In 1961, communist leader Erich Honecker ordered a wall built around the city of East Berlin. That infamous Berlin Wall separated families, prompted East Berliners to risk their lives for freedom, and became a hated symbol of the Cold War. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” said President Ronald Reagan in a speech near the Brandenburg Gate. The wall did fall, November 9, 1989. Today you have to look hard in Berlin to find anything left of that wall of separation but, if you’re old enough, the joy at its unbelievable fall is still remembered.
St. Paul used the image of a broken-down wall to describe the unity that Jesus Christ brings to Jews and Gentiles. The Good News of Jesus can reconcile people who have dealt with one another only on the basis of the Law and its demands and threats. “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Ephesians 2:14-16).
America and the world still have our dividing walls of hostility, and the Church’s sad divisions don’t model the better way, the way of unity that Jesus Christ brings between people. “There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6). What if the world saw that in us? Spirit of God, tear down these walls!
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