No Longer Strangers

Exodus 16:9–21; Ephesians 2:11–22

Remember that you were at that time without Christ, Paul writes to the Ephesians. Remember being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Remember what it felt like to be outside.

Paul is writing to Gentile converts—people who, by every measure of Jewish identity, had no claim on God’s promises. They were the outsiders, the uncircumcised, the ones beyond the wall. And now, Paul says, in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall.

"There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, sermon, 1934

The dividing wall Paul refers to was literal. In the Jerusalem temple, a stone barrier separated the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts. Inscriptions warned that any foreigner who passed beyond the barrier would have only themselves to blame for their death. Christ, Paul argues, demolished that wall. Not by rewriting the rules but by absorbing the hostility into his own body.

Meanwhile, in Exodus, the manna continues. The people gather—some much, some little—and when they measure it, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage. The provision is perfectly equitable. No one goes without. No one hoards. The wilderness becomes, for a moment, a glimpse of the kingdom.

Abba Macarius the Great once told a story: I was walking through the desert and found a skull lying on the ground. I asked it, Who are you? It replied, I was a pagan priest. And when you pray for those in hell, we receive a little comfort.

Even in the desert fathers’ imagination, mercy crossed every wall—even the wall between the living and the dead.

The walls we build—between denominations, between political parties, between the worthy and the unworthy—are real. They shape our lives. They determine who belongs and who does not. But Paul insists they have been broken. In Christ, there is no dividing wall. The stranger has been made a member of the household. The alien has been given a home.

Today, consider: who is on the other side of your wall? Whose outsider status have you accepted as permanent? Paul’s letter is an invitation to look at the rubble where the wall used to be and to recognize, in the face of the stranger, a fellow member of the household of God.

In the monastery of Taizé in France, brothers from Protestant and Catholic traditions live together under one roof. The community was founded during World War II by Brother Roger, who sheltered Jewish refugees. The entire project—ecumenical, international, rooted in reconciliation—is built on the conviction that the dividing wall has been broken. Every Friday evening, thousands of young people gather in the Church of Reconciliation for prayer around the cross. The prayer is almost entirely silence. In the silence, the wall stays down.