Your Life Is Claimed By a Mystery
16th Sunday of the Year
Most of my friends from high school no longer believe in God. Most of you, I imagine, also have old friends or members of your family who no longer live the Christian faith. We all know that lost belief is one of the great challenges of our times. And we cannot make the mistake of thinking that the cause of unbelief is a lack of understanding alone. My high school friends did not stop believing in God because of some lack of knowledge, as if a better understanding of our faith would have resolved their struggles with belief. We all know that there are truths for each of us that we understand perfectly well but that do not shape our lives as they should. Knowledge alone makes no one a Christian. But there are some truths of our Christian faith so vital to what we believe that to fail to understand them is to risk that loss of faith. There are answers to questions that—I am almost certain—every Christian asks at one point or another. And to know the answers to these questions makes all the difference in the world.
Here are the questions. What is the purpose of our Christian lives? And why does the Church exist? These are questions that every person who loses faith asks in their own way, and to which they usually do not receive a sufficient answer. I wish that someone—at some point, somewhere along the way—had told my friends about the claim that St. Paul makes in our second reading today, about how our Christian lives are possessed of so much meaning. Because St. Paul gives an answer to these questions—a single answer. And here is his answer: the Church exists to reveal to the world what Christ makes possible for our lives, and so the mission of the Church bestows an indelible purpose upon every Christian life. Your life is filled with purpose because the Church has a mission and you belong to the Church.
The answer that St. Paul gives to these questions turns on his use of the word mystery. There is, says St. Paul, a mystery hidden from ages and from generations past. What does Paul mean? A good dictionary will tell you that the word mystery means: something that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain. But St. Paul means something different by his use of the word mystery. For St. Paul there is only one mystery—the Christian mystery. And the Christian mystery is the structure of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. The Christian mystery is the design of providence—the chosen way through which God will bring to fulfillment the relationship of communion that he established with human beings when he created the world.1 The Christian mystery is the divine economy: God’s work of creation and redemption for the sake of us human beings.
And as St. Paul says so clearly, this divine economy—the structure of God’s plan for the salvation of the world—remained hidden from ages and from generations past. No one knew the designs of God for the salvation of the world; the work of providence remained concealed and was known to God alone. But then begins the work of revelation: the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past is slowly revealed to the world. God makes the choice to involve himself in human history. He chooses for himself a people—a nation—that will serve as an instrument of salvation. Patriarchs and prophets, priests and kings: for centuries the people of Israel play their part in the history of salvation. Over the course of centuries the hidden mystery of our redemption is gradually revealed to the world. And yet still no one understood fully the work that God was doing; the divine economy remained veiled within the depth and breadth of all that God had not yet revealed to human beings.
Until the coming of Christ into the world. Through the Incarnation—through the marriage of God with humanity—the mystery of our salvation becomes known. Christ is the fullness of revelation.2 Through Christ all that was hidden from ages and from generations past becomes known—the eternal designs of God become manifest in Christ. The mystery of Christ is the mystery of our own salvation. In the person of Christ we see how God will bring to completion the work of redemption that before Christ was known only through the hints and shadows of promises and prophecy.
And here is the key to making sense of the word mystery and its meaning for our lives: the Incarnation is not an event that remains trapped in some distant past but rather is a reality given to us each day through the life of the Church. The logic of St. Paul is simple enough to understand: if Christ is the mystery of God—if Christ is the visible and tangible realization of God’s plan for the salvation of the world—and if the Church—as St. Paul teaches us—is the body of Christ, then the Incarnation happens now. Each day for the Christian is a day for meeting the mystery of our salvation through the life of the Church. The Church is the extension of the Incarnate God into our lives. And through the Church we are incorporated into the life of the Incarnate God himself—he who is the mystery of the world’s salvation.
The mystery of the Incarnation—the mystery of the Church—changes everything about the Christian life. Your life is claimed by a mystery. The mystery that had been hidden from ages and from generations past . . . has been manifested to his holy ones, to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory. God has revealed himself to you through Christ. But more than that: St. Paul tells us that the mystery of God is Christ in you, the hope for glory. The Incarnate God who now lives within you is the foundation for your hope. The Christ who you meet through the Church is the warrant for your own glorification. Your life is claimed by a mystery.
Your life is also filled with purpose. What is that purpose? To live out the mission of the Church. What is the mission of the Church? Here is the answer that St. Paul gives: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church, of which I am a minister in accordance with God's stewardship given to me to bring to completion for you the word of God. What Paul describes here is the life of Christ itself: a life of sacrifice and affliction given over in love for the sake of another. Here is what St. Paul means: it is possible—really and truly possible—for each of us to live like Christ. It is possible for us to put on the mind of Christ—as Paul says to the Christians in Philippi—and so offer up our lives in love for the sake of others. And the mission of the Church is to reveal to us the truth of Christian possibilities: that sin and brokenness do not have to define our human lives.
There is a biblical scholar who says that for St. Paul the Church is a sacrament of the world’s possibility.3 What a remarkable statement. The Church reveals to the world that it is possible to live like Christ. There is the mission of the Church—there is the answer to the question of why the Church exists—and I wish that someone had told my friends about this mission all those years ago. Maybe some of them would have persevered in the faith. Maybe some of them would have realized that because of the mission of the Church the Christian life is given an indelible purpose. What is that purpose? Well, again, to live out the mission of the Church. But we can say more. If Christ is the mystery of God—and if Christ is the fullness of revelation—and if Christ is in you just as you are in Christ—then not only is your life claimed by a mystery but so also is your life a work of divine revelation. The purpose of your life is to reveal to the world the truth and the goodness and the beauty of God. For there is only one way for those who lack faith to see the reality of who God is and of what Christ has accomplished: you must show them.
Ernest Skublics, Plunged Into the Trinity, Our Sacramental Becoming: Essays in Sacramental Ecclesiology. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books (2019). p. 11.
Ernest Skublics, Plunged Into the Trinity, p. 11.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Great Courses: The Apostle Paul. Audiobook (2001).
Homily preached on July 16th, 2022 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary