Ephesians 6:10-18
Rev. David A. Davis
August 23, 2015
Finally. As when you are sitting in a lecture hall, one of those college amphitheater rooms, listening to the driest of lectures and trying your best to stay awake. The speaker organized the presentation by numbering the main points and you started to lose focus somewhere after you heard, “Fifthly”. But your ears perk up and you take a few deep breathes and you find yourself able to type some notes again after you hear the person with the lapel microphone at the podium say “and….finally”.
Finally. Like when you find yourself on a jam-packed plane sitting on the tarmac at Newark Airport after a 3 hour flight waiting for a gate to open up. It was only 15 minutes but it seemed like forever, and then there is the deplaning ritual yet to come. As you step off the plane and hit the jet way, you don’t have to say anything. It’s your body that speaks as the blood makes it way back down your legs. Finally.
During one of those long hugs, at the airport, at the train station, in the driveway, when the loved one comes home after a semester abroad, a stint overseas with the military, just a long business trip. That embrace as tight as the one from the “Prodigal’s Father” and someone whispers “Finally”! Or the kind of shout that comes as the fireworks on July 4th reach their bombastic, colorful conclusions, “Finale, finally”, it’s all the same. Or when the use of the term and the tone with which it is spoken connotes attitude elevated to an art from. People use a few different words like “Finally” but the message is the same: “I’m just about done with you”. When heard this way the words sound the same: “Seriously….Whatev…..Finally”!
The Apostle Paul, Ephesians the 6th chapter, v.10. “Finally…Finally….Finally….be strong in the Lord” Perhaps better, “be made strong or keep being made strong… Finally, keep being made strong in the Lord. Paul and his finally. We’re here almost to the end of the epistle. So one could rightly conclude Paul’s use of the term is not unlike a professor’s organizational cue for a lecture; “we’re coming to the end now”. Though in Paul’s letter-form, the ending is most signified by his parting words of love and grace. Here in Ephesians, “Peace be to the whole community.” Maybe its better understood as the conclusion to just these last few chapters. After Paul addresses wives, husbands, children, fathers, mothers, masters, slaves, what the scholarly tradition labels and contextualizes as “Paul’s household codes”. Here in Ephesians as Paul signals the end of his domestic instruction, he writes, “finally”.
But it would not be far off base to interpret Paul’s “finally” as the tag for his finale, his rousing finish. After such memorable sections; God has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (1:22)…..For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing it is the gift of God….So, then you are no longer strangers and aliens but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God….For this reason I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and hear takes its name….There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, on faith, one baptism, on God and Father of all” And of course Paul on the gifts of the Spirit; all of them equipping the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. After all that, all those highlights, all those crescendo’s, finally, one last great big splash, the Apostle Paul and the whole armor of God!! Belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet, sword. The whole armor of God. Finale!!
Many New Testament commentators, weekly preachers, and devotional writers, they spend quite a bit of time with the armor metaphor. One suggests providing a labeled sketch in the worship bulletin of a roman soldier all decked out in battle attire. Another catalogues the armor to such degree that it seemed important to note which part of the armor Paul left out (something to do with shins). Many point out that all of the armor pieces are defensive except for the sword and the sword is the Word of God. There seems to be more than a bit of fascination with Paul’s extended metaphor of the whole armor of God.
Early this summer when the Nassau Church group was in the Holy Land, we learned the archeological term “tel”. As we visited some tells, you could see how they were strikingly visible mounds, hills, that rise from the earth over centuries. Tels are formed as one civilization is established over the remains of another. One place we visited archeologists have been able to identify 26 layers going back thousands of years. To say it is one civilization established over another is a bit of historically cleansed understatement. More accurately put, it is one civilization wiping out another with a violence, a destruction, a complete leveling, that over time reduces an entire people and decades of their existence to an inch or two in the earth. A tel is an archeologist’s dream perhaps, but also a lasting witness to humanity’s unquenchable thirst for violence, victory, and vengeance.
