Eph. 4.17-24 / 15th Sunday after Trinity / St. Clement’s, Oxford
17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. 19 Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. 20 That, however, is not the way of life you learned 21 when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
17Τοῦτο οὖν λέγω καὶ μαρτύρομαι ἐν κυρίῳ, μηκέτι ὑμᾶς περιπατεῖν καθὼς καὶ τὰ ἔθνη περιπατεῖ ἐν ματαιότητι τοῦ νοὸς αὐτῶν, 18ἐσκοτωμένοι τῇ διανοίᾳ ὄντες, ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ θεοῦ, διὰ τὴν ἄγνοιαν τὴν οὖσαν ἐν αὐτοῖς, διὰ τὴν πώρωσιν τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν, 19οἵτινες ἀπηλγηκότες ἑαυτοὺς παρέδωκαν τῇ ἀσελγείᾳ εἰς ἐργασίαν ἀκαθαρσίας πάσης ἐν πλεονεξίᾳ. 20ὑμεῖς δὲ οὐχ οὕτως ἐμάθετε τὸν Χριστόν, 21εἴ γε αὐτὸν ἠκούσατε καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ ἐδιδάχθητε, καθώς ἐστιν ἀλήθεια ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ, 22ἀποθέσθαιὑμᾶς κατὰ τὴν προτέραν ἀναστροφὴν τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν φθειρόμενον κατὰ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τῆς ἀπάτης, 23ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν, 24καὶ ἐνδύσασθαι τὸν καινὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν κατὰ θεὸν κτισθέντα ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ὁσιότητι τῆς ἀληθείας.
Let me give you a little story – entirely fictional, of course. Say you’re living together with other people, and you’ve got a new housemate who has a habit which annoys you. Say, for example, that they keep the bathroom floor rug hanging on the side of the bathtub rather than on the floor. This, for whatever reason, produces irrational irritation in you, maybe because the idea of having a rug and not keeping it on the floor doesn’t make sense to you. So, you are presented with a choice: get irritated, raise the matter with your housemate, maybe have your way, have what you wanted – that is, the rug on the floor – or just leave it and let your housemate have their way.
Now, you might think, if there ever was a banal moral dilemma this would be it: what could it really matter, in the great scheme of your or your housemate’s life, whether the rug is kept on the floor or not?
Well, I’d like to argue, that it could, in fact, matter more than we tend to think: I’d like to argue that in this story you, in fact, would be presented with a dizzyingly significant moral choice between merely getting what you happen to immediately want (the rug on the floor) or becoming ‘a new self, created to be like God in the true righteousness and holiness’.
Now, perhaps you think I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but – to my defense – I’m not alone in my hyperbole this Sunday morning. You see, I think that Paul is doing the same thing with his depiction of all non-Christians as being ‘darkened in their understanding’, ‘ignorant, ‘hard heartened’, ‘indulging in every kind of impurity’, and ‘full of greed’.
Indeed, we might even be slightly offended by such language, we might think that Paul was being a little too black-and-white, a little fundamentalist. Or maybe it was just different back then, he wasn’t aware of all the finer shades of grey we modern, tolerant people know about. For surely we all know many decent, good non-Christians.
And I think Paul did too. He lived in a very pluralistic culture, after all, interacted with all sorts of people. Why, then, such hyperbolic juxtapositions? Such stark contrasts between light and darkness, ignorance and understanding, deceit and truth, rugs on the floor and not on the floor?
I think it might be because sometimes we need them. Sometimes we need the stark contrasts, a little bit of hyperbole, to remind us again of the fact that life is a serious moral adventure where our choices matter. Even choices as banal as to where the bathroom floor rug should be kept.
Now, we might of course miss the point of Paul’s hyperbole. We might think that the most important contrast here is between ‘us’ Christians and ‘those’ others. This text, however, is not an invitation to go around Oxford this coming week like the Pharisee from Jesus’s parable, thanking God that we are not ‘like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers’. In fact, such sense of self-satisfaction is the opposite of what this text is getting at.
I think, you see, that the most relevant contrast is found not between us and others but within each of us – between a self and a self. It’s the contrast between ‘our former way of life’ – ‘the old self’ – and our new way of life learned through Christ, the new self formed to his image.
While words like ‘old’ and ‘new’ suggest a temporal contrast – a contrast between now and then, what we used to be and what we are now – I’d like us to also consider that perhaps the central contrast is between the selves we are and the selves we could be.
The selves we could be – the person I could be – extends into two directions. First, there is the self whose heart is hardened, who is ‘alienated from the life of God’, darkened in her understanding, so ignorant as to be almost incapable of truth. Then there’s the other self, ‘created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness’, the self set free by the truth, the flourishing self.
As you can see, this is quite serious indeed, these possibilities of my becoming. Perhaps serious enough to merit some hyperbole, some stark contrasts, and broad strokes.
Thus, also my somewhat hyperbolic story about the dizzying moral significance of the bathroom floor rug. For this formation, this becoming, this choice between two possible selves, abides in the ordinary and the banal. It’s the stuff of bathroom rugs on the side of a bathtub.
And now, here’s the catch: desire is what draws me toward either self. Desire is formative. Like a magnet it moves us toward what we see as good and in so doing it shapes our lives, our selves. We become what we love.
There can be a formation of the self through desire that is aimed at what is truly good. In so doing, I can become the image of what I love, I can become like my beloved, like God in true righteousness and holiness, his image disclosed in me through transformation.
There can also a formation of the self through desire that is not aimed at true goods, futile love. I can spend my life and energy on things not quite worthy of my love – or things not quite worthy of all the love I give them. This will result in a kind of counter-formation of the self, or deformation of the self. The end product is a life spent in futility, as Paul says.
One way to put this is to say that we can love lesser goods as our highest good. If I love something as my highest good, I love it like my happiness depends on it: if I only get this thing, then I will be happy, content, satisfied, at peace.
St. Thomas Aquinas offers what I think is quite a good list of false candidates for our greatest good: money, honour, power, fame, and pleasure. (Summa Theologiae, II-I, q. 2, a 1-8). It is possible for us to seek these things as our true happiness, as the final rest of our restless hearts or to love these more than we should love better things.
It’s not wrong to love something as our highest good – only we need to love what truly is the highest good as our highest good. In other words, we need to know the truth about the things we love. According to traditional Christian understanding this highest good is God. This the truth we were taught in Jesus: that our true happiness, our very best good, is to be taken into God’s own Triune life, know him who is Love, be formed into his likeness by living in love. That is our calling.
There’s a connection, then, between desire and truth, as Paul indicates: the old self is ‘corrupted by its deceitful desires’ because it is ‘darkened in its understanding, separated from the life of God because of ignorance’. The old self doesn’t know the truth about the things it loves – it spends its love on things not entirely worthy of its love, it thinks that pleasure, money, honour, power or fame will make it happy.
Our desire for these sorts of goods can be very strong – and if left unchecked potentially destructive. At the very least, desires not ordered rightly toward true goods make for chaotic lives. Hence, we need to train our desires. The desert fathers and other such saints from the church’s history advise us that for such a training, asceticism is needed. Intentional denial of something we immediately want so that our desires can be directed toward higher ends. In other words, fasting and things like that, yes, but also more ordinary intentionality about when to pursue what we in the moment happen to want – such as the placement of the bathroom floor rug where I’d like it to be.
It’s perhaps a common misconception in our somewhat pleasure-focused culture that those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of their immediate desires – who, as Paul puts it, ‘give themselves over to sensuality’, whose desire for things like pleasure, power or money is unbridled – somehow experience more intense satisfaction, that they live a life of more vivid pleasures. The ascetic, denying himself needlessly, is the unsatisfied and unhappy one, this culture of pleasure says.
Paul – and the church’s ascetic traditions – disagree, however: giving oneself over to such lesser loves results in loss of sensitivity, not its intensification. You see, desire is like a powerful river flowing within us; we can choose to channel its power toward what’s truly good and in so doing harvest that power toward formation into our true selves, toward what makes for true happiness. Or we can run after whatever in the moment seems best, letting the river of our desire run first this way and then that way, dividing itself into smaller and smaller little streams, less and less powerful and vivid. Ultimately, we can become almost entirely insensitive to true goods, wasting our lives away, running after unreal pleasures.
I have a choice, then, a dizzyingly significant choice even in the most banal situations as to how I channel the power of my desire: do I want the bathroom rug where I’d like it to be or do I embrace this situation as an opportunity for pursuing an even better good – the formation of my self away from selfishness toward God and other human beings in love? I can put away the old self, corrupted by its selfish wantings and loves, and embrace a new life in Christ.
The more we love what’s truly good, the more we let our desire be formed by the truth, the more we will know the good, our sensitivity to what is true and good increases – and so does our pleasure in what is good. The good ordering of desire according to truth results in its purification and finally, clarity of vision. ‘Blessed are pure in heart, for they shall see God.’
I’m presented with the possibility, then, as to how to organise my desires and loves: I can pursue what is truly good according to the truth about the things I want. And in so doing I can become formed into the image of what I love.
Or I can treat my immediate desires themselves as truth about what I need and what I must have to be happy, I can let those desires run my life, and eventually – if things go badly enough – bring it to ruin.
This formation of the desiring self, the making of our loves, is something God’s Spirit achieves in us, but it also requires training and intentionality on our part. ‘Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit’, as Paul says in Galatians. Since we are ‘blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing’ (Eph. 1.4), ‘destined for adoption as God’s children’ (1.5), let us live that way.
As to how this training of desire and formation of self could happen on a practical level, I have two things in mind for us today.
First, by paying attention to what we give our attention to. As Maximus the Confessor says it: “Where the mind devotes its time it also expands, and where it expands it also turns its desire and love.”(Chapters on Knowledge, 71.) Hence, as Paul says, we should be made new in the attitudes of our minds, giving our attention to what is truly good for us.
Second, and this is connected to attention, we should not ignore what is closest and most immediate but embrace even mundane choices as opportunities for growth. I’ve got a choice, even in the most trivial, between having what I want immediately and some greater good, greater happiness. Also, if I can’t fight my selfish desire even with something as banal and unimportant as where to keep a bathroom rug, how could I ever be ready for the time when more difficult and serious situations call upon me? The moral life, after all, cannot be lived in grand abstractions, in some great ideas about heroic future actions. It must be lived here and now.
Here now and now, then, we have a call: to live for what is truly good, to ‘lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely’ (Hb. 12.1), to begin again a pilgrimage toward that new self, created to be like God in truth and in love. Today we can pursue this call not because in so doing we merit God’s love, as if we were anything but sinners saved by grace, but because in so doing we will be happy.