Completely one – 10 May 2013

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. [John 17: 20-21]

But the world looks at us and sees hopeless disunity.  Historians can see that back in the days when the church was more or less one, that unity was enforced, often brutally, by both church and state.  You can have the appearance of unity if you are powerful enough to enforce it.  I am always amused to see parishes and schools named after St Thomas More, Henry’s pious Lord Chancellor.  But Thomas More unblinkingly executed numerous protestants who would not return to Rome – and he himself got executed by Henry, as we know, because Henry required unity around Henry’s agenda.  However Jesus expected his disciples to behave, I feel it was not like that. 

But if I may speak as a survivor of the now almost forgotten Church Union negotiations in this country back in the 1960s and 1970s...  What we mainly discovered was what we should have known, that unity does not come by negotiation, by conference.  There was much good will around at that time, but in the end nothing much changed. 

Jesus points to something much more basic.  Jesus’s disciple shares in the unity Jesus knows with his Father – May they be in us, Jesus says.  The disciple enters into another way of living.  It is not possible that Jesus’s disciple now has enemies, or hierarchies exercising control.  When Jesus touches on matters of power and precedence, in the Sermon on the Mount, he states categorically, It will not be so among you. 

Unity begins not by treaty or agreement, but in a changed heart.  Our prayer constantly invites us to live deeper and better than our inner dividedness, our fears, our memories.  In silence and stillness, God’s Spirit is able to begin and continue a work of re-creation in us, helping us to set aside what we are afraid of, and all that poisons life and hinders our inner unity and our relationship with God’s world.   I suppose we are always tempted to assume we would be naked and vulnerable without our inner demons and accumulated memories, handicaps, whatever they are.   But in the silence we are able to get past the fear of letting go these things.  Unity within very soon leads us to become agents of unity around us, where we are and live.