Simon’s Reflection for the Second Sunday after Epiphany
As our gospels tell us, one of the first things Jesus did as he began his public ministry was to bring a group of disciples together. Those disciples would become in time, the people God would use to make his Gospel known and they would be most successful in making Christ known when they were most united. They would be given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to help to bind them together. But they were real people like us, precious but with flaws, and like any group of real people they argued!
We read St Paul, following his Lord, and busy at work in the First Letter to the Corinthians in community-making. If you read the whole of that letter you will see how important the message of unity was to that community and it is in that letter, that St Paul uses his famous, inspired image of the Church as the Body of Christ to remind those Christians and to preach to posterity, i.e., to us, of the deep unity and mutual belonging we share in Christ even if we don’t always live up to its implications.
Tomorrow sees the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We certainly need unity of a positive sort at the moment. We need unity of purpose to help us to overcome the pandemic and we need to pull together and look after one another. The news last week focussed on the deep and dangerous divisions in the USA but, of course, we have plenty of divisions in our own society in need of reconciliation and healing.
Christians are called to set an example of loving unity for Christ’s sake in the way that we work together, not least by responding together to the huge need for healing and help that has been caused by this crisis. I guess if you were in a hospital being treated for a bad case of Covid right now, it would not much matter to you whether your doctors and nurses were protestants, catholics, orthodox or muslims, hindus, jews or humanists for that matter, you would be grateful for their dedication and help. Some things remind us that there are deeper and more important sources of unity. The Hebrew man who was helped by the Good Samaritan would not have been bothered about the “orthodoxy” of his religious views!
I’ve been working my way through Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” this year which is set in a period in which the differences between Catholics and Protestants and between various shades of protestant were literally burning matters! A reminder perhaps that even when there seemed to be more unity in “Christendom” that unity was often achieved by force. It is mystifying how official Christianity could have got from Jesus’ teaching of love of enemies and turning the other cheek to the burning of heretics!
Thankfully we have moved on and we recognise that Christians need to proclaim the gospel together and that while there are differences between the denominations and not all of them insignificant, there are much more important things which unite us and also things that we can learn from one another. We recognise that we should look to what unites us and work together as much as we can.
I think it was the great Calvinist theologian, Karl Barth, who, writing on the subject of church unity suggested that it was by being as faithful as we can to Christ in our own denomination of the church, that we will be doing our best for church unity. Being faithful to Christ where we are, he was suggesting, is more important than searching around for the “perfect” church denomination.
There are reasons of course why we are more comfortable with being Anglican/Episcopalian or presbyterian or Catholic or Baptist or Pentecostal or Evangelical and they are not all just matters of taste and preference. There are real issues about how we understand the sacraments, the bible, the proper organisation of church, mission and discipleship and of course Christians sometimes disagree about moral issues.
We can’t agree about everything. Sometimes, if we have the wisdom to hold some aspects of our own traditions with humility, we can learn from the differences in other traditions and be enriched by them or challenged by them. We all after all have a mixed history and there is no perfect denomination. But we can’t rationalise away all differences and say that they enrich us. It remains true that it is a shame that Christians don’t agree with each other about more things and our disunity is something in need of healing.
We must, however, take seriously the call to follow Christ together and think about what Christ wants us to do. Think about Christ’s deep desire to bring us into unity with Him and with each other. Think about the way in which one of his first acts was to call a disparate group of people together. Nathaniel, in his encounter with Christ is led beyond his initial scepticism to faith. Then he is led beyond his rather nationalistic idea of the messiah as the King of Israel to a vision in which Christ Himself is Jacob’s ladder from the Book of Genesis; the one who unites heaven and earth, God and humanity and humans with one another. If we stick close to Him, he will give us a better vision and a deeper desire for loving unity between all peoples. Amen.
