UNITY NOT UNIFORMITY

If I were to summarize the long prayer that the writer of John’s Gospel puts into Jesus’ mouth at the Last Supper, it would be this: “that they may be one as we are one.” Jesus wants us, all of humanity, to be one as he and God are one. That prayer, unfortunately, at least in one way, has not been fulfilled. It has been in another.

We are one because we are all children of one God no matter what we believe about God or even if we even believe in God. Yet, when Jesus prayed as he did that we be one, his concern was for us to be more than simply brothers and sisters to one another. He prayed that we be in the same type of relationship that he had with God, a relationship based on mutual love one for another. If we ever attained that goal, we would indeed be one; we would be at unity one with the other.

Unity, however, is not the same as uniformity. Jesus and God are one but they are also different. Granted, we do not understand that difference because the idea, the concept of God, is simply beyond our human comprehension. My wife and I are one, we are united; but we certainly are not uniform when it comes to much in our daily lives. We like most of the same things, recreations, foods and the like; but we do not hold all things in common.

No one does because there is no one just like me. Each one of us is unique. Even though we may all hold much in common, even though we have the same God as our creator, we are different. That is the joy of life in this life. Can you imagine how boring life would be if we all thought alike, liked all the same foods, even looked alike. Life would not be life even though we were alive and well.

It is our differences that make life so wonderful on the one hand and sometimes so difficult on the other. Sometimes, when swamped by the problems those differences bring about, we are tempted to believe that our goal should be both unity and uniformity. If we could only get the other person to think as we do, to see as we see, to believe as we do, then all would be well – or so we might presume.

The scandal of Christianity to those who are not Christian and even to those of us who are is the divisiveness among us, often very bitter divisiveness, most of which is caused by one party wanting the other to be just like him/her/they. They want unity and uniformity. The church has never been united and uniform; never. Peter and Paul had their disagreements up to their own deaths. They took them to the grave. But they were united in their faith in Jesus and that was what really mattered.

What is important is our unity. As long as we do not insist that we have to be uniform as well, we can live well. We will deal with our differences in a loving way, compromising here, agreeing to disagree there, even changing because the love of the other is more important than what we are clinging to, whatever that is. The more we understand that unity is more important than uniformity, the easier it is to be one even with all our differences.