Sunday of the Sixteenth Week of the Year (Year B)(21 july 2024)

          Psalm response: The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.

          Paul speaks here, as he so often does, in terms of categories which were fairly clear and evident to him and to those he was writing to but are not those which we are accustomed to in our days – so I will try to present what he is saying in a more modern manner. 
          He speaks of those who “were far off” and of the “barrier of hostility” which Jesus broke down “through his blood”: they were far off from God because of sin and a refusal to look beyond their materiality, but God rescued them by Christ’s Incarnation and all that it implied.  Paul is writing here to the converts at Ephesus, originally pagans in a major city and a fairly advanced culture, yet he could just as well be writing to us because even as the Christians of today we are only too often in the same situation with our fascination with our image, our security, our comfort, and even such intangible possessions as our education.  Our misusing them so badly puts us in that same position of hostility to God.
          The blood of Christ that Paul refers to is not so much a bloody sacrifice in Christ’s death as it is the fact that Jesus was human, both completely God and fully one of us.  The Old Testament  Jews believed that blood was the seat of life, the life God gave to us, which is reflected in the kosher laws and in Moses’ sealing of the covenant between God and his people with blood (Exodus 24:3-8): blood was sacred and could not be shed without thought, even needing to be poured into the earth as a sign of returning it to God.   
          For Paul the issue is more the Incarnation, God’s amazing decision to live here on earth as a full human being with – at the same time and just as fully – that same God-life in him which Jesus so generously offered in his human death.  Even more amazingly, Jesus God offered to his gathered believers to drink his blood, the actual divine life within him, even if drinking any blood at all was absolutely forbidden to the Jews.  Jesus poured it out in the chalice and on the cross and told them to take and drink that they might have life. 
          In the Incarnation God offers us a much closer union with him than the Jews possessed through God‘s presence in the Temple.  The reference to the cross which Paul makes a verse or two later is in the same general vein: the absolutely innocent God-man undergoes death, an integral part of our human condition, in order to make our new life in him integral for us who are willing to trust him even in our own dying.  We are then no longer merely material beings but completely spiritual ones as well if we accept Jesus as our Way, our Truth, and our Life.  That dying is both the final shedding of our bodies but is also in all the little ways of our lives as we try to follow and imitate Jesus in all that he taught us about becoming truly human, the real children of God we are created to be.  All of this is true for us as humans in terms of the long history of our salvation but it is still true for us today on the individual scale. 
          Jesus did not “abolish the Law” – Paul exaggerates! – as much as fulfilled it, transformed it, and so brought us to a new level of responsibility in the two greatest commandments (Mark 12:28-34).

Chas Kestermeier, SJ
St. Camillus Jesuit Community
10201 West Wisconsin Avenue
Wauwatosa, WI   53226-3541
414-259-4689
ctk34340@creighton.edu