Catholic Commentary
Final Blessing: Peace, Love, Grace, and Incorruptible Love
23Peace be to the brothers, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.24Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ with incorruptible love. Amen.
Ephesians 6:23–24 is Paul's closing benediction pronouncing peace, love, faith, and grace upon the church from God the Father and Jesus Christ. The passage emphasizes that believers who love Christ with incorruptible love—love rooted in resurrection life itself—receive divine grace that transcends mortality and corruption.
Paul's final blessing calls us to a love that death cannot dissolve — not a feeling, but a choice that outlasts every circumstance.
The phrase "all those" (pantōn) — despite occasional manuscript variants — signals universality: this blessing is not reserved for an elite, but for every baptized soul who perseveres in love. The "Amen" is not a mere liturgical close; it is an act of faith, a ratification of everything Paul has proclaimed. In Hebrew, amen means "so it is" and "so let it be" simultaneously — affirmation and petition bound together, which is the very shape of Christian prayer.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates these closing verses in several intersecting ways.
On "love with faith" as the form of Christian life: The Council of Trent, drawing on Galatians 5:6, defined that charity is the "form" of faith — faith is, as it were, animated and completed by love (Session VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 7). St. Thomas Aquinas, following this line, teaches that caritas is not a separate act added to faith but the very perfection by which faith attains its end (ST II-II, q. 4, a. 3). Paul's "love with faith" in v. 23 is thus the compressed formula of the entire Catholic understanding of the justified life.
On "incorruptible love" and the theology of grace: St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Ephesians, observes that Paul does not say "those who love greatly" or "those who love worthily," but those who love in incorruptibility — because the measure of true Christian love is its immortal quality, its participation in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1822–1829) teaches that charity is a theological virtue infused by God, by which we love God above all things and our neighbor for His sake. This infused charity is, by its very nature, oriented toward eternal life — it is already a participation in the incorruptible love of the Trinity.
On the double source — Father and Son: The parallel attribution of peace, love, and grace to both the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ implicitly grounds the later Trinitarian definitions of Nicaea and Constantinople. St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Ephesians themselves just decades after this letter, draws directly on this Pauline theology when he calls Jesus Christ "our God" (Ephesians salutation) — the seamless theological logic of Paul's blessing anticipates and nourishes that confession.
On the final "Amen": The Catechism (§2856) teaches that the "Amen" of Christian prayer expresses our ratification of all that God has revealed and promised. Here, Paul's Amen seals the entire theology of Ephesians — election, redemption, unity, the household of God, the spiritual warfare — under the sign of love that cannot perish.
These two verses offer a concrete examination of conscience and a daily aspiration for the contemporary Catholic. Ask yourself: Is your love for Christ incorruptible — or is it conditioned on consolations, social approval, comfortable circumstances? Paul's benediction implies that authentic Christian love must be capable of surviving desolation, suffering, and the slow erosion of time. This is particularly urgent in an age of "expressive individualism," where love is understood primarily as feeling. St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body insists that genuine love is always a free, total, faithful, and fruitful gift of self — qualities that map directly onto aphtharsia, incorruptibility.
Practically: begin or end each day by offering your love for Christ explicitly — not as emotion, but as an act of will. Pray with the words of Augustine: "Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." Receive the sacraments as the means by which Christ renews in you the gift of grace (charis) and sustains your love against corruption. And in your relationships — spouse, friend, parishioner — ask whether you love "with faith," letting supernatural vision shape how you see others, as Paul has urged throughout the letter.
Commentary
Ephesians 6:23 — Peace and Love with Faith
Paul's closing salutation is not a mere formality. "Peace be to the brothers" (eirēnē tois adelphois) echoes the Semitic shalom — not the absence of conflict but a positive, overflowing well-being, the right ordering of the soul toward God and neighbor. That this peace is addressed to "the brothers" (and sisters, by inclusion) situates it within the ekklēsia, the Body of Christ; it is an ecclesial peace, not purely private. Throughout Ephesians, Paul has labored to establish that Jew and Gentile are reconciled "in one body through the cross" (2:16), and this final peace-wish is the personal application of that cosmic reconciliation.
"Love with faith" (agapē meta pisteōs) is a striking pairing. Paul does not list them separately, as if they were independent virtues, but conjoins them as an integrated reality. In the Catholic tradition, this reflects the teaching that faith is formed by charity (fides caritate formata — see Gal 5:6). Faith without love is incomplete; love without faith lacks its proper supernatural object. The source of both is explicitly double: "from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." The parallel construction is theologically freighted — the Father and Jesus Christ are placed in identical grammatical relation as the joint origin of these gifts. This is Pauline Trinitarian grammar: the Father acts through the Son, and their shared outpouring is the Spirit (cf. the opening blessing in 1:3–14).
Ephesians 6:24 — Grace and Incorruptible Love
"Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ" — Paul closes as he opened (1:2), with charis, grace. This is the signature word of Ephesians: appearing twelve times, it encompasses the entire economy of salvation from divine election (1:6) through redemption (2:8) to the ministry of the Church (4:7). To close with it is to remind the Ephesians that everything they are, have, and hope for is gift.
But the culminating phrase is en aphtharsia — "in incorruptibility" or "with incorruptible love." This word aphtharsia belongs to the language of resurrection and immortality (see 1 Cor 15:42, 50–54; Rom 2:7). It is not merely an adjective modifying the quality of love; it describes the mode and destiny of that love. To love Christ "in incorruptibility" is to love Him with the kind of love that death cannot dissolve, that time cannot corrupt, that sin alone can interrupt. This is love rooted in the imperishable life of the Risen Lord.