Begin with verse twelve, because verse twelve is the instruction manual and everything else is hardware.

For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.

Notice what that sentence does before it does anything else. It subtracts. Before Paul tells you a single thing the enemy is, he tells you what the enemy is not, and what the enemy is not is people. Flesh and blood is the plainest phrase in the whole letter for a human being, and it is the first thing ruled out. Not against flesh and blood is a subtraction before it is ever a battle plan.

That matters because of where it sits. Paul has just spent five chapters on how to live with actual human beings, at close range, under the same roof. Speak the truth to your neighbour. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Be kind to one another.

Bear with each other, he says. Then he hands out armour, and the first thing he tells you about it is that the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

He is not changing the subject. He is protecting the five chapters he just wrote. The armour is issued so that the household survives, and the clause is there so that nobody in the household gets mistaken for the thing the armour is for. Not against flesh and blood is the fence he puts around his own house rules.

Now count the verbs, because they are the tell.

Stand against. Resist in the evil day, and stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore. Three commands to stand and one to resist, and then the list. There is no verb of pursuit anywhere in the passage. Nobody is told to advance, to hunt, to root out, to purge, or to take ground. The whole grammar of the thing is a person planted where they are, not moving. That is what an army looks like when the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

That is a strange way to arm a raiding party, and a very sensible way to arm a household. Which is precisely what the Collect asked for a moment ago: guard Thy household, that it may be free from harm and serve Thee by good deeds. Guard. Not conquer. The equipment matches the prayer, and both of them assume the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

Then look at what is actually in the kit, one piece at a time.

A belt, of truth. A breastplate, of justice. Shoes. A shield, of faith. A helmet, of salvation.

Five items, and every one of them is armour in the ordinary sense, meaning it does nothing at all unless somebody is coming at you. You cannot attack a man with a helmet. That is the shape of equipment issued on the understanding that the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

There is exactly one thing in the list that has an edge on it, and Paul names it before you can get any ideas: the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Not your argument. Not your position. Not the thing you were about to say to that person. The one offensive item in the whole inventory is explicitly not yours, which is exactly what you would expect in a fight that is not against flesh and blood.

The shoes give the game away completely. And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Read that as a quartermaster would. Somebody is being issued footwear, and the footwear is peace. You do not put peace on the feet of an army you are sending out after people. Whatever this equipment is for, the ground it is meant to cover is ground you arrive on peaceably, because the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

So the passage arms you, tells you not to move, hands you a defensive kit, gives you one weapon that belongs to God, and puts peace on your feet. And then people have taken it and gone hunting. Every one of those choices only makes sense if the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

Here is the fruit-test, and it applies where it belongs, which is to Christianity’s own record with this text. When not against flesh and blood is dropped out of the reading, the language of this passage gets pointed at human beings, and it always has. Heretics. Witches. Neighbours.

Whole peoples, in some centuries. The armour comes off the wall and somebody in particular gets called the darkness. That is not a misuse at the margins of the text; it is a flat contradiction of the one clause in it that names the target, and the clause says not against flesh and blood.

I want to name who is on the receiving end of that reading right now, because the clause itself makes the naming necessary. Trans people are described, routinely and in the language of this very passage, as a spiritual battle, an agenda, a darkness to be resisted. The words come straight out of Ephesians six. The clause in the middle of Ephesians six forbids exactly that, because a trans person is flesh and blood, and the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

That is not a soft reading imported from outside. It is the sentence Paul wrote, in the position he wrote it, doing the job he gave it. Anyone using this armour on a person has picked up the equipment and thrown away the instruction.

And if none of the theology here is yours, the ethical claim stands on its own and it is short. A moral fight that has found itself a human target has already gone wrong, whatever it says it is about. Cruelty toward a specific person is not a side effect of the good fight; it is the evidence that the fight stopped being good. You do not need to believe in principalities to accept that the wrestling is not against flesh and blood, because the whole moral use of the phrase is to keep you from turning a person into an abstraction.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who transitioned in her fifties and went back to the same small church she had attended for thirty years. On her second Sunday a man she had known for two decades met her at the door and told her, in front of other people, that she was what was wrong with the world. She went in and sat where she always sat.

She kept coming. Not weekly at first, and never comfortably, but she kept coming, and she kept sitting in the same place, and after a while so did he, two rows back. Nothing was resolved. There was no conversation, no apology, no scene of reconciliation that anybody could point to afterward.

What happened instead took years and was almost invisible. One winter morning she came in late and her book was already open on the seat, at the right page, with somebody’s glove laid across it to hold it flat. He never said anything about it, and neither did she, and it happened again the following week.

That is what the passage is describing. He had been treating her as the enemy, and one day, without announcement, he stopped. He did not surrender a conviction in public. He put down a weapon he should never have been holding, because the wrestling is not against flesh and blood, and what was left over was a man who could reach a hymn book before somebody else got there.

Look at Sunday’s Gospel again through that clause, because it is the same lesson from the other end. The servant is forgiven ten thousand talents and walks straight out and throttles a man over a hundred pence. His mistake is not that he fought. It is his choice of opponent, and the rule he broke is the one that says not against flesh and blood. Shouldst not thou then have had compassion also on thy fellow servant, even as I had compassion on thee? He had just been handed everything, and he went looking for the smallest human being in reach.

Monday the whole Church prayed eternal rest give to them over every one of its dead without sorting them into deserving and undeserving first. That refusal to sort is the same instinct as this clause. Both of them decline to make a category of people into the problem, and both of them do it on purpose, in the liturgy, where it is hardest to wriggle out of. Not against flesh and blood does the same work in a single clause.

The Offertory today is a single verse about Job. There was a man in the land of Hus, whose name was Job, simple, and upright, and fearing God. The Church puts that verse here, on this Mass, and it fits the clause exactly.

Job’s real injury in that book is not the weather or the boils. It is three friends who arrive, decide he must be the guilty party, and spend thirty chapters on him. They had the wrong opponent. Their wrestling was not against flesh and blood either, and they never worked it out.

The Gradual then says something worth holding onto if you are the one being wrestled with. Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from generation to generation. Refuge, not fortress. A refuge is a building measured by who gets in, not by who gets kept out, and generation to generation means that whoever has been treated as the darkness this century will not be the last person to need the door. A refuge only makes sense to people who already grant that the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

And the Alleluia verse, on a Wednesday with nothing else going on, is Israel walking out of Egypt. The people in that sentence had a real oppressor, an actual state, an actual army. The verse does not name a single Egyptian. It names the going out. Even there, at the one place where flesh and blood genuinely was in the way, the liturgy keeps the sentence pointed at deliverance rather than at a person, because the wrestling is not against flesh and blood.

The <a href=”https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05485a.htm?utm_source=bloomministries.org” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Catholic Encyclopedia</a> records something about this letter that makes the clause land harder. Ephesians was written from prison, most likely at Rome, and the article notes that it reads as a circular letter rather than mail to one congregation. The man handing out armour was in custody. He had flesh and blood opponents, with keys.

He does not mention them. He had every excuse to name a jailer, an informer, a magistrate, and he writes instead that our wrestling is not against flesh and blood. That is not a man who has never met an enemy. That is a man in chains declining to give the word enemy to a person who could have earned it.

Which is why the clause holds on an ordinary Wednesday, and why it needs to. Nothing is being celebrated today. Fourth class, green, no feast, no commemoration, the Sunday’s texts read out again to whoever showed up. The armour is not issued for great occasions; it is issued for the Wednesdays, when the temptation is not to fight a war but to be small and hard with one particular person who is easy to be small and hard with. Not against flesh and blood is a Wednesday rule before it is a doctrine.

Stand there. That is the whole instruction. Keep the belt and the breastplate and the peace on your feet, keep the sword in the hands it belongs to, and keep the clause in the middle of the passage where Paul put it, because our wrestling is not against flesh and blood and the moment you forget that you have started fighting something you are supposed to be protecting.

↑ The order resumes below.