Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ephesians · About this commentary
Awake, You Who Sleep
Ephesians 5:11-14
11 Have no fellowship with the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but rather even reprove them. · WEB
The instruction about darkness is to expose rather than to avoid, and the quotation that closes it is not found anywhere in Scripture.
Verse 11 gives two commands about the deeds of darkness, and the second is the surprising one. Have no fellowship with them — separation, as expected. But rather even reprove them — exposure, which is engagement rather than withdrawal.
The verb means to bring to light so that what a thing is becomes visible, and the letter has used the same idea of the mystery being made plain Ephesians 3:9.
Verse 12 concedes a limit: it is a shame even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. So the reproving is not to be a recital of details, and the letter does not resolve the tension between exposing and not discussing. What it supplies instead is a mechanism.
Verse 13 is that mechanism: all things, when they are reproved, are revealed by the light, for everything that reveals is light. The exposure is not chiefly verbal. Light does its work by being present — which is exactly what verse 8 said the readers now are. A congregation walking as children of light reproves the dark by existing in it.
Then verse 14, and the quotation is worth marking. Awake, you who sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you — introduced with he says, the letter's formula for citing Scripture Ephesians 4:8, yet these words stand nowhere in the Hebrew Bible in this form. They read as a summons of the kind used at a baptism, and their imagery draws on prophetic calls to a sleeping people.
What the letter does with it is consistent: the answer to darkness is somebody waking up and light falling on them.
held with reason What this mark means