Douglas Hickey

Dear Friends,

In today's reading from Ephesians (which I love), Paul writes that "[God] made us alive together with Christ...and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace toward us in Christ Jesus."

As I write this I am sick in bed with the flu, propped up next to a pile of dirty Kleenex, definitely not feeling like someone raised up and seated with God in the heavenly places.

I don’t always have a clear sense of what it means to be "in Christ Jesus." I think Paul is way too interested in powers and principalities and angelology and cosmic reversal for “in Christ” to just mean something like “identifying with Jesus’ teachings.” In fact, Paul doesn’t seem all that interested or even aware of Jesus’ sermons and parables. (In all of Paul’s letters, he quotes Jesus only three times).

Instead, Paul is much more concerned with the work that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection have accomplished on our behalf. So it seems more likely to me that when Paul says we were resurrected and raised up and seated with God in Christ, he means exactly that. Our spiritual position in the cosmos has changed radically as a consequence of Jesus’ coming and going, and this has already happened.

The break between our day-to-day experience and the reality we glimpse in Christ is a hard one for Christians to navigate. And I think it might be harder than usual during the Easter season when, counterintuitively, the gap between "Now" and "Not Yet"—that is between the Kingdom we proclaim and the Kingdom we perceive—can seem most glaring. Christ’s exaltation has already happened!

But then there’s the other business about “in ages to come.” And here we sit, uncomfortably stuck in the middle.

Paul gives structure to this middling space when he says, “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we may walk in them” which I take to mean something like “Accept the life God has given you. There is good work for you there, and when you inhabit that good work, you move closer to God’s purpose.”

They also serve who only sniffle and wait.

In Christ,

 —Douglas