Canter Bridge

The apostle Paul is seldom as brilliantly insightful as in his description of New Creation’s community in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians. The portrait of this new humanity as a body that responds to the direction of Christ as its head is redolent with ethical implications. It is a stirring picture, to say the least, but one that is at the same multi-layered in that way which both begs for and repays careful analysis.

Near the end of this discourse, Paul reverts to the familiar language of behavior as a way of clothing oneself. The metaphor mixes comfortably with the vocabulary of new creation:

You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

The dominant subtext here is that YHWH is in Christ forging a new creation, one that is continuous with but at once escapes the corruption and limitations of creation as we know it. Proper ethics is then a matter of aligning our lives with those qualities of new creation that we observe emerging, taking shape, and solidifying before our redemptively attentive eyes.

So does one not only notice, not only observe, but actually participates in the divinely driven process of creating something new and compelling where once only tired, worn, death-dealing patterns were in place.

So does new creation gather us in and make us its own. Paul sees future only in this.