Catholic Commentary
Imitators of God: The Call to Walk in Love
1Be therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.2Walk in love, even as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling fragrance.
Ephesians 5:1–2 commands believers to imitate God as beloved children and to walk in love by the standard of Christ's self-sacrificial death, which Paul describes in cultic terms as a fragrant offering to God. The passage establishes that Christian morality flows from baptismal identity and finds its concrete expression in the sacrificial love exemplified by Christ's voluntary self-surrender.
Christian love is not a feeling but the shape of the Cross—giving yourself away completely, as a fragrant offering that disappears.
Ephesians 5:1 — "Be therefore imitators of God, as beloved children."
The opening "therefore" (Greek: oun) is pivotal. It links this verse directly to the concluding exhortation of chapter 4 (vv. 31–32), where Paul urged the Ephesians to forgive one another "even as God in Christ forgave you." The logic is seamless: because you have already been forgiven with a divine forgiveness, become what you have received. The call is not to imitate an abstract deity but the God who has acted concretely in Christ.
The Greek verb mimētai ginesthe ("be imitators," or literally, "become mimics") is deliberately strong. Paul does not say merely "follow God's example" — he demands an ontological conformity, the kind of resemblance a child bears to a parent. This is the only place in the New Testament where believers are explicitly called to imitate God himself (as distinct from imitating Paul or Christ as model, cf. 1 Cor 4:16; 11:1; 1 Thess 1:6). The audacity of the command is softened and grounded by the relational basis: "as beloved children" (hōs tekna agapēta). This phrase is not rhetorical flattery — it is a theological claim about baptismal identity. Those who have been adopted as children of the Father through Baptism (cf. Eph 1:5: "predestined for adoption through Jesus Christ") now possess the family resemblance that makes imitation not just possible but natural. The capacity to imitate God flows from the gift of participation in divine life.
Ephesians 5:2 — "Walk in love, even as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling fragrance."
"Walk in love" (peripateite en agapē) continues Paul's characteristic use of peripatein ("to walk") as a metaphor for the entire moral conduct of one's life (cf. Eph 4:1, 17; 5:8, 15). Christian love (agapē) is not a feeling but a direction of life, a habitual orientation. Paul immediately prevents any vague or sentimental reading by defining this love with absolute precision: "even as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us." The standard and pattern of Christian love is nothing less than the self-surrender of the Son of God.
The phrase "gave himself up" (paredōken heauton) echoes Gal 2:20 ("the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me") and forms a deliberate contrast with Eph 4:19, where the Gentiles "gave themselves up" (paredōkan heautous) to licentiousness. Christ's self-giving is the antithesis and the remedy to fallen humanity's self-abandonment to sin.
The verse culminates in deeply cultic, Old Testament language: "an offering (prosphoran) and a sacrifice (thysian) to God for a sweet-smelling fragrance (osmēn euōdias)." The phrase osmē euōdia is a Septuagint liturgical formula appearing repeatedly in Leviticus and Numbers to describe sacrificial offerings acceptable to God (e.g., Lev 1:9, 13, 17; 2:2; Num 15:3). By applying this language to Christ's self-gift, Paul makes an extraordinary typological claim: all the animal sacrifices of the Mosaic covenant were anticipatory figures whose full reality is the singular, perfect offering of Christ's body on the Cross. The "fragrance" language suggests not merely acceptability but delight — God the Father is pleased with the Son's obedient love unto death (cf. Phil 4:18, where Paul applies the same formula to the Philippians' material support, suggesting believers' loving acts participate in this same fragrance).
Taken together, these two verses map the entire architecture of Christian moral life: identity (beloved children) → imitation (of the Father) → the standard of imitation (Christ's sacrificial love) → the goal of that love (pleasing God, as a fragrant offering). Morality and liturgy are inseparable.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with unusual depth precisely because it connects moral life, liturgical sacrifice, and divinization — three pillars of Catholic theology — in a single breath.
Divinization and Adopted Sonship: The command to imitate God presupposes what the Greek Fathers called theōsis — participation in the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1:4). St. Athanasius's famous dictum, "God became man so that man might become God" (De Incarnatione, 54), captures the logic Paul assumes: the Incarnation opened the possibility of genuine divine imitation by making us sharers in Christ's own filial relationship with the Father. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the divine life is given us from the moment of our Baptism" (CCC 1212) and that "the Word became flesh to make us 'partakers of the divine nature'" (CCC 460). To call Christians to "imitate God" is therefore not hyperbolical — it is a statement about what Baptism actually does.
The Eucharist as the Locus of This Passage: The sacrificial language of verse 2 points directly to the Mass. The Council of Trent defined that the Eucharist is the same sacrifice as Calvary, offered in an unbloody manner (Decree on the Holy Eucharist, Session XXII). The "sweet-smelling fragrance" of Christ's self-offering thus becomes present on every altar. St. John Chrysostom commented on this verse: "Do you see how Paul brings us to the very pinnacle of virtue? He bids us imitate God" (Homilies on Ephesians, Homily 17). St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Ephesians, connects the "fragrance" explicitly to the Eucharistic oblation, noting that Christ's sacrifice pleases the Father not as appeasement of wrath but as the perfect act of filial love.
Love as the Form of the Moral Life: The Catechism (CCC 1822–1829) identifies charity as "the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves." Ephesians 5:2 is its paradigmatic scriptural foundation: love is not defined abstractly but by the form of Christ's act — self-donation even unto death. Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est §12 writes that Christ's love "is truly an exodus, a going-beyond-the-self" — precisely the self-giving paredōken heauton of this verse. Christian love is therefore essentially Eucharistic in form: given, broken, poured out for others.
The passage poses a razor-sharp question to contemporary Catholics: whose love are we actually imitating? Culture saturates us with models of love defined by reciprocity, feeling, personal fulfillment, or romantic chemistry. Paul's definition is unsparing: love means giving yourself up — your preferences, your comfort, your claim on recognition — as an offering pleasing to God, not primarily as a strategy to be liked or to feel good.
Concretely, this passage calls Catholics to examine whether their daily relationships — in marriage, family, friendship, parish, workplace — bear the shape of the Cross. The "sweet-smelling fragrance" image is instructive: a fragrant offering is consumed, it disappears into the air — the gift is total, not partial or transactional.
For parents, this is the call to sacrifice sleep, ambition, and ego for the flourishing of children. For spouses, it is the daily renewal of the wedding vow's logic. For anyone experiencing conflict, verse 1's "therefore" demands that the forgiveness already received from God become the measure of forgiveness extended to others. The Mass is the school where this love is learned: attending not to receive a spiritual service but to unite one's own self-offering to Christ's — to become the fragrant sacrifice that pleases the Father.
Commentary