Dear Friends,
Starting last Sunday, the second reading at Sunday Mass comes from St. Paul’s wonderful letter to the people of Ephesus. We will be listening to it for the remainder of the summer. Perhaps that does not strike you as anything special, but those selections are filled with some of Paul’s famous statements and teachings. The letter to the Ephesians is extraordinary. The things Paul could not tell the Corinthians, he tells the Ephesians, things that can only be understood spiritually and by a unified church. Ephesians was one of the most widely circulated of St. Paul’s writings because of its powerful, practical instructions for disciples of Christ. In fact, its six short chapters contain some of the most discussed passages in the New Testament.
In Ephesians, Paul describes how high Christ ascended – above every name that is named and beyond all the heavens, so that He could fill all things; how He created the Church as “the fullness of Him who fills all things”; how He made Jew and Gentile one new temple, made a new person in Himself, allowed us to offer ourselves as a new offering, and sent to His bride (the church) the gifts needed for her to be a pure and unwrinkled, unspotted bride. As we hear today, “Jesus broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person, thus establishing peace.”
Each week we will get several nuggets from St. Paul in our second reading. I hope those nuggets will be the source of your reflections this summer. Paul, as he stresses next week, is trying to teach the Christians in Ephesus to live in harmony with each other as mature disciples of Jesus.
Paul is teaching them what Jesus taught – that others will know we are his disciples because of the way we love one another. That is not an easy thing to do, to love. Love is often burdensome. This bothers people today because we want to feel good about our love. We think that loving freely arises from the happiness loving gives us. This is not the kind of love that Jesus taught.
Love to the Christian is not a product of passions or appetites. Love, as is powerfully taught in Marriage Encounter, is a decision. Love arises from the will – regardless of the feelings. In fact, Christian love (agape) has been defined as “to will the good of the other.” The love of the Christian – the love of Christ – is the love that wills the blessedness of its object. Not a feeling or a passion, but a choice to act for the good of the other.
The love that Christ planted in our hearts through the paschal mystery is a unique love, especially in an age like ours that doesn’t believe in a will. When a Christian looks at another person in a Christian way, he or she beholds before them the Image of the One they love above all else. Because they love Christ, they labor for those they love. The love of Christ labors in them to bring the beloved to perfection, to what scripture calls “glory”.
St. Paul speaks of “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” and says that when a person gazes on Christ they are “transformed from glory to glory,” and that “these momentary light afflictions” work in you “an eternal weight of glory.” The Christian, as Christian, should have one supreme desire for the object of his or her love: to see it attain this state of blessedness, this glory.
St. Paul told us last Sunday, “In Jesus we were also chosen, destined in accord with the purpose of the One who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will, so that we might exist for the praise of his glory.”
Knowing that we have been chosen by Jesus for glory, we can help love others into that same glory.
Peace,
Fr. Damian