Note that this is the third in a series of three homilies focused on the Letter to the Ephesians.
17TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)
1. Two Sundays ago, last Sunday, today and for the next three weekends, the second reading at the Liturgy is taken from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Such liturgical prominence underscores the Letter’s significance.
2. The Letter begins: Blessed be God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing. God has chosen us in Christ before the world began for holiness of life. This truth tells us – I suggest – that you and I are marked in the course of our lives this side of the grave for a variety of vocational callings – marriage, religious life, medicine, law, priesthood, business and finance, technology and skilled labor. However, over and above these callings and transcending them all, we all share the overriding, all-important vocation which is the call to holiness of life. This is what the Letter to the Ephesians is all about.
3. As I have already stated, because God wills to communicate with us here on earth, he has no choice but to speak our language. Thus we can say – God’s word, in human words, expressed in literary form in the Sacred Scriptures, has a two-fold context: first, a particular writer, under the grace of the Holy Spirit, writes for a particular group of disciples at a particular time in the later decades of the first century Church. That very teaching, always under the grace of the Holy Spirit, is now addressed, especially in and through the Liturgy, to us who follow Christ here and now as we gather in prayer here in Wellesley Hills. What the author of the Letter to the Ephesians once wrote to the Ephesians is now addressed to you and me, under the Holy Spirit, at this very Liturgy. And what has Paul written? He tells us – “We are what God has made us to be, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared for us beforehand to be our way of life.” Thus, the Ephesians yesterday and we ourselves today are admonished to walk always worthy of the crucified Christ.
4. Our excerpt today from the Letter to the Ephesians stresses the unity of the Church, a unity which is a gift from the Holy Spirit and a challenge for all of us who are members of Christ’s body which is the Church. Ephesians is that great letter in which Paul sets forth God’s plan, God’s strategy for the salvation of the world. Paul writes in Chapter 3 – You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for your benefit to make known the mystery, the plan, which God had from the beginning of the world, to bring into unity both Jew and Gentile, announcing to the world that the Gentiles are co-heirs with the Jews, members of the same body, co-partners in the promises of Christ. In the opening lines of the Letter, Paul tells us that by reason of his self-giving love, God has destined us for adoption to himself through Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul borrows the expression of “adoption” from the legal system of ancient Rome. The Emperor Caesar Augustus had no heirs. He and his wife adopted an abandoned boy who succeeded his father with all the rights and privileges of sonship, even succeeding his father as emperor. This is what God does for us through Christ and the sacraments of the church. Making us, by the grace of divine adoption, daughters and sons of God, we truly become by grace what the Lord Jesus is by nature and that divine grace brings in its train the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity which unite us with God; and the moral or human virtues of prudence, justice, courage and temperance which are the virtues which make us human. The new law of Christ is summed up in charity and so Ephesians tells us – Be imitators of God, as his beloved children; follow the way of love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us.
5. It is important that we understand that the Christian life is not equivalent to the ethical life. It surpasses the ethical life but includes it. Morals and ethics are indeed important. However, the Christian life, by the grace of divine adoption, means our sharing in the life proper to our Three-Personed God, a life brought into human history through Christ the Lord and made available to all who believe by the sacraments of the Church. The ethics philosophers like to study are of great importance for all who possess human nature. However, they do not constitute Christian existence, Christian living. Christian existence is always under grace, and so we must speak of Gospel ethics. Faith, hope and charity are new virtues, new powers which come to us from the Holy Spirit. Aristotelian human or moral virtues are raised to the level of the Gospel by the Holy Spirit but are true virtues for us only when informed by Gospel charity.
6. How can we best describe this new life of our Catholic Christian life, our life in the Spirit? Two expressions come to mind which summarize the Christian life, namely, the love of God and the cross of Jesus. God the Father so loved us that he sent his only Son as our Savior. This Son of his so loved the Father and ourselves that he shows us the way to the Father, the safest way, the truest way, the surest way which we call the way of the cross. As we live this life it might be good to keep in mind some words of St. Cyprian, bishop and martyr in the early Church:
“It is with Christ that we journey, and we walk with our steps in his footprints: he it is who is our guide and the burning flame which illumines our paths: pioneer of salvation, he it is who draws us towards heaven, towards the Father, and promises success to those who seek in faith. We shall one day be that which he is in glory, if by faithful imitation of his example, we become true Christians, other Christs.”
P.S.: I have a summer suggestion for those reading this blog. Summer is a good time to catch up on some reading such as detective stories. My favorite mystery writer, perhaps a bit out of date, is Agatha Christie. Reading Agatha will get us caught up in her mysteries. Why not then read the Letter to the Ephesians. That will get us caught up in God’s mysteries.
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