Epistle – Ephesians iii. 13‒21
Brethren, I pray you not to faint at my tribulations for you, which is your glory. For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened by His Spirit with might unto the inward man. That Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts; that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth. To know also the charity of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do all things more abundantly than we desire or understand, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus unto all generations, world without end. Amen.Thanks be to God.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
“My heart has uttered a good word! I speak my works to my King!” (Psalm xliv. 2) The enthusiasm of the royal Psalmist when singing the glorious Nuptial Song has taken possession of our Apostle’s whole soul, and inspires him with this marvellous Epistle which seems to put into music, into a song of love, the sublime teachings of all his other Letters. When he wrote this to his Ephesians he was Nero’s prisoner, but it shows that the word of God is anything but hampered by the chains that make an Apostle a captive (2 Timothy ii. 9).
Although the Epistle to the Ephesians is far from being the longest of his Letters, yet it is from it that the Church borrows most during these Sundays after Pentecost, and we may argue from such choice that it gives, more than any other of Saint Paul’s Epistles, that leading subject on which the Church is particularly anxious to direct her children’s thoughts during this season of the Liturgical Year. Let us therefore thoroughly master the mystery of the Gospel (Ephesians vi. 19) by hearkening to the herald who received it, as his special mission, to make known to the Gentiles the treasure that had been hidden from eternity in God (Ephesians iii. 8, 9). It is as Ambassador that he comes to us (Ephesians vi. 20), and the chains which bind him, far from weakening the authority of his message, are but the glorious badge which accredits him with the disciples of the Christ who died on Calvary.
For God alone, as he tells us in the music we have just heard, can strengthen in us the inward man enough to make us understand, as the Saints do, the “dimensions” (breadth, length, height and depth) of the great mystery of Christ dwelling in man, and dwelling in him for the purpose of filling him with the plenitude of God. Therefore is it, that falling on his knees before Him from Whom flows every perfect gift, and who has begotten us in the truth by His love (James i. 17, 18) he, Paul, our Apostle, asks this God to open, by faith and charity, the eyes of our heart so that we may be able to understand the splendid riches of the inheritance He reserves to his children, and the exceeding greatness of the divine power used in our favour, even in this life (Ephesians i. 18, 19).
But if holiness is requisite in order to obtain the ull development of the divine life spoken of by the Apostle — let us also take notice how the desire and the prayer of Saint Paul are for all men, and how therefore no one is excluded from that divine vocation. Indeed, as Saint John Chrysostom observes, the Christians to whom he sends his Epistle are people living in the world, married, having children and servants, for he gives them rules of conduct with regard to each point (Ephesians v. 22; vi. 1, 5). The Saints of Ephesus, as of all other places, are no others than the Faithful of Christ Jesus (Ephesians i. 1) that is to say, they are those who faithfully follow the divine precepts in the condition of life proper to each. Now it depends on us to follow God’s grace. Nothing else but our own resistance prevents the Holy Ghost from making Saints of us. Those sublime heights to which the progressive movement of the sacred Liturgy has since Pentecost been leading the Church are open to all of us. If the new order of ideas introduced by this movement strike us at times as being beyond our practical attainment, the probable reason of such cowardice is, and a short examination of conscience will bear witness against us, that we neglected, ever since Advent and Christmas, to profit, as we should have done, of the teachings and graces of every kind which were given us as means for advancing in light and Christian virtue. The Church, at the commencement of the Cycle offered her aid to every one of us, and that aid she adapted to each one’s capabilities, but she could never remain stationary because some of us were too lazy to move onwards. She could never consent, out of a regard for our laggings and sluggishness, to neglect leading men of good will to that divine Union which, they were told, “crowns both the Year of the Church, and the faithful soul that has spent the Year under the Church's guidance.”
But on no account must we lose courage. The Cycle of the Liturgy runs its full course in the heavens of the Church each Year. It will soon be starting afresh, again adapting the power of its graces to each one’s necessities and weaknesses. If, with that new Year of Grace, we learn a lesson from our past deficiencies, if we do not content ourselves with a mere theoretical admiration of the exquisite poetry, and loveliness and charms of its opening seasons, if we seriously set ourselves to grow with the growth of that light (which is no other than Christ Himself) (John i. 5) — if that is, we profit of the graces of progress which that Light will again infuse into our souls — then the work of our sanctification having been this time prepared, has a cheering and “a new chance of receiving that completeness which had been retarded by the weakness of human nature.”
