brings us together for His purposes, which may or may not be our purposes. In this church and in many other Orthodox churches throughout the world we are “being fitted together . . . being built together into a dwelling of God in the [Holy] Spirit.” Our task is to pray and to seek—to pray for God’s will to be done in each of our lives and to seek the building up of the Church in which we each have a place—a role to play, a contribution to make.

Fourth and final batsman, St. Theodoret of Cyrus writing of this passage (and I quote):

Christ dispelled the enmity [that is, the ill will, the hostility] between us and God . . . The realization of full maturity lies in the responsive choices of the will . . . [to] the gospel teachings. . . . Yet these gospel teachings are not laid down as laws. They are a matter of free choice.

In other words, we are not going to become fully mature Orthodox Christians just because we follow the laws as interpreted by our families and our cultures and our Orthodox jurisdictions. We need to read and seek to understand the Gospel itself—the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If we do not read the gospels—if we rely solely on our family upbringing, our culture and our Orthodox jurisdictions, we will not reach full maturity as Orthodox Christians. None of us know the future. None of us know how close to God we can come. But we do need to seek peacefulness with Christ.

To conclude, is Christ our peace? I can only answer for myself. Sometimes, yes, and hopefully for longer and longer periods of time. I can continue to seek oneness with Christ, but what I find is up to God. Do join me in continuing to seek Christ as our peace—by coming to Holy Communion, by reading the four gospels, by reaching out to those in need, by responding with charity to the challenges of life, by seeking God’s will always.

Let us pause for a moment before we conclude by praising the Holy Trinity.

And so we ascribe as is justly due all might, majesty, dominion, power and praise to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Father Emmanuel Kahn