Tenth Sunday after Pentecost - July 28, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
2 Kings 4:42-44 + Psalm 145:10-19 + Eph. 3:14-21 + John 6:1-21
Grace to you and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I speak to you today in the name of the + Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.
“That you may be filled with all the fullness of God!”
There are few passages in the New Testament that convey as rich an expression – indeed, as deep a desire – for mystical union with God in Christ, than that of Paul’s so-called “prayer report” in Ephesians 3:14-21 which we heard proclaimed this morning. [Margaret McDonald, Sacra Pagina, vol. 17, 281]
“Prayer reports” (as they are called, throughout the Pauline corpus) are passages where Paul openly gives voice to the nature and desires of his prayer. That is to say, they are places in his letters where he “reports” to his intended audience the prayer he holds for them in his heart.
Here, in Ephesians, it is clear that his prayer is above all, for union among all people, all tribes, all families and nations; a union that is born by the power of the Spirit, revealed through the indwelling Christ and grounded (or rooted) in love. “I fall on my knees,” he says, “before the Father from whom every family in heaven and earth takes its name.”
It is easy to miss here in the English translation the obvious play on words Paul intends here in the original Greek. The Greek word for “family” (patria) derives from the Greek word for “father” (pater), which despite any negative connotations that ‘patriarchy’ may hold in the modern world, speak in Paul’s time of the importance of a family deriving its social identity from the father of a household.
Thus, in his own social and religious context, Paul is asserting an abiding union that exists among all people by virtue of the fact that we are all children of the same heavenly father; a union we share not only among all tribes and peoples, and nations, but, of the citizens of heaven as well.
It is before this all-loving Father that Paul falls upon his knees to pray that Christians may come to know with all the saints of heaven… a lived experience of the “breadth and length and height and depth” of Divine Love that is beyond comprehension, in order that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.
And he prays that the fulness of this mystical union be accomplished within the church – the ecclesia –for all generations to come. That is to say, he prays that the Beloved Community be the place on earth where this heavenly union in all its “breadth and length and height and depth” becomes manifest for all the world to see, to know, and to experience.
The church’s role both as catalyst and ‘location’ (if you will) of such a radical divine union in which we are to be “filled with the fullness of God” should not be underestimated. For, the Letter to the Colossians upon which the Letter to the Ephesians bears a certain literary dependence, uses almost identical language to speak of the divinity of Christ: “For in Christ,” Paul says in Colossians 2:9, “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily…” And here, in Ephesians 3:19 Paul extends this radical claim of the fullness of divine indwelling to the church itself.
In fact, in his commentary on Ephesians, Andrew Lincoln summarizes the theological problem raised by this correspondence when he observes: “So bold is the request, in fact, that it might well leave the modern Christian asking whether there is any difference in the kind of fullness of deity that dwelt in Christ (in Col 2:9) and that which is available to believers in (Ephesians 3:19). [Andrew Lincoln, Ephesians, (1990), 215; Cf. McDonald, 281]
The Greek word for “fullness” used in both letters is ‘pleroma’ and the only difference between how that pleroma of divinity is understood in Christ and in the Church is that in Christ that fullness simply is. Christ is the fullness of divinity in bodily form, as it were.
By contrast, the church’s fullness of divinity is grounded precisely in the indwelling of the divine Christ in the hearts of all Christians. This is what the early church would soon come to call deification. However, such fine points of doctrine are clearly not the concern of Paul in his prayer for the Ephesians. Rather it is simply his deep desire that the Ephesians come to know this fullness (this ‘deification’) experientially. Not as a theological proposition or doctrinal pronouncement: but as a lived experience. And his language about this is emphatic, “that you may be filled with the fullness of God,” which, if you’ll forgive me, is to say “that you may be “pleromed” with the “pleromaness” of God.”
Christian exegetes are all but unanimous in identifying that the experience of the Christian liturgy lay at the heart and foundation of the first three chapters of Ephesians. We see this expressed in many aspects of Paul’s letter that time will not permit us to explore today. For example, the formulaic nature of the opening blessing (“Grace to you and peace from God our Father…” is familiar to all of you as precisely in the context of our liturgy still today), as well as a number of thanksgivings, doxologies, and prayer-reports that echo liturgical language and contexts. These liturgical allusions culminate here with Paul’s ‘prayer report’ with its expansive and breathless doxological conclusion, “…to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations for ever and ever. Amen!”