Even now, though our dispositions may not be all they should be, yet the Holy Ghost, that Spirit of loving mercy who reigns over this portion of the Cycle, will not refuse the humble prayer we make to Him, and will supply at least in some measure our sad shortcomings. Great after all has been our gain in this, that the eye of our faith has had new supernatural horizons opened out to it, and that it has reached those peaceful regions which the dull vision of the animal man (1 Corinthians ii.14) fails to discover. It is there, that divine Wisdom reveals to the perfect that great secret of love, which is not known by the wise and the princes of this world — secret, which the eye had not before seen, nor the ear heard, nor the heart even suspected as possible (1 Corinthians ii. 6‒9). From this time forward we will the better understand the divine realities which fill up the life of the servants of God. They will seem to us, as they truly are, a thousand times preferable, both in importance and greatness, to those vain frivolities and occupations in the midst of which is spent the existence of so-called practical men.
Let us take delight in thinking upon that divine choice which, before time was selected us for the fullness of all spiritual benedictions (Ephesians i. 3) of which the temporal blessings of the people of old (Deuteronomy xxviii. 1‒14) were but a shadow. The world was not as yet existing, and already God saw us in His Word (Ephesians i. 4). To each one among us He assigned the place He was to hold in the Body of His Christ (1 Corinthians xii. 12‒31; Ephesians iv. 12‒16). Already His fatherly eye beheld us clad with that grace (Ephesians i. 6) which made Him well pleased with the Man-God, and He predestinated us (Ephesians i. 4‒5) as being members of this His beloved Son, to sit with Him, on His right hand, in the highest heavens (Ephesians I. 20‒23; ii. 6).
Oh how immense are our obligations to the Eternal Father whose good pleasure (Ephesians i. 9) has decreed to grant such wondrous gifts to our Earth! His will is His counsel (Ephesians i. 11). It is the one rule of all His acts, and His will is all love. It is from the voluntary and culpable death of sin (Ephesians i. 7; ii 1‒5) that He calls us to that Life which is His own Life. It is from the deep disgrace of every vice that, after having cleansed us in the Blood of His Son (Ephesians i. 7), He has exalted us to a glory which is the astonishment of the Angels and makes them tremble with adoring admiration. Let us then be holy (Ephesians i. 4) for the sake of giving praise to the glory of such grace (Ephesians i. 6).
Christ, in His divinity, is the substantial brightness and eternal glory of His Father (Hebrews i. 3). If He has taken to Himself a Body, if He has made Himself our Head, it was for no other purpose than that He might sing the heavenly canticle in a new way. Not satisfied with presenting in His sacred Humanity a sight most pleasing to His Father — that is, the sight of the created reflex of divine, and therefore infinite, perfections — He wished, moreover, that the whole of creation should give back to the adorable Trinity an echo of the divine harmonies. It was on this account that He, in His own Flesh, broke down the old enmities existing between Gentile and Jew (Ephesians ii. 14‒18), and then, bringing together these that were once enemies, He made of them all one spirit and one body, so that their countless human voices might, through Him, blend in unison of love with the angelic choirs, and thus, standing around God’s throne, might attune the one universal song of their praise to that of the infinite Word Himself. Thus will we become forever to God, like this divine Word, the praise of His glory, as the Apostle thrice loves to express himself in the beginning of this his Epistle to the Ephesians (Ephesians i. 6, 12, 14).