As we would be driving all around the region of Israel and the West Bank in our tour bus, Shane Berg would sometimes take the microphone and read to us from the ancient historian Josephus. Josephus offers vivid descriptions of the land and the geography from a resource of antiquity other than the bible. But to listen to Josephus read is to hear graphic accounts of violence that would rank up there with the latest post-apocalyptic movie out there today: blood, death, war. And any study of the city of Jerusalem itself is a chilling reminder that the potential for military conflict in that region now is a never ending lesson in history repeating itself, pretty much forever.
Interestingly then, even a rather obsessive treatment of Paul’s description of the whole armor of God does not begin to give Paul enough credit for his literary, poetic, metaphoric, creative use of the whole armor of God. It really doesn’t do justice to the contrast Paul makes between “the cosmic powers of this present darkness” and the ways of God. To make a drawing of a Roman soldier and label it like a kind of GI Joe spiritual action figure does little to draw out the Apostle’s Paul’s indictment of humankind’s lust for earthly power, and the idolatry of military might, and the penchant for evil. Belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet, sword. Paul’s not offering an inventory. For with every phrase, every piece, he offers the coupling of truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, prayer. He piles one twist, one paradox, one oxymoron upon another in way that just takes his point to the nth degree, hammers it home. Which is to say, in every conceivable way, the strength and power of God is in contrast to, works differently than, cannot even be compared to the forces at work in the world that gnaw away at and over time come to define the human condition. It is Paul’s ultimate description of how life in the kingdom of God ought to stand part from and forever contrast the world’s way. Finally.
The Apostle Paul’s “finally”. It’s where he points to the compelling, overarching existential, divine difference. In the Hebrew prophet Isaiah it is the peaceable kingdom. In Paul it is the whole armor of God. And the divine/human distinction, the path of the Spirit vs the path of the flesh, the way of God over and against the way of the world, for Paul it could not be more striking, more lasting, more clear. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, prayer. Which is why those blasted household codes ought to be so frustrating to us as a people of the Word. There is nothing about slavery that fits in Paul’s “finally”, that fits in God’s kingdom of truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and prayer. And no amount of historical contextualizing ought to make the church somehow feel better about it; especially when pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist preachers and churches and politicians used those verses all the time to justify their arguments and themselves in our nation’s history. Given the current conversation on race and the tensions that are again on the rise, the church, a prophetic church, a church that seeks a voice in the public square, a church committed to racial justice ought to take the risk and be willing to say that Paul just got it wrong. Paul on slavery, it was inconsistent with his own sense of God’s way. Every time the church gives Paul a pass that is labeled “historic context”, it invites someone inspired by literalism or far-right Christianity or hateful teaching that abuses the gospel, it invites someone to try to turn back the clock….or worse.
The belt of truth. The breastplate of righteousness. Shoes that proclaim the gospel of peace. The shield of faith. The helmet of salvation. The words of the Spirit which is the word of God. Prayer at all times. Notice too, how standing firm is the theme. Stand against. Stand firm. Stand therefore. Putting on the armor of God is a call to perseverance. Words like victory and conquering don’t appear. Victory for Paul? That’s resurrection; God’s victory in Jesus Christ over death ( I Cor). Conquering? We are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Romans 8). To immerse oneself in this promise, to put on the whole armor of God, to keep being strong in the Lord and in the strength of God’s power, it is for the purpose of standing firm in and for God’s kingdom, it is in order to persevere amid all that the world’s present darkness has to offer and to witness to, to work toward the world that God intends. The whole armor of God. Standing firm. It’s more than waiting for God’s promise of eternal life yet to come, it is a craving for an abundant life not just for you but for all.
One scholar translates the word “finally” in v. 10 as “for the rest”. Rather than “finally, be strong in the Lord”, he suggests, “For the rest, be made strong in the Lord. For the remainder, for everything else, keep being made strong in the Lord and in the strength of God’s power. It makes the whole armor of God sound a lot less like a command and a whole lot more of a promise. For all the rest, for everything else, for all that is in your life out there, for everything you face in the world, for the rest, allow the strength of God’s power to go with you, to be with you, to help you to stand. To stand. To persevere. To get to tomorrow and the next day and day after still standing for the way of God.
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