Paul’s language here is telling. It is unheard of anywhere else in the New Testament for a reference to ‘the Church’ to be included a doxological praise whose intention is to praise God. Yet again, Paul seems to be alluding to his oft made claim that the Church is first and foremost not a social institution or a do-gooder society, but the Mystical Body of Christ, governed by Jesus as its head.
To be “in the church” then is to open oneself to a lived experience of what it means to be “in Christ.” And this experience is most clearly manifest in the Christian liturgy.
Liturgy invites what Margaret McDonald calls “consecrated behavior” – ritual actions, sacred ceremonies, communal prayer, the singing of hymns, the sign of the cross, bowing, kneeling, and so on. [McDonald, 282]
And as such, liturgy not only reflects our beliefs but informs our beliefs, and in the process transforms our hearts. Indeed “Consecrated behavior” consists in actions, ways of being, as it were, that would make little sense elsewhere: bowing, genuflecting, processing, and so on. When we move from the secular time of chronos to the sacred time of kairos we something in us shifts. That which is unacceptable or perhaps bewildering in the secular world is suddenly common place, expected, natural. Imagine going to a restaurant and pushing your chair aside so that you can eat your entire meal down on your knees. Try this on a first date and I can guarantee it will be your last.
Yet this is precisely the posture by which we eat the eucharistic meal…and have done so for centuries. A strange ritual anywhere else but here. Perhaps like Paul, this is emblematic of the fact that the liturgy itself brings us to our knees, as it were, in which we are all made equal, children of one Father, made full by emptying ourselves before a Power greater than any of us, greater than all of us. Kneeling, as it were, not in fear and trepidation, but like Paul in awe and wonder and desire for a union we cannot comprehend with the mind, but only come to realize here and now in our hearts. In gratitude and in praise.
Paul’s prayer report is not powerful because he prayed it on behalf of the Ephesians, nor even because by extension he prays it for us, among those of all generations to come. His prayer is powerful because it mirrors our own. With Paul, it is as much our own deepest desire to be “filled with all the fullness of God.”
And like the liturgical foundation that undergirds Paul’s Letter, it has become a mainstay of Anglican identity to profess first and foremost a Book of Common Prayer not a Book of Common Doctrine. Though, these two are undoubtedly intimately linked, it is in our coming together liturgically precisely “as church” that, on the one hand, we celebrate what it is we believe, and yet as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out, in the same ritualized moment we continue to formulate our very beliefs then and there. [McDonald, 281-82]
It is in this context that one might begin to glimpse why our lectionary combines the epistle reading with the miracle of the loaves and fishes in the gospel of John today. Like Ephesians, the miracle of loaves is also grounded in ancient liturgical formulas of the church. The very words Jesus uses when breaking the bread are still echoed in our eucharistic prayer today “He took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed.”
And here too, no less than in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, and no less than within our own hearts today, the people who sat mesmerized by the wisdom and teaching of Jesus along the shores of Tiberias, knew within themselves the deepest desire for fullness, pleroma… for that incomprehensible union with God, grounded in love.
And what Christ gives them, then and now, is but a morsel of bread. The same morsel we gather to receive together today. The same loaf broken into many pieces that makes us one. And we, like Paul, fall on our knees, perceiving as we do, that there is more than bread here. That there is fullness in a crumb. A morsel intended less to fill the belly than to transform the heart, meant less to fortify the individual than to forge a community into One.
It is these words and actions, sacred gestures and ceremonial acts of the ancient church that informed Paul’s letter, indeed his prayer for the Christians at Ephesus, and it is these same sacred acts by which we are invited to experience the incompressible fullness of mystical union rooted in the indwelling love of Christ.
Let us then together be the answer to Paul’s prayer. Let us not miss the grandeur of Paul’s desire in the simplicity…indeed in the strangeness of what we do liturgically. For today I join my prayer with that of Paul, not for the saints in Ephesus but for the saints of Inverness, that we too may know in fullness among one another what so many of have already have begun to intuit: the incomprehensible union of God’s love in us, rooted in Christ indwelling. And may this community be that prayer’s “Amen!”
+ Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.