It has been my experience that people just beginning serious study of Sacred Scriptures follow a pattern: the Gospels/Acts, selected Old Testament books, and then the letters of St. Paul. One of the challenges in reading and understanding Paul is that you are often only listening to half of the conversation. Often Paul is responding to some news or correspondence he has received from the particular Christian community, e.g. Corinth and Galatia. This week’s first readings are mostly taken from the Letter to the Ephesians, a letter that lacks any personal greetings and seems, as some scholars offer, a “circular letter” meant to be received, copied and passed on to the next community. One is left to wonder if Paul is writing about a problem or whether the majestic chapters of Ephesians are meant to be an overarching message that emphasizes the unity in the church of Christ that has come about for both Jews and Gentiles within God’s household.
In the first reading today, Paul talks about “the mystery was made known to me by revelation.” He tells us the great mystery: the Gentiles would share in God’s promises. But wait a minute. Didn’t Isaiah already say that the nations would come to worship God? Didn’t God promise Abraham that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him? So what exactly was the mystery?
The surprise wasn’t simply that the Gentiles were invited but that they were no longer outsiders. “The Gentiles are coheirs [synklēronoma], members of the same Body [syssōma], and co-partners [symmetocha] in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” The underlying Greek and its near alliteration drives the point home. They didn’t have to become someone else before they could belong to Christ. The middle word, syssōma, is especially striking. It is an unusual Greek formation, emphasizing membership in the very same body, not simply association between two communities. The emphasis isn’t merely that Gentiles may receive blessings from Israel’s God. They become equal participants in God’s promise through Christ.
Prophetic expectation was that the nations would come to Zion and worship Israel’s God. But the mystery revealed in Christ is that Jews and Gentiles are reconciled in Christ and together constitute one new humanity, sharing the same access to the Father through the Spirit. The prophets saw the nations coming to God. But they did not see the full shape of the Church as the one Body of Christ, constituted through his death and resurrection, in which Gentiles share fully in the promise without becoming Jews. All this is no longer some future event, but one that has already happened. The Church itself has become the visible expression of what God has accomplished. “So that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the principalities and authorities in the heavens.”
If God’s great mystery is that people once separated have become one in Christ, then the Church cannot proclaim that mystery while casually accepting divisions within its own life. We cannot celebrate being one Body while treating other members as though they don’t belong. And the challenge isn’t simply to be welcoming in a general sense. It is to recognize that the person whom I might regard as an outsider may already be someone Christ has made my brother or sister.
For generations, the prophets proclaimed that the nations would come to God. But in Christ, God did something more extraordinary than anyone had fully imagined. He didn’t simply invite the nations to come and visit. He made them family.
It is not that God had never hinted at what He intended to do, but that no one had yet seen just how far God’s promise would go.
And you have to wonder if God is done. How far might He go?
Image credit: “Christ at the home of Martha and Mary” | Charles de La Fosse | Private collection in a castle in Lorraine (France); Galerie Didier Chéreau, Paris | PD-US
