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From: Colossians 1:21-23

Christ’s Saving Action on the Faithful

[21] And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds,
[22] he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present
you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, [23] provided that you
continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gos-
pel which you heard, which has been preached to every creature under heaven,
and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

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Commentary:

21. “Hostile in mind”: literally, “enemies in mind and thought”; for, even if they
did not formally declare themselves to be enemies of God, they were enemies
in fact due to the way they acted.

22. “In his body of flesh”: the physical body of Christ, through which he offered
himself to the Father on the cross and brought about the reconciliation of men
with God and with each other. Christ’s sacred humanity is, therefore, an instru-
ment of salvation: through his passion and death our Lord conquered sin and
obtained the graces we need to be cleansed of our faults and to be presented
“holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.”

The sacred text shows that the Incarnation of the Word is something diametri-
cally opposed to a disembodied spiritualism, which is quite foreign to the spirit
of the Gospel. In a homily given in a Mass on the campus of Navarre University
in 1967, St. Escriva explained that “authentic Christianity, which professes the
resurrection of all flesh, has always quite logically opposed ‘dis-incarnation’,
without fear of being judged materialistic. We can, therefore, rightfully speak of
a ‘Christian materialism’, which is boldly opposed to those materialisms which
are blind to the spirit” (”Conversations”, 115).

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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.