Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24; Psalm 100; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

The contemplative heart of these lessons seems to focus on the reading from Ephesians. It would be too easy to move into the question of judgment, of consigning people to categories of salvation and damnation, but that would violate the contemplative energy of the passage. So let’s go directly to the heart of the matter.

The author of Ephesians speaks of a particular kind of prayer that "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ might give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in recognizing him.’ The Greek word epignosis is what we translate as "recognition." The prayer asks for knowledge and revelation in order to recognize God as present, active, engaged, and infused into all life. This is made even clearer by the final verse of the reading: "And ‘he subdued all things under his feet’ (Psalm 8:7) and he gave him (as) a head over all things in (or for) the church, which very thing is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in all things."

God’s fullness pervades all existence. There is nothing that exists that does not reflect, manifest, present, represent, or make present God’s divine energies. God’s energies are indeed "the fullness of the one who fills all things in all things." This is the contemplative recognition: to find the point in all things that God’s presence and energies have been both known through spiritual wisdom and revealed. In Ephesians, the author says that he "makes memory" of these things "at the time of his prayer." The contemplative task, then, is simply to remember, to bring to memory, the divine presence that pervades all things and all people and all events.

When we turn to the Gospel and to the lesson from Ezekiel, we find a judgment attached to that recognition. Those who recognize the divine energies find that God dwells in those who thirst, who hunger, who are naked and lonely, and those in prison. To see God there is to recognize the divine energies in the particularities of each individual’s life—God filling all things in all things. The contemplative recognizes precisely because the contemplative sees God in and through all things and all people. And so in seeing, the contemplative transcends judgment.

C. S. Lewis calls this recognition "co-inherence," the state of one being living in another, the state of God’s presence in all existence. The Gospel points to the Christ co-inhering in those who hunger and thirst, the naked and the imprisoned. Christ is there to be recognized. But the recognition does not end with people—Ephesians points us toward "all things in all things." God co-inheres the entire universe. That’s what we’re called to recognize, and in recognizing that co-inherence, we begin to act justly, to do right by those around us, to protect the physical world in which God co-inheres, and by whose co-inherence has sanctified all things and all people.

Ezekiel would probably understand those who see the co-inherence, as those who are gathered into the flock by God, the Good Shepherd. And Jesus certainly affirms the elect status of those who see him in the naked, hungry, thirsty, lonely, and imprisoned. All this hinges, though, on the prayer of the author of Ephesians that "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ might give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in recognizing him.’