Ephesians 2:8-9: Nobody Gets to Rank Anybody

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV)

Nobody Gets to Rank Anybody

“You would not believe what I paid for that,” a man says in the parking lot with the receipt still in his hand. The man he is telling it to bought the same thing last week and paid what it cost.

The people receiving this letter had spent their lives being told they were outside. Gentiles by birth, called uncircumcised by people who called themselves the circumcision, foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. Paul writes into that and says it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.

He ends the sentence on boasting, and boasting of that kind is something said in a room. It needs a mouth, and it needs somebody near enough to come up short while it is being said. I would guess the usual thing was already starting there, that whoever had been in longest had found a way to let it be known.

Work does not disappear from the paragraph. The same letter goes on to call every one of them God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works that God prepared in advance for them to do. Every job a mason takes gets one page in a spiral notebook, hours down the left side and materials down the right, and the hours still go in and the page still fills up. Nobody gets to add the column at the bottom and set his page beside the next man’s.

That is harder to receive than it sounds. A page with no total at the bottom is not much use to a man who wants to hand it across a table. The mason likes his notebook, and so do the rest of us.

He can price every wall he has ever put up, down to the sand. He keeps no page at all for the thing that was handed to him for nothing.