Homily
for the
18th
Sunday of Ordinary Time
Aug.
1, 2021
Eph
4: 17, 20-24
Christian
Brothers, Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y.
Ursulines,
Willow Dr., New Rochelle
“Be renewed in
the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in
righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4: 23-24).
In his Letter
to the Ephesians, Paul has taught that Jewish and Gentile Christians form one
body in Christ. Today he brings out a
necessary distinction—not between Jew and Gentile but between Gentile attitudes
and lifestyle, and Christian attitudes and manner of life.
The
Gentiles—by which in this context Paul means pagans—“live … in the futility of
their minds” (4:17), worshiping empty idols, gods that don’t exist in reality
(called Zeus, Athena, and all the rest of the pagan pantheon). Their lives are “corrupted thru deceitful
desires” (4:22). Paul reminds his
readers of their “former way of life” (4:22)—at least that of many of his
Gentile converts. He means lives of
sexual depravity (“deceitful desires”), cheating in business, indifference
toward the poor, and vices that he’ll mention a few verses further on: “bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and
reveling” (4:31).
Instead, Christ’s followers, Jew or Gentile, are called to “be renewed in the spirit of your minds,” made new, recreated interiorly. In the Collect we prayed that God restore what he created. Restoration, conversion, begins in the heart, as Jesus taught emphatically. Christian desire is for the truth that “is in Jesus” (4:21), the way of thinking and living that he taught and practiced. Paul called both Jews and pagans at Ephesus to change their lives, and he reminds them now that their conversion must be ongoing. He alludes to the baptismal ritual they may have undergone, if it was already developed in Paul’s time.
The catechumens stripped off their garments, symbolically “putting away the old self,” and descended bare into the baptismal bath; on emerging, they were garbed in the fresh white garments of the neophytes, symbolically “putting on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness.”
When we were
vested in our religious garb many years ago, we may have been instructed to
“put on the new self, created in God’s way.”
We were committing ourselves to assume a new persona (and you got a new
name), fully committed to being made into images of Christ. Whether or not we realized it at the time, we
were being called to conversion of life. We still are called to a complete conversion,
to allowing God to make us new, to recreate us “in righteousness and holiness
of truth,” the truth of living like Jesus in his Father’s love, practicing his
Father’s love among our brothers/sisters, in our daily community lives.
Living that
truth is the greatest challenge for us as religious, even before the challenge
of loving our pupils or their parents or our staff. It’s the greatest challenge for spouses,
parents, and children in a family. If
we’re retired from active ministry, we don’t even have much opportunity for
active love of “outsiders” except in prayer.
“Charity begins at home” doesn’t mean “me first” but loving the members
of our household before even thinking of loving others. It’s fine, it’s necessary, to be kind to
acquaintances and strangers or the persons in our apostolates; but 1st of all, our
brothers/sisters.
And there’s
the rub, often. We rub, we grate on, one
another. It’s too easy to be offended,
to be impatient and sharp, to be careless and inconsiderate. Paul pleads to us, “Be renewed in the spirit
of your minds, and put on the new self” proper to your calling in Christ.
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