God’s Desire Is That We Be One

The desire of the Evil One is to create divisions between us in every aspect of our lives. Wherever there is division, God has been forgotten. The poison of division can happen in the family, in our neighborhoods, in our country, and between nations. Divisions of all kinds are often defended by the shallow, tortured logic of “us versus them”, which presumes, by some awkward, even distorted mental gymnastics, that the ‘us’ is naturally better than the ‘them’. When Christians engage in such arguments, they are Christians in name only. For such distinctions are antithetical to the Gospel message. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ” (Gal. 3: 28).

Jesus, praying to the Father on behalf of the disciples before his arrest, says, “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” (Jn. 17: 20-21). The greatest scandal of Christianity is our divisions. If we are truly honest with ourselves, should we be surprised that the world does not believe that the Father sent Jesus to show us the love of the Father and to redeem all human beings from their sins? The world sees no love in, or between, our divided denominations, so why should it believe in the Word of God, Jesus Christ? How can the world know the peace of Christ, or learn about the love of God, if it does not see it lived out in the Body of Christ, that is, the Christian Church?

Christ, the Word of God, is the only source that can bring true freedom, true justice, and true peace to this broken world. To depend on a human being, or a particular human ideology, or on the accumulation of power or wealth, or on some variation of individualist pleasure principle, as the means to our happiness or salvation, will only continue to lead us down the same dark, decadent, hateful, bloody road that we have been on since Adam and Eve. Christ is no dreamer. He is the ultimate realist. In his humanity, he knows the reality of suffering and death. In his divinity, he accepted the cost of doing the Father’s will. His word is truth itself, unsullied by passion, by ignorance, or by prejudice. His own, undeniable action backs it up. To put it in the vernacular, he ‘walked the talk’. He ‘practiced what he preached’. And now he calls on us to do the same. He does not ask us to do what is impossible. He knows what we are made of and, by his life, death, and resurrection, we can believe that he desires only the best for us.

To be a true disciple of Jesus Christ, we must take on the personal and holy work of coming to know, to understand, and to believe in Jesus. We must study, read, and meditate on the scriptures; we must make prayer part of our daily life. But the real work ahead of us is that of moving from the prayer we do on our knees in our private spaces, to the prayer that we do on our feet in public; in our care for, and service to, one another, and, yes, in our ability to forgive one another. When we can look at others and see Christ in them, then the unity that Jesus desires for us will come to be. This is not an easy task. We know this only too well. In reality, we can neither do this alone nor by our human power. We need the encouragement and support of others, but we need something more as well. If or when we come to understand and desire to live as Jesus’ disciples openly and joyfully, the Holy Spirit swiftly comes and fills us with God’s overflowing grace. He does not abandon us.

To be disciples of Jesus in the fullest sense, we cannot have Jesus Christ on our lips but the world in our hearts. “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt. 7: 21-22). “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt. 6: 24). If the arguments of worldly division are in our hearts, how can the world come to know the love of God in person? To believe in Jesus Christ is to believe that his forgiveness, compassion, and redemption extend to all. It is to accept the role of the Good Samaritan as our norm. It is to see Jesus not only in our group, our church, our party, but also in the hungry, the naked, the alien, and the stranger, and to feed them, clothe them, and to welcome them, not as uncomfortable “others” but as our brothers and sisters. To believe otherwise is to deny the Word of God who walked among us and showed us the way, the truth, and the life that is the only way that leads to the Kingdom of God. This is the unity that God wants. Only in being one with God and one another will we come to know the peace, the justice, and the joy our hearts desire.