ST. PAUL'S LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS 4:7-13
BRETHREN, grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it is said, "When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men." (in saying, "He ascended," what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is he who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.) And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
As most of you know, I’m the father of four. The youngest of them is ten now, so I don’t have babies in my home anymore, but babies are definitely something I am very familiar with. In fact, there was a time when a few of them were babies all at once. That was a really special time in our home. I remember setting them up in high chairs, Beth being to patient with them, begging them to open their mouths and to eat, working to diligently to get just a single spoonful of food into their mouths. I, on the other hand, would just plop the bowl of food down in front of them, figuring, “Hey, if they’re hungry, they’ll eat.” And if you’ve spent any time with babies at all, you know what happened next. My kids, like babies everywhere, proceeded to smear their food all over their high chairs, their clothes, their faces, the walls, and just about everywhere they could, everywhere except for the one place it was intended to go – into their mouths. I suspect that even to this day, a decade or more later, if you took a scraper to our dining room ceiling, you’d still find traces of sweet potato puree up there.
That’s the kind of craziness that we expect from babies, but we would never expect that behavior from adults. So it should be shocking when Christ tells someone like Nicodemus that he must be reborn in order to see the kingdom of God. Or when Jesus tells his disciples that “except you convert and become as little children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” We have heard these phrases so often that perhaps the shock value has worn off. But if we read closely, we can still hear the confusion in Nicodemus’ reply – “How can an old man be born again? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time?”
Interestingly, when we hear phrases like “repent,” “convert,” “be born again,” we tend to think of these ideas as synonymous with salvation. But that’s not the case. All of these phrases simply describe a part of salvation, the very first steps. Baby steps, if you will. Salvation is meant to be understood as much more than this.
You begin to see this when writers such as St. Paul and St. Peter take up this metaphor of spiritual babies. For instance, both of them suggest in different places that their followers are being nursed on “milk” like babies and are not yet ready for the “strong meat” that would be fed to spiritual adults. To give an example, Paul says to the Corinthians, “And I spoke unto you as babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for you were not able to bear it, and you are still not able.” There are similar passages in Hebrews and 1 Peter. There are also many passages where Paul refers to his followers as children, for instance in Galatians 4 or in Ephesians 4, the source of today’s epistle reading. Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians ended with, “till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, as unto a full grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” If we would have read just a few more words, those words would have been, “so that we may no longer be like children.” Paul is calling on the Ephesians to stop acting like spiritual children and grow into the full stature of Jesus Christ.
In these passages Paul and Peter are instructing those who are like children to grow up, while Jesus seems to be telling those around him to become like children. Are Jesus and his Apostles contradicting one another? Not at all. There is actually a great synergy between their teaching, though it can be a bit obscured by the translation. The truth is Jesus tells people to grow up all the time, it’s just not translated that way.
The Greek word that is a bit difficult to translate here is teleios. It is the word in today’s epistle translated as “full grown” – where Paul calls on his readers to become “full grown” adults. “Full grown” is a reasonable translation of the word, especially here with it is juxtaposed with the instruction not to be “like a child.” But because of this word choice, it can be difficult for us to associate it with Jesus’ teachings. It is hard to call to mind any famous sayings of Jesus that talk about growing up. But in truth Jesus uses the word teleios all the time. It’s just normally translated as “perfect.”
So, when the rich young ruler says to Jesus that he has kept all the commandments from his youth up, and Jesus challenges him to go farther, he tells him, “If you would be perfect, sell all that you have and give it to the poor, take up your cross, and follow me.” We hear “be perfect” and think that Jesus is giving him more rules to follow, that following the law is not quite perfect enough, but if he follows a few more rules, then he will be perfect. In truth, Jesus is saying that if he has indeed already been keeping the commandments, then by doing this he has been taking his first baby steps. But if he would like to become full grown, if he would like to be teleios, he should take on the ascetic behaviors of selling all that he has and giving it to the poor. By doing this, he would be taking up his cross and beginning to mature toward the full stature of Jesus Christ.
We find another example where Jesus tells his disciples to be “full grown” in the instruction to “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” In this case, you can see where “full grown” is a difficult translation. How could you think of God, who is eternally the same, as being “full grown.” So, is “perfect” the better translation? Maybe Paul in Ephesians is just calling us to become a perfect man, and the translation “full grown” is what is off.
Well, first, I must say that many translations actually do make that choice, but this in some ways also misleading. This is because the English word “perfect” is not really spot on, either. Teleios is a very specific kind of perfection. Teleios is the kind of perfection that an object achieves by reaching its telos, its goal, purpose, or end. Thus when a fruit is teleios, it is ripe; a child is teleios when it becomes an adult; the construction of a building is teleios when it is complete. If the Greek hamartia, which we translate as sin, actually means something like missing the mark, then to be teleios is its opposite, it means to hit the mark. And this is the message that Jesus and his apostles are driving at: We have strayed from the path, we are missing the mark, we need to turn around, get back on the path, and make our way toward our telos, that perfect purpose for which we were each created.
