NOTES for Eph 1:15-23

If we read the apostle Paul's words carefully, we discover something strange. Paul says that the Church is not simply Christ's Body—an image familiar to us—but His fullness! He who fills all in all, the source of every fullness, willed that the Church should become necessary to Him, that it should become His fullness. In other words, the Lord loved the Church so much that, without it, He Himself would, as it were, lose His fullness: out of love He made Himself dependent on human beings.

What does this dependence consist in? In the fact that, after the Ascension, Jesus' bodily presence on earth—that is, His fullness, since He is truly human and would be incomplete without a body—is realized only through the Church. This concerns, first and foremost, the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which He is bodily present. But the Church is also His body, and this means that every member of the Church embodies His presence in the world.