Ephesians 3:17-19
“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Where this sits
Paul's prayer for the Ephesians, offered from prison. It is the second of two prayers in the letter and the more personal.
Reflection
Paul mixes his metaphors in one line and does it on purpose. Rooted is agricultural; grounded is architectural. A root goes down into soil and draws from it; a foundation goes down into rock and holds weight.
Both are underground, and neither is visible. Whatever else he is asking for, it is not something anyone would be able to see. And both images describe the part of a thing that determines how much it can withstand.
What they are sunk into is love — not doctrine, not discipline. Paul is praying that the invisible, load-bearing part of these people should be made of that.
Then the dimensions, and the list is odd. Breadth, length, height, depth — four, where three would do. He does not say what he is measuring. The sentence has no object; he simply gives the axes and moves on. It reads like a man attempting to specify something and abandoning the attempt mid-sentence.
Which the next clause admits outright: to know Christ's love which surpasses knowledge. He asks them to know something he has just said cannot be known. That is not carelessness. It is the distinction between knowing a person and having the measure of them, and anyone who has loved someone for decades understands that these are different achievements.
And the goal is filled with all the fullness of God — the largest request in any of his letters, made from a cell.
- Theme:
- Love
- Book:
- Ephesians