Thus too is to be wrought that mystery which, from all eternity, was the object of God’s eternal designs, mystery, that is, of divine union, realised by our Lord Jesus uniting in His own one Person, in infinite love, both Earth and Heaven (Ephesians i. 9, 10).Gospel – Luke xiv. 1‒11
At that time, when Jesus went into the house of one of the chief of the Pharisees on the Sabbath day to eat bread, they watched Him. And behold, there was a certain man before Him that had the dropsy. Jesus answering, spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying: “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day” But they held their peace. He taking him, healed him, and sent him away. And answering them, He said: “Which of you will have an ass or an ox fall into a pit, and will not immediately draw him out, on the sabbath day?” They could not answer Him to these things. And He spoke a parable also to them that were invited, marking how they chose the first seats at the table, saying to them: “When you are invited to a wedding, sit not down in the first place, lest perhaps one more honourable than you be invited by him. And he that invited you and him, come and say to you, ‘Give this man place,’ and then you begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go sit down in the lowest place that when he who invited you comes, he may say to you: ‘Friend, go up higher.’ Then you will have glory before them that sit at table with you. Because every one that exalts himself, will be humbled; and he that humbles himself, will be exalted.”Praise be to you, O Christ.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
Holy Church here tells us, and in a most unmistakeable way, what has been her chief aim for her children ever since the Feast of Pentecost. The Wedding spoken of in today’s Gospel is that of Heaven, and of which there is a prelude given here below by the Union effected in the sacred banquet of Holy Communion. The divine invitation is made to all, and the invitation is not like that which is given on occasion of earthly weddings, to which the Bridegroom and Bride invite their friends and relatives as simple witnesses to the union contracted between two individuals. In the Gospel Wedding Christ is the Bridegroom, and the Church is the Bride (Apocalypse xix. 7). These nuptials are ours, inasmuch as we are members of the Church, and the banquet hall in this case is something far superior to that of a common place marriage.
But that this Union be as fruitful as it ought to be, the soul, in the sanctuary of her own conscience, must bring along with her a fidelity which is to be an enduring one — a love which is to be active even when the feast of the sacred mysteries is past. Divine Union, when it is genuine, masters one’s entire being. It fixes one in the untiring contemplation of the Beloved Object, in the earnest looking after His interests, in the continual aspiration of the heart towards Him, even when He seems to have absented Himself from the soul. The Bride of the divine Nuptials, could she be less intent on her God than those of Earth are on their earthly Spouse? (1 Corinthians vii. 34). It is on this condition alone that the Christian soul can be said to have entered on the Unitive Life, or can show its precious fruits.
But for the attaining all this — that is, that our Lord Jesus Christ may have that full control over the soul and its powers which makes her to be truly His and subjects her to Him as the Bride is to her Spouse (1 Corinthians xi. 8‒10) — it is necessary that all alien competition be entirely and definitively put aside. Now, there is one sad fact which every one knows: the divinely noble Son of the Eternal Father (Wisdom viii. 3), the Incarnate Word whose beauty enraptures the heavenly citizens, the Immortal King, whose exploits and power and riches are beyond all that the children of men can imagine (Psalm xliv.). Yes, He has rivals, human rivals, who pretend to have stronger claims than He to creatures whom He has redeemed from slavery and, that done, has invited them to share with Him the honours of His throne. Even in the case of those whom His loving mercy succeeds in winning over wholly to Himself, is it not almost always the way that He is kept waiting, for perhaps years, before they can make up their minds to be wise enough to take Him? During that long period of unworthy wavering, He loses not his patience, He does not turn elsewhere as He might in all justice do, but He keeps on asking them to be wholly His (Apocalypse iii. 20), mercifully waiting for some secret touch of one of his graces, joined with the unwearied labour of the Holy Ghost, to get the better of all this inconceivable resistance.
Let us not be surprised at the Church’s bringing the whole influence of her Liturgy to bear on the winning souls over to Christ, for every such conquest she makes for Him is a fresh and closer bond of union between herself and her Lord. This explains how, in some of these previous Sundays, she has given us such admirable instructions regarding the efforts of the triple concupiscence. Earthly pleasures, pride and covetousness are really the treacherous advisers who excite within us, against God’s claims, those impertinent rivals of whom we were just now speaking.
Having now reached the sixteenth week of this Season of the reign of the Holy Ghost, and taking it for granted that her Sons and Daughters are in right good earnest about their Christian perfection, the Church hopes that they have fairly unmasked the enemy. She comes, therefore, to us today hoping that her teaching will not fail to impress us, and that we will no longer put off that most loving Jesus of ours whose great mystery of love is preached to us in the allegory of our Gospel, and of which He Himself said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is likened to a King who made a marriage for his Son” (Matthew xxii. 2).
