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Office Of Readings | Week 5, Wednesday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Letters Of Saint Ambrose | We Are Heirs Of God And Fellow Heirs With Jesus Christ
‘We are heirs of God, coheirs with Christ.’
In this reading, Saint Ambrose reflects on Saint Paul’s teaching about life in the Spirit and the dignity given to believers as children of God. His focus is on adoption, inheritance, and hope, all of which shape the Christian understanding of suffering and future glory.
Ambrose begins with Paul’s claim that those who put to death sinful deeds by the Spirit will live. This life is not merely moral improvement but participation in a new relationship with God. The presence of the Spirit is the sign that believers are no longer slaves but sons and daughters. This sonship is confirmed inwardly by the Spirit himself, who enables believers to address God with the intimacy of ‘Abba, Father’. For Ambrose, this interior cry is a decisive witness to Christian identity.
Ambrose then turns to the second proof of this sonship: inheritance. To be a child of God is to be an heir, and more specifically a coheir with Christ. Sharing in Christ’s inheritance also means sharing in his path. Glory is inseparable from suffering, and participation in Christ’s suffering is presented not as a loss but as the condition for being glorified with him.
Ambrose places present suffering within a broader perspective. Drawing on Paul’s words, he stresses that present hardships are insignificant when set against the glory that is to come. That future glory is described as restoration to the likeness of God and the direct vision of God. Human destiny is therefore not simply survival beyond death but transformation and communion.
The scope of this hope extends beyond humanity. Ambrose explains Paul’s teaching that creation itself is involved in this drama. The created world shares in humanity’s frustration and awaits the revealing of the sons of God. Creation’s hope is bound to Christ, and its future freedom is linked to the freedom of God’s children. Redemption is thus cosmic in scope, embracing both humanity and the world it inhabits.
For the present, both creation and believers live in a state of longing. The Spirit, already given as firstfruits, awakens desire for what is not yet complete. Adoption is already real within the Church, where the Spirit cries out in believers’ hearts, but it will reach perfection only at the resurrection, when humanity is fully renewed and sees God face to face.
Ambrose concludes by emphasising hope. Salvation is described as something already begun but not yet finished. Hope sustains believers in this in-between time, just as faith does. Christian life is therefore marked by confident expectation, grounded in the work of the Spirit and the promise of God.
A Reading From The Letters Of Saint Ambrose | We Are Heirs Of God And Fellow Heirs With Jesus Christ
The person who puts to death by the spirit the deeds of our sinful nature will live, says the Apostle. This is most surprising since one who has the Spirit of God becomes a child of God. So true is it that he is a child of God that he received not a spirit that enslaves but the Spirit that makes us sons. So much so that the holy Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are sons of God. This is the witness of the Holy Spirit: he cries out in our hearts, Abba, Father, as we read in the letter to the Galatians.
There is also that other great testimony to the fact that we are sons of God: We are heirs of God, coheirs with Christ. A coheir of Christ is one who is glorified along with Christ. The one who is glorified along with him is one who, by suffering for him, suffers along with him.
To encourage us in suffering, Paul adds that all our sufferings are small in comparison with the wonderful reward that will be revealed in us; our labors do not deserve the blessings that are to come. We shall be restored to the likeness of God, and counted worthy of seeing him face to face.
He enhances the greatness of the revelation that is to come by adding that creation also looks forward to this revealing of the sons of god. Creation, he says, is at present condemned to frustration, not of its own choice, but it lives in hope. Its hope is in Christ, as it awaits the grace of his ministry; or it hopes that it will share in the glorious freedom of the sons of God and be freed from its bondage to corruption, so that there will be one freedom, shared by creation and by the sons of God when their glory will be revealed.
At present, however, while this revealing is delayed, all creation groans as it looks forward to the glory of adoption and redemption; it is already in labour with that spirit of salvation, and is anxious to be freed from its subjection to frustration.
The meaning is clear: those who have the firstfruits of the Spirit are groaning in expectation of the adoption of sons. This adoption of sons is that of the whole body of creation, when it will be as it were a son of God and see the divine, eternal goodness face to face. The adoption of sons is present in the Church of the Lord when the Spirit cries out: Abba, Father, as you read in the letter to the Galatians. But it will be perfect when all who are worthy of seeing the face of God rise in incorruption, in honour and in glory. Then our humanity will know that it has been truly redeemed. So Paul glories in saying: We are saved by hope. Hope saves, just as faith does, for of faith it is said: Your faith has saved you.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
Father of mercy,
you have given us your Spirit
and made us your children in Christ.
Strengthen us to live by the Spirit,
putting to death what leads away from life,
and trusting in the inheritance you have promised.
Give us patience in suffering
and confidence in the glory that is to come.
Sustain our hope
as we await the full redemption of our bodies
and the renewal of all creation.
May your Spirit continue to cry within us,
Abba, Father,
until we see you face to face
and share fully in the glory of your Son.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Spirit of God | The Holy Spirit dwelling within believers
Adoption of sons | Being made children of God by grace
Abba, Father | An intimate address to God inspired by the Spirit
Heirs of God | Those who share in God’s promised life
Coheirs with Christ | Believers who share in Christ’s inheritance
Suffering with Christ | Sharing in hardship for the sake of Christ
Glory | The transformed life promised by God
Likeness of God | Restoration of humanity to its intended form
Creation | The whole created order
Bondage to corruption | Subjection to decay and death
Firstfruits of the Spirit | The Spirit as a foretaste of future glory
Redemption | The full restoration of humanity and creation
Hope | Confident expectation of God’s promise
The psalmist highlights upright behaviour and righteous deeds as signs of integrity. Truthful speech rooted in the heart is emphasized. Harmful words and actions are avoided. Backbiting and tale-bearing are rejected [ … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
In this passage from his Treatise on Cain and Abel, Saint Ambrose reflects on the nature of Christian prayer as both personal and communal, inner and active. His interpretation moves beyond external forms and focuses on the transformation of the heart, the renewal of love, and the unity of the Church as the Body of Christ [ … ]
