For seven weeks beginning today, the second lesson at Sunday Mass will be taken from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, and during these weeks I encourage you to read and study all of the Letter to the Ephesians, which runs to about four pages in most Bibles.
The city of Ephesus was founded nearly three thousand years ago and was located on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Ephesus was the site of a magnificent temple to the pagan Greek goddess Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo, which was completed about 550 BC, and Ephesus also had a splendid open-air theater near the harbor that seated 25,000 people. The Romans took over Ephesus about a century before the birth of Christ, and in Paul’s time the city was a thriving commercial center of over 200,000 people.
Ancient tradition holds that when the Church was dispersed from Jerusalem by persecution, the Apostle John moved to Ephesus with the Blessed Virgin Mary and that they lived there together until near the end of her life when she returned to Jerusalem. It is likely that John wrote his Gospel in Ephesus during the last decade of the first century, and in the year 431 the Third Ecumenical Council of the Church was held at Ephesus.
That Council was convoked to refute the heretical teaching of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who held that Mary cannot be called the Theotokos, or God Bearer, but only the Christotokos, or Christ Bearer. The Council of Ephesus teaches that although Mary is God’s creature we must paradoxically call her the Mother of God to avoid separating the divine and human natures of the Lord Jesus, who is both the Son of Mary and God the Son.
Near the end of his second missionary journey, Saint Paul lived and worked in Ephesus for about two years beginning around 52 AD. The Apostle began his mission among the Jews of Ephesus, but after meeting stiff opposition to his preaching in the synagogue, Paul moved his attention to the Gentile population and planted the first Christian community in that ancient city which would play such an important part in the life of the Church for centuries.
Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians was written while he was in jail and was almost certainly composed in Rome about two years before his death. The central theme of Ephesians is the mystery of salvation in Christ which is made accessible on earth in the Church, the body of Christ.
Paul teaches in Ephesians that the entire human race is called by the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the forgiveness of their sins in Jesus Christ and, even more, that we are called to divine filiation - to adoption by God as sons and daughters in God the Son without respect to human distinctions: Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free, as Paul put it in his Letter to the Galatians.
Our second lesson today is from chapter one of Ephesians, verses three to fourteen, and in the original Greek, all eleven of these verses constitute one very long, intricate sentence, a fact which makes this text a real challenge to translate. Many of Paul’s letters contain a prayer of thanks or blessing after the greeting, and Ephesians follows this pattern but at greater length than usual.
Paul likely borrowed parts of this passage from an ancient Christian liturgical hymn, and the words came spilling out of his pen in an effort to say everything at once. But while God the Father can say everything in one Eternal Word, we mortals need many words to sing the glory of the Incarnate Word, and that is what Paul does here.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him.”
Notice, in Christ we were chosen by God the Father from before the creation of the universe so that we would be holy and blameless before him. The Greek word rendered here as blameless comes into Latin as immaculati. Immaculate. Without stain. So, in Christ we are all called to be holy and immaculate, just like the Mother of God.
Paul continues: “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”
Again, the plan for our salvation is eternal. God is not improvising after man’s Fall from grace, and the purpose of God’s will always included the taking of flesh by the Eternal Word so that he could share his divine nature with us by the union of his human nature with us. And the motive for this gift is love. Not power or control, not competition or domination. Love.
Paul goes on: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
But friends, we need forgiveness because we have trespassed. We have gone where we have no right to go. We have taken what we have no right to take. We have done what we have no right to do. We have sinned, and our disordered self-love separates us from God, from others, and from our own true selves.
But through Christ’s blood we have been washed clean and redeemed from the grave, and by the riches of God’s grace and wisdom, we now know the mystery of God’s will through the revelation of the Father’s eternal plan of salvation for the universe, a plan to unite all things in Christ.
Paul explains: “In him (Christ) we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.”
Here Paul teaches that because we have been adopted by God through our union with his Son, we are all now heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. Imagine discovering that you have inherited … everything: the universe and all that is within it. Well, we have obtained such an inheritance, and this was always God’s plan for the human race, beginning with the Jews - those who were the first to hope in the Messiah, the Christ.
“In him you also” - meaning us Gentiles - “ you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.”
Being sealed with the Holy Spirit happens at Baptism and is completed at Chrismation or Confirmation when we are marked with the Holy Chrism which makes us like Christ. That anointing with oil is a sign of the anointing of the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of our divine inheritance, and the Holy Spirit teaches, strengthens, and comforts us as we seek to receive the Gospel of salvation in the obedience of faith.
In these eleven verses of Ephesians we see the Holy Trinity at work for the salvation of the world. God the Father has an eternal plan for the human race, a plan made before the universe was made from nothing, a plan made out of love. God the Son completes the revelation or publication of that eternal plan of salvation by his life, death, and Resurrection, out of love. And God the Holy Spirit acts in history to unite those who trust in Christ Jesus to the spiritual blessings of his atoning death on the Cross and his glorious Resurrection and thus to impart the forgiveness of our sins to the praise of God’s glory, out of love.
And all of this is given to the world through Word and Sacrament. The Word of God eternal is God is the Son. The Word of God incarnate is the Lord Jesus. And the Word of God written is Holy Scripture. And we are called to communion with the eternal, incarnate, and written Word of God by the seven sacraments of the new and everlasting covenant.
Friends, the world is a mess and the Church often seems little better. But the mess is entirely of our making, not God’s, and the Church is messy only because we are. But the holiness of the Church and her power to bear witness to the eternal plan of salvation comes from the Savior and not from us.
The Lord Jesus is in his human nature the primordial mystery or sacrament of salvation. Then Christ’s Church is also the mystery or sacrament of salvation because it is his Body. And finally the seven sacred rituals given by Christ to his Church are the mysteries or sacraments of grace by which we receive the Gospel of salvation and are made the children of God through adoption.
And this is the eternal plan to make us holy and immaculate, to raise us up to be heirs of an eternal and glorious inheritance through our union of faith, hope, and love with the one alone who is both God and man, the Son of Mary and the Word made flesh, the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 14 July 2024, the 15th Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman