In this last week before Pentecost Sunday, we’re hearing the last of a series of readings from John’s gospel, all taken from a monologue by Jesus that goes on for several chapters, the words that he spoke to the disciples on the night he was betrayed. Our gospels during the Easter Season every year are all from this long farewell message. Some of Jesus’s words are directed to the disciples themselves, emotional and beautiful words, although sometimes hard for us to understand. But today we reach a kind of climax, since now Jesus is addressing not the disciples but his father, God the father, and now what he says is sometimes so intense that it is even harder for us to understand what he means. At the very least, what does all this talk about this mysterious unity, I in them and you in me, what does it have to do with us?
What it comes down to first is, what kind of a relationship did Jesus have with the Father? In some ways, of course, Jesus’s life was entirely spent doing difficult work in obedience to his sense of what the Father wanted, and he did it because he had such a sense of being called, even ordered to do it. But his relationship with God was way more than just one person being obedient to another. Jesus has no hesitation in saying that he and the Father are “one,” he is in me, he said, and I in him. So Jesus wasn’t doing things he was told to do; in fact what God wanted and what he wanted were always identical. They really are as much one person as they are separate. Now that is complex. What we call a mystery, even. There was complete intimacy and trust between the two of them, it’s like when we hear these words of Jesus today we are overhearing a conversation between two people who are so close they can speak in some sort of mysterious language to one another, leaving the rest of us outside looking in.
Except it turns out we’re not on the outside. Because what Jesus is saying is that through this unity he has with God the Father, because of this intense love that describes who they are, we have the capability of being one with them, them as part of us. And if that reality of God and Christ are in us, then we will all be one with one another, in a relationship that is so deep it overcomes all our differences. We will be one, as they seem somehow to be one. This is what’s possible for us — we are called to complete trust and honesty, a church and a world where people love one another as equals, one bread, one body, one Lord of all, says the song, that’s the way we’re called to see the whole world. Not people banded together in a cult, all looking and behaving the same, but people who under the surface are united in love with Jesus and one another.
Who would you say you feel unity with, like you are one with? Being humans, we usually feel closest to people who are very much like we are, who find the same words and music moving, who grew up in the same family or the same town, who laugh at the same jokes or share the same politics. That is friendship, that is love, it’s nourishing, we can’t live without it. But sometimes we mistake it for this unity that Jesus is talking about, the unity we really want. That deeper unity goes beyond people we know and like. The unity we are supposed to have is based on one revelation: that all of humanity shares one nature, just as Jesus shares one nature with the Father. And that nature is love. Something that touches any one of us touches all of us. We are one body. We want the oneness that helps us live as if there is a great unseen and unnoticed relationship among everyone who walks this earth
Our lives would be turned inside out if that is true. We’d make different decisions and find ourselves headed in a different direction if that oneness became clear to us. We might see that the poverty that we see, the desperation some people experience, is not someone else’s. It is ours. We may not like all of those people with whom we are one, we may feel ignored by them and betrayed by them and hated by them, their differences will put us off, but they are us. We don’t get a choice. We are connected, and we can live as if we are.
A few weeks ago, a great saint of our time, Jean Vanier*, died at age 90. He spent his life establishing and living in communities around the world for people with developmental disabilities, and reflecting on what their lives mean for the rest of us. He said that what Jesus did on this earth was teach us that we can never think of the world as a hierarchy, or a pyramid, where there are people at the top with power and money and abilities, and a larger number of people at the bottom who don’t have those things the people at the top have. Instead, Jesus came to show us that we are not a pyramid but a living body, all the different parts fit together and live as one, the parts don’t make any sense without one another, and in fact can’t live without one another. If one part of the body is ill it affects everyone, if the body is healthy, everyone thrives.
And that brings us back here, today. With us being here today in this place, for a meal. Jesus’s essence is sharing himself with others, and that is passed on to us, eating from one plate of bread, all drinking from one cup, as if we were all already one body. It is not just a meal, it is a sign of how God wants this world to look. And it’s nourishment to help us live in a way that is so close to one another that most people don’t think it’s possible.
*2023 Update: I guess like a lot of other people, I was wrong about Jean Vanier.