Summary: In his "High Priestly Prayer" in John 17, Jesus prayed that his followers all may be "one." Today, however, Christianity is a house divided and divided and then divided even further. So is there any way in which the followers of Jesus today are or could be considered "one"? Or is that just an unrealistic dream?
In the passage that we read today from the Gospel of John, we are eavesdropping on part of what has been called the "High Priestly Prayer" of Jesus.
It's an anguished, pre-crucifixion prayer in which God in the flesh speaks to God in the spirit. In that kind of internal holy dialogue Jesus can be wholly transparent. And he is. He opens up his heart and soul to God and is preparing for the approaching time when he'll no longer be with his disciples on Earth in his human body.
One of the mysteries in this passage is what Jesus means when he asks that his followers "may all be one." Did he mean he wanted them all to think alike or never have disagreements about what to think or do or believe? If that was really his desire, why did he pick such a wide range of people who were so different from each other in so many ways?
Sometimes they even disagreed with themselves. Around a charcoal fire, Peter denied Christ three times and then, later, around another charcoal fire, Peter affirmed Christ three times. Judas joined up as a zealous disciple and then betrayed Jesus. Clearly Jesus didn't hire any of these guys using long, penetrating interviews on the Indeed.com website.
When Jesus talked about his followers all being one, was he proposing some sort of rigid institutional structure for what eventually, many decades later, would become the Christian church after it reluctantly parted from its roots in Judaism?
If that's what he meant, why didn't he say so directly and clearly instead of speaking metaphorically, as when he said to and of the apostle Peter, "on this rock I will build my church"? Calling someone a "rock" might be a compliment but making Peter a rock star, as it were, was nowhere near a tight organization plan for a worldwide religious movement that eventually would draw in millions of people.
So we may have to look elsewhere for an answer to what the oneness of Christ-followers back then and right now might mean.
As we do that, let's think about whether those of us who put our trust in Christ are all one today. If so, why are we so divided up denominationally? We're Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, United Methodists, Pentecostals and on and on and on.
And all those churches I just named are further divided. For example, there's the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Presbyterian Church (US), the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and so on. In the same way, the recent painful schism in the United Methodist Church is raising the question of what the word "United" might really mean in that denomination's official name.
I'm reminded of the cartoon that shows a rescue ship that has just arrived on the shore of a desert island. The lone resident of that island is explaining to the rescue team why, in such a small space, there are two separate buildings in addition to his thatched hut.
"Well," he said, sort of proudly, "this one is my church. And that other one over there is the church I used to attend."
So despite sometimes-successful ecumenical efforts, the institutional Christian church certainly is not one. And we can be forgiven if we imagine that this divisive reality breaks the sacred heart of Jesus.
But maybe there are other meanings to the idea of Christ's followers all being one. In fact, a more important question than whether we're all Baptists or all Catholics or all Methodists is what true oneness might mean for us today and what it would mean for this wounded world if, in fact, we Christians somehow came together across our many differences and became one in the sense that Jesus meant for us to be one.
Which is to say one in purpose, one in commitment to the spirit of the risen Christ in our midst, one in being the hands, feet and heart of Christ in our broken world.
Perhaps the Christian mystics have an idea or two that might help us here. They approach their relationship with God in several different ways, as Simon Critchley writes in his engaging new book called, simply, Mysticism.
"For mystics," Critchley writes, "everything turns on the love of God. The divine is not some entity -- some desiccated abstraction -- that invites belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. No, God is to be [lovingly] enjoyed."1
What he seems to mean is that we must somehow experience an embodied God even as God remains spirit. And that's exactly what happened in the incarnation. The Word (capital W) became flesh. Later, of course, human beings tried to put their understanding of that miracle into statements of faith, or confessions, though sometimes that process seems simply to have made the living Flesh (capital F) become word (lower-case w), and thus lifeless in some way.
The church's historic confessions have their useful place, but they do not and cannot replace the spirit of the resurrected Christ.
And yet Christians today still hunger for what theologians call the "Real Presence" of Christ in their lives, meaning a Christ who is in some way embodied.
And that is what the church says happens in the sacrament of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.
In his book on mysticism, Critchley puts it this provocative way: "The relation to God, the communion with God, takes place through the mouth."2 Which is why the Eucharist sometimes is called a right-brain (or mystical) way of preaching the gospel while a sermon like this one is considered a left-brain (or logical and analytical) way to do that.
Different branches of the church have different ways of explaining how Christ is somehow present in the Eucharist -- either as a real presence or in memory, meaning that the Eucharist becomes a memorial, an ongoing memory of the Lord's earthly birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection.
We need not get into a complicated discussion about the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and about the Aristotelian science on which that doctrine is based, nor about the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation or any other institutional effort to describe the meaning and amazement of Holy Communion.
Nor, for our purposes today, do we need to argue about whether the Eucharist is a sacrament, as it's called in many branches of the faith, or an ordinance, as it's often used by Baptists and some other branches.
All we really need to know is that the old saying is true: You are what you eat. When we ingest the body and blood of Christ -- however we understand that -- we experience God. We consume Christ and that changes us into his hands, feet and very heart so that we, as one body, can do the healing work that Jesus calls us to do.
So that eucharistic transformation is an important way that we all become one in Christ.
Earlier I mentioned that our scripture passage for today is part of Christ's High Priestly Prayer, and it's helpful to note that the prayer has three parts, only one of which we read today. In the first part, Jesus takes note of what he has done in his ministry on Earth, and he acknowledges that his time is almost up.
Second, he speaks to God about his disciples, that fascinating band of brothers he has gathered around him, praying that they will continue in God's will and not be threatened or coerced by the destructive values of the world.
Finally, in what we read today, Jesus speaks to God about the future of what we have come to call the church. God's glory has been revealed in the life of Christ on Earth, and his prayer is that the disciples will continue to be living models of how God wants us to live.
And in his prayer for the church, Jesus is praying for us today, some 2,000 years later. He seems mostly interested in a oneness of spirit and goal, in our ability to recognize our common humanity and not so much in the structural or institutional oneness of the church.
The church, to be sure, needs some kind of organizing structure, just as a house needs a foundation, walls and a roof. But if our loyalty is to the structure and not to the purpose of the church itself, we're missing the point.
And what is the point? It's that the triune God -- Creator, Cross-bearer and Comforter -- has appeared on Earth in the flesh and not only shown us how to live but also what it means to lay down one's life for another.
Jesus came so that we might have life -- and have it more abundantly. But this doesn't mean a life of possessions, of worldly wealth and fame. The winner is not the one who dies with the most stuff.
Rather, abundant, flourishing life -- for now and for eternity -- means a life of self-sacrificing love, which is always and everywhere beautiful, always and everywhere gracious, always and everywhere inspirational.
In the perspective of a cosmos that scientists say is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few weeks, the span of our lives is infinitesimal. And yet our lives are a gift from the God who made us, who loves us, who gave up his divine privileges to come and show us what we are to do with our lives. His answer, too, is simple, but demanding -- love others as I have loved you. If we all do that, we can be one, just as Jesus asked us to be. May it be so.