Walls

Walls

Ephesians 2:14-16

            I have long been a fan of Robert Frost.  Many of his poems speak powerfully to me.  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” and “The Road Not Taken” are some of my favorites, although it’s difficult to overlook “Choose Something Like a Star,” and…but you get the idea.

            One of my very favorites is “Mending Wall.”  Perhaps this poem means so much to me because, as a teacher, one of my goals is to break down walls—walls within people that prevent them from learning, as well as walls between people that prevent them from using their knowledge to create a better world.

            As you might gather from that last paragraph, “Mending Wall” is not about building walls at all, although that’s the activity the two men are engaged in.  It’s really about tearing walls down.  Frost wrote the poem in first person singular, making himself one of the characters in the story. 

The setting is New England, Frost’s home ground.  The countryside is dotted with walls made of the stones which are so plentiful in the area.  Many of these stones can be found lying about, while others are unearthed by farmers as they seek to make the land usable for growing crops.

            The Frost character and his neighbor meet on a spring day to repair the wall that separates their properties.  The stones have been dislodged by winter weather, which heaves the ground up in some places and depresses it in others.  Frost sees no need for the wall, since his property is covered in apple orchard and his neighbor’s in pine trees.  He tells the neighbor that his apples won’t come over and eat the pine cones.  The neighbor can only reply, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

            Frost’s most important point, I think, is found in lines 32-36

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

            We can point to all kinds of walls where this has been true:  the Berlin Wall; electronic walls erected by dictatorial governments to keep out radio broadcasts or the internet; walls of lies erected by those who don’t want the truth to be known.  In each case, something penetrates the wall, tears it down and allows everyone to see and hear clearly.

            Paul understood this.  In Ephesians he was speaking specifically of the wall in the Temple that separated the inner court from the court of the Gentiles.  This wall was low enough to see over, with gaps big enough to see through.  Its purpose was not only to declare, “No admittance!” to the Gentiles, but also to rub their noses in the fact that they weren’t allowed inside.  “Hah!” it proclaimed, “You are not one of the chosen.  You must stay on the outside looking in, while we enjoy all the benefits of being insiders.”

            Paul says that Jesus Christ has broken down “the dividing wall of hostility,” making all people one in him.  We have been reconciled to God, made members of one body through the cross, thereby destroying hostility and breaking down the walls hostility creates.

            God calls us not to erect any walls that separate people from each other.  Rather we are to be about the business of breaking down the barriers that divide us from each other, uniting all in Christ Jesus, and making us all one with God.