That They May All Be One
Seventh Sunday after Easter
This is the final Sunday before Pentecost. In our gospel reading for today Jesus prays for his disciples, “that they may all be one.” Putting this reading on the final Sunday of Easter invites us to see Pentecost as the fulfillment of that prayer. As a result, if we are to think about Jesus’ desire that we, his disciples, may be one, we should begin by looking at the unity given at Pentecost. In Genesis 11:1-9 we read that everyone spoke a single language. In response to the great tower that humans construct, God fragments and confuses human speech into multiple languages, making future tower building enterprises much more difficult. At Pentecost human diversity, especially the diversity of languages, is taken as a given. Instead of returning to a single language, everyone hears the gospel in their own language. The unity prayed for by Jesus and delivered at Pentecost is this type of unity. It does not erase diversity. At Babel diversity of languages makes cooperation and life together difficult, if not impossible. At Pentecost the Spirit reaches across linguistic diversity to draw together a vast group of diverse people into a single body of Christ.
God creates an ordered and diverse world. Human sin renders that diversity and difference into something competitive, threatening, disordered and fragmented. Pentecost does not erase the diversity of Babel. It infuses a Spirit directed, peaceable order into the disordered competitive diversity of the world, providing a testimony to and foretaste of God’s ultimate reconciliation of all things in Christ.
Today the church in the U.S. is deeply fractured. Even relatively homogenous groups of Christians seem to have a hard time living together. The unity Jesus prays for in John 17 seems fantastical. In the light of our current and past divisions it might seem wise to speak of church unity as something invisible. It is something granted by God to the church in some eschatological sense, but not to be expected in this world. This may help us to live more easily with our divisions. It is not, however, what Jesus prays for in John 17:20-26. The first thing to note about the unity Jesus prays for is that it is visible. One of the points of this unity is that it shows the world that the Father has sent Jesus (17:21). For this to happen, the unity of Jesus’ followers must be visible. How else will the world “know that you have sent me…”? The unity that Jesus prays for is not merely a unity in the hearts and minds of believers; it must be visible in some ways. I will leave aside for the moment the questions of what the visible signs of this unity are. ( At the very least, the Lord’s table should be one of those places where unity is visible, but that is a much longer discussion.) Instead, Jesus’ prayer seems to indicate that the world will believe in him because of the unity of his followers. In whatever ways it is to be manifested, the credibility of the gospel is tied to the visible unity of the church.
One can see how this might work as the passage unfolds. The unity Jesus prays for in John 17 is also a unity of love. Jesus asks that the love which the Father has poured into him should also be poured into his followers so that they may be one. The unity of Christ’s followers is a unity founded on the Father’s love of the Son, an eternal love which is poured into us through the Spirit. Theologians spend a lot of time reflecting on how precisely fallen and redeemed humans might manifest the love internal to the Triune God. Without answering that question in detail, it seems clear that human believers manifesting in their life together some form of the love between the Father and the Son would be very compelling in our divided world. Such visible love in action would clearly render the gospel credible.
Nevertheless, someone might point to our reading in Acts or the reading from Ps. 97 to note that one must also stand up for the truth of the gospel. This is the case even when, like for Paul and Silas, it lands you in jail. If there are some gospel truths that are worth one’s freedom or even one’s life, should we not be willing to divide the body of Christ over these? Doesn’t the integrity of the gospel depend on our willingness to stand for the truth no matter the cost?
Both the credibility of the Gospel and its integrity are important things to pursue. Indeed, I assume that, at least on the surface, most church division stems from people thinking that they are defending the integrity of the Gospel. If the integrity of the Gospel is threatened by the work of other believers, they are willing to divide the body of Christ for the sake of that integrity. Gospel integrity wins out over the credibility the Gospel gains through ecclesial unity. This seems like a sort of ecclesial utilitarianism. I can see that, when presented in this way, the path to ecclesial division seems a lot easier to follow.
By the time one seems faced with the stark choice between the integrity of the Gospel or its credibility, many other things about a church’s life have already fallen into disrepair. The most important thing that seems to have been lost is the glorious freedom the Gospel grants believers to be wrong, to make mistakes, to move in unfortunate directions AND to be called back, to repent and to be restored to life together. It would also seem that believers had neglected to cultivate and maintain the patience required to live with incomplete answers, waiting charitably with each other for clearer guidance from the Lord. If our failings become the final word on our life together, if we have lost the capacity to speak the truth to each other in love, if forms of creative repentance and active reconciliation have dried up among us, we are likely to find ourselves (regularly) in those situations where Gospel integrity is pitted against the credibility the Gospel gains from ecclesial unity. If that is the case, it seems unlikely that Jesus’ prayer will be realized among us.