Radical Unity

A few years ago, I found myself in the middle of a conflict.  Nothing too dramatic, in many ways the usual, very human kind, with pain and hurt and broken relationships, even as people tried to do the right thing in difficult circumstances.  I had landed in it quite suddenly, but friends rallied round, with tea and kindness, with their prayers, and with the wisdom gained from many similar experiences.  I remember especially the words of one friend and colleague, himself no stranger to such situations.  ‘All you can do’, he said to me, ‘is try to build low-level consensus, get people to agree where they can’.  It was extremely useful advice, and has stuck with me ever since.

This week, as we focus our prayers and our hopes on Christian unity, I’ve been thinking about that advice again and wondering what St Paul might have said to me and to us.  We heard in our reading his words to the Christians at Corinth, a city known for its education, its tolerant cosmopolitanism, its vibrant engagement with ideas and religion – if Oxford were ever to be twinned with a city in the ancient world, surely it would be Corinth.  And just like Christians today the Corinthians found themselves arguing, over status and power, over the place of women, over the merits of different charismatic preachers and leaders.  Into that conflict Paul writes them a letter, a letter they will cherish and keep and pass down through the generations.  But this was also a letter written to startle them, for it does not urge cautious consensus, or a careful knitting back together of the status quo.  It was designed to shatter their old assumptions and break apart their ideals, urging them to continue the work of radical transformation which had begun in them and yet was now stalling.  Paul wants to shake the church to its foundations, so that it might be built through the Spirit as the true body of Christ. 

And Paul wants the Corinthians to grasp what kind of Church he has in mind, for it is not going to look very solid to the rest of the world.   Indeed, from the outside it will look like it will simply collapse.  For this a building, or a body, where everyone is different, where each lives out their own gifts in different ways, and yet still in the service of all.  There is no normal hierarchy, no structure of rules, none of the orderliness and tidiness we expect in our architecture and in our lives.   Instead, everything is held together purely and totally by the Spirit of God, a Spirit which turns everything upside down and inside out.  This Spirit gives gifts without regard to merit and status, riding roughshod over every principle of political justice and classical civilisation.  More than that, it is the Spirit who leads people to proclaim the crucified Jesus as their Lord, and to see in the cross and that shameful death the true divine wisdom and power.  Cheerfully this Spirit tramples the cultural sensibilities of all those sophisticated Corinthians and their educated friends.   

Yet Paul does not stop there.  His images of wild unity against false hierarchy, of the exuberant Spirit over rules and structures, of the foolish cross against the wisdom of the world – all these are fundamental to his advice to these fractious Corinthians.  For their problem is not that they lack rules or organisation or structures of differentiation, which might keep them alongside each other even as they drift apart.  Their problem goes deeper, for they are losing sight of what it is that holds them together, and that is and can only be God, the God revealed in Christ and made known through the Spirit.  God, Paul is telling them, will not be forced into their human structures or used to settle their human rivalries.  God gives gifts and talents and skills to people not to mark out the haves and have nots, the strong and the weak, or to justify some allegedly natural pecking order – however much they may wish to be top of it.   God’s gifts are for us all, for the flourishing and the salvation of all people, and the first step to unity is always to recognise that, to let go of our own ambitions, and let our dreams be the dreams of all.  Yes it is risky, as Paul himself is all too well aware, but Paul’s point is that this new kind of community, this unique unity, is the only way to be the Church, the only way to live after the world-transforming events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

It is, perhaps, to the Corinthians’ great credit that Paul can be so ambitious, that he can offer advice so explicitly foolish, so clearly against the rules of the world.  Reading his words in our lesson today, his concern for diversity and the common good, perhaps we have lost something of their counter-cultural edge, the challenge they posed to ancient claims about natural hierarchy and fixed social status.  With our lips at least we are willing to say that all are equal, that all should work for the common good, that there is joy and dignity in diversity.  Yet if we have absorbed something of Paul’s rhetoric, I wonder if we  - I wonder if I - have really taken seriously his underlying message, his dismissal of all human claims to power and order, and his insistence that we allow the cross and the Spirit to shape our lives and our communities – however disruptive and unsettling that might prove to be.

And yet Paul is not unrealistic and he reminds us of the need to work together in the midst of the here and now.  Very often this will mean a search for consensus, for agreement of some kind over what is good in our lives and in God’s creation – and there is no consensus without honesty, transparency, and careful listening.  In our gospel reading we heard Jesus’s very first miracle in John’s gospel, a miracle about an ordinary wedding party saved from disaster when the family recognises the problem and go to ask Jesus for help.  Seeing what they need in that moment, Jesus turns the water into the finest wine, and the party is a memorable triumph.   Here we see the possibilities for love and community that open up when the gifts of creation are transformed by God’s power and when we can enjoy them together.  But this miracle is only the start of a gospel story through which we will learn the true meaning of unity, the unity that comes from abiding in Christ just as he is in the Father, the unity of wills that leads Jesus to death and resurrection, the unity of sharing in the divine Trinity.

So as we pray this week, and through our lives, for Christian unity, let us work always to find common ground, shared aims, and to rejoice together in God’s wonderful, diverse creation.  But as we do so, perhaps we might remember too that there is only one true foundation for our unity and our Church, and that is a foundation as unsettling and disruptive as it is eternally faithful.  For it is the divine, self-giving love revealed to us by Jesus Christ, shared with us through the Holy Spirit, the love that we too are invited to make known in the world, through our words and our actions and throughout all our lives.