But, after all, her anxiety as Mother and Bride never allows her to make quite sure of even her best and dearest children, so long as they are in this world. In order to keep them on their guard against falling into sin, she bids them listen to Saint Ambrose whom she has selected as her homilist for this Sunday. He addresses himself to the Christian who has become a veteran in the spiritual combat, and tells even him that Concupiscence has snares without end, even for him! Alas, yes, he may trip any day. He has got far, perhaps very far, on the road to the Kingdom of God, but even so he might go wrong and be forever shut out from the Marriage Feast, together with heretics, pagans and Jews. Let him be on the watch, then, or he may get tainted with those sins from which, hitherto, he has kept clear thanks to God’s grace. Let him take heed or he might become like the man mentioned in today’s Gospel, who had the dropsy. And dropsy, says our saintly preacher of Milan, is a morbid exuberance of humours which stupify the soul and induce a total extinction of spiritual ardour. And yet, even so, that is, even if he were to get such a fall as that, let him not forget that the heavenly physician is ever ready to cure him. The Saint, in this short Homily, condenses the whole of Saint Luke’s 14th chapter, of which we have been reading but a portion. And he shows, a little further on, that attachment to the goods of this life is no less opposed to the ardour, which should carry us on the wings of the spirit, towards the Heaven where lives and reigns our Love.
But, above all, it is the constant attitude and exercise of Humility to which he must especially direct his attention, who would secure a prominent place in the divine Feast of the Nuptials. All Saints are ambitious for future glory of this best kind but they were well aware that in order to win it they must go low down, during the present life, into their own nothingness. The higher in the world to come, the lower in this. Until the great day dawns when each one is to receive according to his works (Matthew xvi. 27), we will lose nothing by putting ourselves, meanwhile, below everybody. The position reserved for us in the kingdom of Heaven depends not in the least either on our own thoughts about ourselves, or on the judgement passed on us by other people. It depends solely on the will of that God who exalts the humble and brings down the mighty from their seat (Luke i. 52). Let us hearken to Ecclesiasticus. “The greater you are, the more humble yourself in all things, and you will find grace before God; for great is the power of God alone, and He is honoured by the humble” (Ecclesiasticus iii. 20, 21). Were it only, then, from a motive of self-interest, let us follow the advice of the Gospel and in all things claim, as our own, the last place. Humility is not sterling and cannot please God unless, to the lowly estimation we have of ourselves, we join an esteem for others, preventing every one with honour (Romans xii.10), gladly yielding to all in matters which do not affect our conscience: and all this from a deep-rooted conviction of our own misery and worthlessness in the sight of Him who searches the reins and heart (Apocalypse ii. 23) The surest test of our Humility before God is that practical charity for our neighbour which, in the several circumstances of every day life, induces us and without affectation, to give him the precedence to ourselves.
On the contrary, one of the most unequivocal proofs of the falseness of certain so-called spiritual ways into which the enemy sometimes leads incautious souls, is the lurking contempt with which he inspires them for one or more of their acquaintance: dormant, perhaps habitually — but which, when occasion offers, and it frequently offers, they allow it to influence their thoughts, and words, and actions. To a greater or less extent, and it may be with more or less unconsciousness, self-esteem is the basis of the structure of their virtues. But as for the illuminations and mystical sweetnesses which these people sometimes tell their intimate friends they enjoy, they may be quite sure that such favours do not come to them from the Holy Spirit. When the substantial light of the Sun of Justice will appear in the valley of the Judgement, all counterfeits of this kind will be made evident (1 Corinthians iv. 5), and they who trusted to them and spent their lives in petting such phantoms, will find them all vanishing in smoke. The having then to take a much lower place than the one they dreamt of, may have this one solace, that some place may be still given them in the divine banquet. They will have to thank God that their chastisement goes no further than the one of seeing, with shame, those very people passing high up in honour above them, for whom, during life, they had such utter contempt.
