As this is being distributed, we will be in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

I have been mulling over the lectionary gospel text for the Sunday that starts this week, part of Jesus’ great high priestly prayer as we find it in John 17.

Jn 17:20 “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Here we see Jesus pray that we be one, ‘completely one’. We are light years from this reality. The tragedy is that the church has always been divided. It still is. I have not seen the church so polarised in decades. The dividing lines are drawn in different places from when I was a child, yet they still exist.

In Paul’s New Testament time, it was mostly the divisions of Jew and Gentile. Then the church got into ‘theology’ – on the nature of the person of Christ. Closer to our time the great division was between Catholics and Protestants. Of late, it has been between ‘Evangelicals’ of their multitudinous stripes and ‘Liberals’ – generally more readily identified with mainline Christianity. To find oneself identifying with both parts of this divide is painful.

Yet Jesus invites us to love with an ‘agape’ kind of love – that love which seeks the highest and best good of ‘the other’. The kind of love that is demonstrated in the cross Ro 5:6 “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” It is in the cross, in this self-giving love, that the glory of God is revealed. It is this kind of love that we are invited to participate in – and it involves loving those we consider beyond the pale.

That is hard. To love them in a Christ-like way. To seek their highest and best good, even when I might despise them, while they are hating on me. It is when I reflect on this, I recognise the rage in my own heart. It is when I call to mind faces of those that espouse the name of Christ, yet also embrace ways of thinking, being, and doing, that are anathema to me, that I recognise my own culpability and it all seems too difficult. Yet the way of Jesus continues to invite me to seek their highest and best good. To love them. To pray for them. To bless them.

My friend Frank espouses a path I find helpful. He is a retired school counsellor. He takes the simple approach that everyone he meets is doing the best he or she can. It may not look very good to us, yet given their gene pool, their history and the way life has shaped them, they are doing the best in this moment that they know how. I find that helpful. It goes with a poem by Miller Williams titled Compassion. I heard read at a funeral last year.

“Have compassion for everyone you meet,

even if they don't want it.

What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism

is always a sign of things no ears have heard,

no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on

down there where the spirit meets the bone.”