Please read the passage before reading the commentary.
In this letter to the Ephesians, St Paul has announced that God has sent Christ into the world to save us in the Church because God has drawn all peoples together, those who believe in circumcision and those who believe otherwise. The result of Christ’s work is that both groups are called into one community with all distinctions between the circumcised and uncircumcised, between Jew and Gentile erased.
Paul himself was an example of the work of Christ. Paul was circumcised as a Jew and also persecuted the Church of God. He was the very least of all the holy ones. Yet God had sent him to preach to the Gentiles that God was calling them into the inscrutable riches of Christ.
Christ had made Jew and Gentile one by joining them both into the mystery of his death and resurrection. Paul became a sign of this uniting of Jew and Gentile into one because Christ called him as a faithful Jew to proclaim God’s faithfulness to the Gentiles.
Paul refers to this as a stewardship of God’s grace. The mystery of Christ had existed from the beginning that Jew and Gentiles were one people united by faith in the on and true God through Christ. In Paul’s time, through Christ, this mystery is revealed, unwrapped, for all to share.
Despite differences in language and customs, all peoples are called into the one community of Christ where the distinctions between circumcision and uncircumcision, between languages and customs, between poor and wealthy, between nation and nation, between citizen and foreigner, between all human distinctions and even between Christian and non-Christian disappear into the oneness of Christ.
This presents us a challenge. We are to accept into our lives and neighborhoods the immigrants from other countries and cultures. For us we are challenged to accept people from Haiti, from Ukraine, from Mexico, from Afro-American background, from indigenous ancestry, from different ways of living their sexuality, as well as from every other group differing from us. All these are brothers and sisters to us through the saving work of Christ. Despite what politicians want us to believe, we must be accepting of these.
All this is part of the mystery of Christ, hidden before the ages of the world and revealed in our day through the work of Christ in the world.