I am certain that I have not read Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” since I was in high school, though I could have come across it in college as well.
But a line from that poem apparently buried itself in my memory and I recalled it recently as I was reading the apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus.
“Something there is,” Frost wrote, “that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
Walls have earned places in history more for what or whom they kept out than for what or whom they kept in. The Great Wall of China, for example, was intended to keep out foreign invaders.
The Berlin Wall, on the other hand, was hastily erected to keep communist-controlled East Berliners in rather than to keep the free West Berliners out.
Whether they wall people or things in or out, they still separate and divide.
In the second chapter of Ephesians, we read that our Lord, by his sacrifice on the cross, “broke down the wall” that separated the Jews from the Gentiles and made them enemies. Paul also instructs us that Christ did this “to create out of the two races one new people in union with himself, in this way making peace.”
The wall that divided Jews from Gentiles was more than symbolic. In the Temple in Jerusalem, a wall separated the court of the Gentiles from the court of Israel. It resulted in a deep-seated hatred of each race toward the other.
Just as real is the “one new people” created when that wall of division came down. In effect, Jesus created a new humanity with an emphasis on oneness, on unity, on identity. By removing that wall, Jesus put Jew and Gentile together as if they were only one person. He restored them to what they ought to have been all along. He made Jews and Gentiles his brothers and God their Father.
All of this was a part of God’s eternal purpose of reconciling all things in Jesus Christ.
It is in the church that the new humanity is displayed. The church is what humanity was meant to look like – or it should be. We believers, who are the new humanity, must present ourselves in such a way that people will see us and say, “That’s a life I would like.”
The new humanity is characterized by our intimacy with God and with each other. God in Christ made it possible by breaking down a barrier to unity among his children.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” No, Someone, and He tore it down.