Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Fides Service) - A solemn hymn at the beginning of the Letter to the Ephesians read once a week at vespers (cfr Eph 1,3-10), a hymn to praise God, celebrated in Christian faith as “Father of the Lord Jesus Christ”, was the subject of Pope Benedict XVI’s reflection during the general audience this morning in St Peter’s Square. Central in the hymn is the “figure of Christ in whom the work of God the Father is revealed and accomplished. In fact the each of the three principal verbs of this long and compact Canticle lead us to the Son” the Pope explained, commenting on the three principal expressions of the hymn.
“God ‘chose us in him’: our vocation to holiness, as adopted children and therefore brothers and sisters of Christ. This gift which radically transforms our state as creatures is offered to us ‘through Jesus Christ’ , as part of God’s plan for salvation … the second verb denotes the gift of grace: ‘given to us in his Only Son the epiphany of the Father’s love which envelops and transforms us”. The object of the third verb is again grace “lavished upon us. So this is a verb of fullness we might say, judging by its original tenor of excess and unlimited and unreserved giving”.
The Holy Father continued: “We come in this way to the infinite and glorious profundity of the mystery of God opened and revealed through grace to those who are called in grace and out of love since this revelation cannot be reached with mere human intelligence and capacities … The ‘mystery of God’s will’ has a centre destined to co-ordinate the whole being and the whole of history leading them to the fullness willed by God: it is ‘to sum up all things in Christ (Eph 1,10)”. In this “harmonious plan of the architecture of being and existing Christ rises up as head of the body of the Church, and also axis which recapitulates in itself ‘things on earth and things in heaven’.” (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 23/11/2005, righe 22, parole 363)
