The New "We"

Diversity as it is present in our society has more faces than the sky has stars.  In the Apostle Paul's day, diversity was a part of culture as well.  However, in the first century world which Paul knew as a Jewish man, diversity only had two faces.  His upbringing taught him that there were only two kinds of people in the world.  Jews were one kind.  Everyone else made up the other kind.  The other than Jewish face in the world was the Gentile face.  It might be Ethiopian, or Greek, or Egyptian, but they were still lumped together in the category of Gentile.

 

One of the early struggles of the Christian community had to do with taking the message about Jesus which came out of the Jewish culture into the Gentile world.  In the beginning there was a danger that the Jesus movement would simply be a Jewish sect instead of a faith that had world wide impact.  Paul saw himself as one called to carry the gospel into the second community, the Gentile community.  In the 11th verse of the 2nd chapter of his letter to the church at Ephesus, we hear him saying, "...remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth called the 'uncircumcision' by those who are called 'the circumcision'...

To read the larger section which begins at this point and continues to the 3rd chapter is to hear how Christ has come to bridge the gap between those who allow differences to separate them from those unlike them.  In those verses the Word of God speaks of  "one new humanity in place of the two" and how Christ "might reconcile both groups to God in one body, through the cross..." (Ephesians 2:15-16)  As the Spirit is given freedom to work out what it means for us to be new creations in Christ Jesus, we come to the place of knowing that "us and them" no longer exists.  Through the blood of Christ on the cross we have been made into a "we."