Poul Madsen
"This is a profound mystery --
but I am talking about Christ and the church."
Ephesians 5:32 (NIV)
EACH time the word mystery appears in the New Testament, we ought to prick up our ears, for we are faced by something which no man of himself can understand or fathom. To rush on hastily is to risk missing some special divine emphasis. Paul also speaks of Christ as "the mystery of God" (Colossians 2:2), and thereby stresses the fact that flesh and blood can never of itself truly know Him. Unless God reveals to us who Christ is, we shall misunderstand Him throughout our lives. In a similar way the Church is a mystery, indeed a profound mystery; even Christians may have wrong ideas about her, wrong ideas which can be so deeply rooted as only to be got rid of with great difficulty.
The most difficult Letter to understand in the New Testament is possibly that written to the Ephesians. In this book the word mystery occurs quite often (1:9, 3:3, 3:9, 5:32 and 6:19) and a great phrase used to describe the Church is "The body of Christ". Already in his first Letter to the Corinthians Paul had made the amazing statement: "For as the body is one and has many [53/54] members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body, so also is the Christ." This may surprise and even puzzle us, but of course we must take it spiritually. The apostle goes on to explain his meaning when he writes: "For in one Spirit were we all baptised into one body ..." (1 Corinthians 12:13).
By giving us His own Spirit, the Lord has united Himself to such an extent with us and united us with one another, that we constitute a spiritual body. This is not just a picture but a reality, so that each believer is one of His members and a member of all others. This is easy to state, but maintaining it in practice involves maintaining a mystery which remains a mystery even when it has been revealed. In other words, we have to fight all our lives against the very human tendency to treat the Church as an institution. It is and it remains the body of Christ and any thought of making it into an institution goes against its very nature. We must beware of trying to substitute our own common sense for a divine mystery.
We know of course that God does not dwell in the building which we call "churches", however sacred these may seem to be, but that the reason for His presence is that there are those -- even if only two or three -- who are gathered together in His name. If they were not there, the Lord would not be there, for the building itself does not attract His presence. The real Church is a spiritual building of living stones, that is, regenerated Christians. Paul calls this "a holy temple in the Lord" and a "habitation of God in the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:20-21).
Since the people of God constitute the Church of God, that Church may be found in some Siberian prison camp where the two or three of God's saints are able to pray and worship together and may yet be lacking in beautiful Church buildings where unregenerate people meet in a merely formal way. We are never exhorted to build church buildings, but we are exhorted to be built up as living stones to a spiritual house. Our services are not thought of in terms of "going to church" but of being assembled together in the Lord's name with the risen Christ in the midst.
Denmark is supposed to be a country which excels in various societies; Danes are said to be mad on societies. At least we know what a society is -- it is a group of people who choose to unite, usually because they have a common interest. The Church, however, is not a fellowship of people with a human basis of uniting, but is in fact a fellowship of incompatibles! Jews and Gentiles are incompatible: Jews despise Gentiles and these in turn hate Jews. There is an insurmountable barrier between them. They would never join together in any society nor form any collective, but would prefer to keep as far apart from each other as possible. In India a high caste Hindu and a pariah will have nothing to do with each other. The former despises the outcast, would not give a thought to him nor help him in his need, but keep him at a proud distance. A Hindu and a pariah could never form a collective. But in Christ and around Christ, incompatibles are united, Jews with Gentiles, high castes with low castes, in a miraculous way which the world can never hope to emulate.
What is more, in Christ God is united with sinners. This is indeed a case of the unifying of incompatibles. The Church is a divine masterpiece, both vertically and horizontally, where redeemed sinners are united with God and previous enemies are united in a fellowship which holds good in time and eternity. In this fellowship, all differences of race, religion, social standing and every other kind of consideration which separate man from man are abolished, for Christ is all and in all (Colossians 3:11).
