Unity

Sam Held. Easter 7, John 17: 20- 26

As some of you know, I’m a linguist by background. I love words, I’m pretty comfortable with them, and never miss an opportunity to share my enthusiasm for language with those around me (whether they want me to or not)
It may surprise you, then, if I tell you that I had to read today’s Gospel passage several times before I was truly satisfied that I had captured all the nuances of meaning it contains. So why should it have caused me so much of a problem? After all, it’s not a long passage, and there are no complicated polysyllabic words in it. The biggest words only have three syllables.
The Gospel reading is not complicated in the slightest, but it is complex, extremely complex.

First there is the ‘surface complexity’, that of the use of language. Today’s Gospel is the third part of what has come to be known as The Great High Priestly Prayer, where Jesus prays aloud to the Father in the upper room on the night before his death on the cross. We must assume he intended his prayers to be heard by the disciples.
Because we are only hearing the third part, Jesus is referring to people previously made explicit by pronouns (they, those etc.), a device known as anaphora, and therein lies the task of unravelling exactly to whom he is referring.

I don’t find the first verse of the passage too difficult if I use my hand as an aid – “I ask not only on behalf of these (the disciples), but also on behalf of those (the rest of humankind) who will believe in me through their (the disciples) word”. Now I’m sure that many of you may have got there much more quickly than I did, but from there onwards, the hand is no longer of any use to me at all. At times Jesus may have been referring to people in general, and at times to the disciples.

I believe though, that in verse 24, When Jesus prays “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory,” refers specifically to the disciples, and is an indicator both of Jesus’ desire to see the disciples rewarded, and of the Gospel provenance of the great apostolic tradition of the Church. I also believe that in the last two verses Jesus is again referring to the disciples, and referring also to Pentecost and the great Trinitarian unity soon to come.

Then we come to the deeper complexity – the layers of meaning we can find in this prayer.
It is perhaps in anticipation of the revelation of that amazing unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit that Jesus prays for unity, for ‘oneness’ between his people on earth. Or is it perhaps that during his time incarnate among humankind he has seen just how urgent is the need to pray for unity?

On this Sunday, when our theme is breaking chains, perhaps we should consider the origin of the chains that fetter us, for I believe Jesus identifies it in this, his prayer, as our seemingly irresistible drive towards disunity.

As Christians we believe in, and pray for, peace and justice. We pray for the oppressed, whether by war or by totalitarian regimes, and we pray for our Christian bothers and sisters who suffer religious persecution in various parts of the world.
How truly marvellous it would be if all our prayers were answered and these chains of external oppression were to be broken.
Praying for the victims of disunity worldwide is something most of us would consider a natural part of the ministry of all the baptised. Worldwide disunity is somehow a concept that we can accept as a constant more easily than disunity closer to home.
Unity is one characteristic that cannot be ascribed to the human race at any point in its history, and even as followers of Christ often it eludes us. Put bluntly the church has not been a good ambassador for unity over the centuries.

Jesus prays on behalf of all those who will believe in him through the word of the apostles for oneness, for unity, but we might be forgiven for thinking that God declined to answer this part of the Great Prayer. The truth is that it is our stubborn and dogmatic human nature that prevents us from attaining unity.
As Christians we have argued from the first century onwards about the right and wrong way to worship; from time to time we have gone to war with each other just to prove that one way of godliness is superior to another.
Jesus saw the opportunity for worship and community whenever “two or three are gathered together in his name”, but burdened as we are by our humanity, when two or three are gathered together we only see an opportunity to give this group a title, write a set of rules and declare to the world that this group, and no other has all the answers.

The major churches have long recognised this problematic tendency and there are many ecumenical movements and initiatives, but people tend to be wary of unity as they often confuse it with uniformity (as, to be frank, do some of the ecumenical movements). Uniformity suggests to adherents of this or that denomination that they might have to sacrifice what they may feel to be non-negotiable beliefs.
A well-meaning pop song of the seventies suggested that what was needed to counter racism was a great big melting pot, which would turn out only coffee-coloured people, but God gave us our great diversity on earth and it is not ours to meddle with.
Back in the UK I was active in politics for some year in the Labour party, and during one particularly difficult internal upheaval there was a joke going around that went:
How do you know when unity has been achieved in the Labour party?
And the answer was:
When your friends start stabbing you in the front!
Like all good humour there is more than a grain of truth in this – unity is not uniformity, and definitely not conformity. Eli Stanley Jones, the 20th Century Methodist missionary and writer once said “Talk about what you believe and you have disunity. Talk about who you believe in and you have unity”.
Unity is about finding what is common to us all and we can agree on, and also agreeing on what is not, without comprising our love and respect for one another.
This has never been easy. It is quite difficult to love and respect someone who disagrees with you, especially if it’s about a deeply held belief. I can speak from my own experience about this. I have some really good close friends on the more evangelical wing of our church, and being openly on the liberal side, when our conversations turn to what they feel is appropriate to teach their children about (as an example) creation, we differ. We have had some difficult moments but worked through them with our friendship and respect intact.
I believe that in the Great Prayer Jesus recognised the immense difficulty humankind faces in achieving oneness. So much so that he prays to the Father not once, but three times – in verse 21, that they may all be one, in verse 22 that they may be one even as we are one, and in verse 23 that they may be completely one.

This is a staged invocation, each going further than the last, and the third complete. Complete oneness, transcending human divisions and disunity. Complete oneness for those who believe - with Jesus the Son, oneness with God the Father and oneness with the soon-to-be-revealed (at Pentecost) God the Holy Spirit.
That they may be completely one
It is well named the Great High Priestly Prayer, for it reminds us of the Eucharist.
Jesus calls us to unity, to oneness, to put aside our divisions, just as we are called to do at the sharing of the Peace, before invoking the Holy Spirit as does the priest in the Great Thanksgiving.
So what can we do in our own lives to move closer to this oneness? Well firstly, it is right that we continue to pray that the iniquitous chains of oppression across the world be broken, we do indeed have a duty to speak out against injustice wherever it is, but injustice doesn’t always live in far-off countries. It is often right under our noses. And what about those people closer to home, whose way of life might not be what we think of as proper, what about “finding what is common to us” not what’s different. As Christians it’s very easy to think that we’ve found the ‘right’ way to live life, but once again I return to Eli Stanley Jones (who incidentally influenced and was influenced by Ghandi) who wrote:
Victorious living does not mean perfect living in the sense of living without flaw, but it does mean adequate living, and that can be consistent with many mistakes.
I admit to many mistakes in my attempts at adequate living, and repeated failures in my efforts to achieve oneness, but I take inspiration from this Great Prayer that we make break the chains of our own making that imprison us in our divisions and disunity, and pray that you may too:

God of infinite understanding, make us one – not so that we are a single entity but so that as one and at all times we believe in you. We ask you this in Jesus’ name
Amen