The dividing wall of hostility: Some things never change

It was many centuries ago now that St Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, in a passage which liturgical churches re-read in services today: 

For he (Christ Jesus) is our peace, who has made both (competing groups among his readers) one, and has broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances ... (Ephesians 2:14-15)

What some translators term "the middle wall of partition" and "enmity", other translators have rendered "the dividing wall of hostility." The hostility was over who was right -- who was better -- and whether keeping ordinances could show who was good and not.

Paul's readers seem to have contained two sides of a debate: people who thought they were better than others because they kept certain purity laws, and people who thought they were better than others because they did not rely on purity laws. Given human nature, there were probably also those who were not that interested in the debate, and others who were not yet convinced by either side, but fixated on finding the one right answer in that debate. At any rate, it appears that all the air in the room was being used up on the debate.

The debates have changed. But one thing has not: when debates cause hostility, the debate itself becomes part of the problem. To be sure, a debate is more what the ancients might have called an "occasion" for hostility -- a setting in which sin flourishes. It really is up to us whether we descend into hostility. The fertile ground there is not merely the debate, but the idea that the debate falls into such a simple situation that people on one side are good people, while people on the other side are bad people. After all, St Paul devotes several chapters at times to explaining that the question of keeping the purity codes is not as simple as some would make it seem: that there is value in the law, and value in freedom, and possibly more value still in humility and recognizing that we are not all alike except in our humanity. God, grant me humility. 

Another thing remains the same: to get beyond our arguments, it requires perspective that God is greater still.