With this in mind, the idea of becoming “perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” becomes much more approachable. We tend to hear in this pharse that “you need to be just as perfect as God,” but that is obviously impossible. A better understanding of the phrase would be something like “grow up to be like your Father, who is perfect, because you were created in his image.” Indeed, this is the Orthodox teaching on the goal of humanity. Humanity was created for unity with God. St. John of Damascus wrote that man was created in such a way that “in the present life, his life is ordered like an animal’s, but in the age to come, he is changed…and becomes deified.” St. Basil also succinctly captures this idea when he described humanity as “a creature who has been given a commandment to become God.”
St. Markarios has a longer passage on this thought, that even references today’s epistle. He writes: “As the new-born child is the image of the full-grown man, so the soul is in a certain sense the image of God who created it. The child, upon growing up, begins gradually to recognize its father, and when it reaches maturity, they manage things mutually and equally, father with the son and son with the father, and the father’s wealth is disclosed to the son. Something similar should have happened to the soul. Before the fall, the soul was to have progressed and so as to have attained full manhood. But through the fall the soul was plunged into a sea of forgetfulness, into an abyss of delusion, and dwelt within the gates of hell….If you want to return to yourself and to recover your original glory, which you lost through your disobedience…then you must now have done with the devil whom you obeyed and turn towards the Lord.” We hear in that passage how Adam, and then each one of us, was created to grow up into the image of our Father, but that we have each of us strayed in our own way. St. Markarios then calls on us to repent if we wish to return to our original glory.
All of these teachers are in their own way describing the Orthodox understanding of “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” God, or likeness to God, is the purpose for which humanity was created. Our soul reaches maturity when it becomes like God. God is humanities telos. Adam failed at that purpose, he disobeyed, he missed the mark, and each of us has done the same ever since. But Jesus Christ did not miss the mark. He was able to say, “I and my Father are one,” and that, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” He was in every way the image of His Father. In his humanity, he is that which Adam was intended to be and that which we are called to become.
So we are each of us is called to be born again, to become spiritual babies and children. But this conversion is just the beginning of our salvation. In converting and becoming like children we able to re-start the journey of Adam in the Garden, and rather than following the example of our forefather, we are called on to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. This is the teaching of Jesus and of Paul and of Peter and John, and of all those Orthodox writers who follow them like St. John of Damascus, St. Markarios, St. Basil, and so many others.
There are two more points I would like to draw from today’s epistle reading. With this shift in our understanding of what is meant by “perfect,” we can begin to see that perfect is not a one-size-fits-all concept. This is why Jesus tells the rich man that he needs to sell all he has, while he tells the lawyer that he needs to expand his definition of neighbor. They have left the path in different ways and need different directions if they are to make it back. Not only do we hear in scripture of diversity in failures, we also hear about diversity in gifts. For instance in today’s epistle reading we heard: “And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” Each one of us has a different telos, a different purpose or goal, and thus a different perfection. For the body has not just one member, but many. Paul takes this metaphor of the body even further in his first letter to the Corinthians, asking, “If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not part of the body; is it therefore not part of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not part of the body; is it therefore not part of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God has set the members every one of them in the body, as it has pleased him….That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And when one member suffers, all the members suffer; and when one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.” We are each of us given different roles, and to fulfill those many, various roles is our path to perfection. We are indeed called to return to our “original glory,” but that does not mean that this “original glory” is identical in each of us.
This illustration of the body also subtly suggests the final point I would like to highlight. Growing into “the stature of the fullness of Christ” is not something we can do alone. This was also hinted at in today’s letter to the Ephesians. St. Paul says we “must attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” in order to achieve “mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” It is in faithful unity that we will best represent the fullness of Christ. As Paul writes in Hebrews, all those saints who have gone before us “did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that they would not be made perfect without us.” We are an integral part of the perfection of the saints. Being perfect, as only Christ Himself is perfect, as His Father in heaven is perfect, is not something we can achieve alone. This perfection is only attainable together. Thus, I stand in need of each and every one of you for my own salvation. And each of you need one another. And the entire world stands in need of us.
I often refer to the Church as a hospital for those whose souls are sick. We talk about being spiritually lame or blind, but in a similar way we can also be said to be spiritually young and weak. And thus it is also appropriate to speak of the Church acting as a nursery, a school, and a mother. We emerge from the waters of baptism spiritual infants, born anew. We come here each week to sit at our mother’s feet and learn her stories, to hear her songs. We do our best to obey her as she reminds us to be kind, not just to our brothers and sisters but to everyone we meet; to share both our toys and our talents; to find comfort in our home; and to see beauty in the world around us.
The Church shelters us under her wing. She mixes bread and wine on a spoon and begs us to open our mouths and to eat. She feeds each and every one of us as if we were babies, sitting in our high chairs with our mouths wide open. We come here this Sunday asking for enough grace to help us through just one more week, “give us this day our daily bread.” May these gifts here offered become for each one of us the light and life and love of Christ, the very body and blood of our Lord and God and Savior, descending into our hearts to give us the nourishment necessary to make our way toward our own perfection in Christ Jesus, to whom be all glory, honor, and worship forever. Amen.