Unity in the Body of Christ
1As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called— 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
7But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. 8This is why it says:
"When he ascended on high,
he led captives in his train
and gave gifts to men." 9(What does "he ascended" mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? 10He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.)
Dig Deeper
From time to time in Christian history, a new group will pop up that seems to have a renewed zeal for religious unity. They want nothing more, they usually say, than to bring all believers back to a so-called New Testament Christianity and become united around the Bible alone. That is certainly a valid and praiseworthy goal, and is something worth striving for. There has just been one problem over the years. In almost every case, the movement has eventually caused more disunity than unity. There are certainly many reasons for that, but among them is the reality that most of those movements eventually get bogged down in disputes over which doctrines should be embraced in this great movement for unity. They then spiral into factions and splinters and end up with more disunity than when they started. The problem, then, is often that they lose sight that in order to attain unity, it must be kept at the forefront. This doesn’t mean that everything else can be sacrificed on the altar of unity, but if unity in Christ is not kept as the central tenet of the Christian community, it will eventually spiral into factions and infighting.
Paul knew this concept well. In the second half of his letter, he will turn his attention to specific ways in which these Christians can bring honor and praise to God in the life of their community. More than anything, he wants them to learn to live the life they were called to live, but he knows that the central component of that is unity. If they lose their unity, then everything else will be a sham and parody of the true life of the community of Christ.
Paul begins this section by repeating his belief that he is a prisoner on behalf of the Lord. It is instructive that even though Paul was in prison at the hands of the Romans, he still doesn’t see it that way. Everything he does and everything that happens to him is a result of his status in Christ because, for Paul, "to live is Christ" (Phil. 1:21). As a result of everything he has said up to this point in praise of God and his belief that all things relate to our new life in Christ, Paul urges them to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. By calling, he doesn’t mean their job or vocation, he is talking about the general call of the gospel on the lives of those who would believe to enter into the life of Christ and to live the life of the age to come based, in part, on their hope of resurrection. The call to the life of the Messiah demands total loyalty and takes complete precedence over everything else in life. Paul continues in verse 2 by listing elements such as being humble, patient, and gentle, that are not on par with the call to life a life worthy of a calling, rather they are varying aspects of that life that are vital to realizing its worth and true value.
A major aspect of this loyalty to the life of Christ is unity towards one another. Many people fall into the trap of thinking that the crux of New Testament salvation is about individual rescue from the wrath of God, and that is certainly involved, but there is far more to it than that. God’s plan, as Paul described in chapter 1, is about becoming a people, the elect in Christ. When we are baptized, we are baptized into the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12), and it is that body that demonstrates God’s wisdom to the powers of the world (Eph. 3:10). This is why the unity of the body of Christ must be maintained and guarded diligently. This is something that takes effort. It takes a determination to bear with one another in love. As Paul describes so beautifully in 1 Corinthians 13, love is not a requirement of God’s people, it is our destiny toward which we are being transformed.
There are two other important aspects of this unity that should not be lost. The first is that this unity is the unity of the Spirit. It comes from the Spirit and is maintained in the Spirit. That means that we don’t create unity, the Spirit does. It is up to the believers to maintain that unity by obeying the Spirit. The second aspect is that unity, rather than destroying diversity, relies on it. Nowhere in the New Testament is the Church called to live a life of uniformity. True unity in love demands diversity and the celebration of the creativity of the multi-faceted body of Christ.
Despite all of the other differences that the members of the body of Christ have, the unifying power of the gospel comes in that all believers share in the same universal body of Christ that shares the same Spirit, the same hope of the resurrection, the same Lord to which we are all obedient, the same faith in the life of Jesus Christ, the same baptism to enter into that life, and of course, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
In all of this unity, that does not mean that individual responsibility is lost. There is always a temptation in a community, to shirk responsibility and rely on everyone else to do the hard work. It should not work that way in the Kingdom of God, however. If we all share the same faith, then we should realize that each one of us holds a equal share in the grace of ministry that has been given each of us by Christ. The unity of the community of Christ is of utmost importance, but that unity and bond of peace can only be brought about by individual believers dying to themselves and living the life in the Spirit and in Christ to which we were each called. Each one of us, in other words, has the kind of access to God in the life of Christ to which Paul has referred repeatedly in the first three chapters, and needs to fulfill our role in the life of the body as we administer the grace that God has given us (1 Pet. 4:10).
The remaining verses in this chapter have been notoriously difficult over the years for commentators to understand or agree upon. Verse 8 is a quotation from Psalm 68:18, but what is Paul talking about here with all this talk of ascending, descending, leading captives in his train and giving gifts to men? Modern commentators often focus on possibilities such as the Incarnation, the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, or Christ’s descent to the Church.
None of these though, seem very satisfying in light of other Scriptures and the record of the early church writings. Acts 2:25-27 quotes from Psalm 16 in which David prophesies that God will not let his holy one, the Messiah, see the decay of Hades (misleadingly rendered "the grave" in the NIV). 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:6 both seem to speak of Christ descending into Hades and announcing to the souls there waiting for the resurrection, what Christ has done. In Revelation 14:13, we are told that those who die in the Lord are now blessed in a way that they had not been possible before Christ came in the flesh of a man. Early Church father, Irenaeus, wrote in 180 AD, "It was for this reason, too, that the Lord descended into the regions beneath the earth, preaching His advent there also. And He [declared] the remission of sins received by those who believed in Him."
Paul has already talked often in Ephesians about the access to God that is afforded to those in Christ both in the future and in the present and how it should impact the lives of believers. Now it appears that he refers to one of the most forgotten doctrines of the early church. The belief that Jesus went to Hades, particularly the area called "Paradise" or "Abraham’s Bosom" and led the righteous out of there and into the presence of God. Before the atonement of Christ, even the righteous dead’s sins had not been atoned for and so they could not be in the presence of the holy God. Now, however, that had all changed (see Rev. Which clearly depicts saints as being in God’s presence in heaven). There is no limit to the gifts that God has given to men in Christ or the access that we now have. God has given us so much, how can we not show gratitude for that by remaining unified in the Spirit of the Messiah.
Devotional Thought
The same Lord and Christ lives in the life of each member of the body of Christ. Remembering this is one of the great building blocks of community. What have you done lately to maintain and improve unity in the body of Christ? Have you done anything to damage or ignore that unity? What might you need to do to repair that?
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