Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Like many people, I was taken by surprise when an American-born cardinal, Robert Prevost, was elected Pope. That was certainly something I had never expected to see! And in fact, Pope Leo is claimed just as deeply—and rightly—by the Peruvians as he is by us Americans. Two nations, two peoples, united in one man who is now Pope.
The motto Leo chose for his papal emblem broadens and deepens this reality: “In the One, we are one.” Clearly, unity is central to his sense of self, his sense of Church, and his sense of his mission as Pope and pastor. It is a unity grounded in the one God, whose image we each and all bear.
But that unity is certainly not uniformity. My life in urban America and the life of a villager high in the Andes mountains are marked by vast differences in both cultural heritage and everyday realities. And yet somehow in Pope Leo, and above all in the God whom he serves, we are united. I certainly can’t speak for Andean villagers, nor for all Americans, but I find that I really do feel that unity in a way that is somehow more personal, more tangible since Pope Leo’s election than I did before.
Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians speaks to this theme of unity. In his context the issue presented itself as forging one unified church community composed of both Jewish converts and Gentile converts, people coming from very different cultures, with very different relationships to the broader world around them. Paul is acutely aware of their differences and calls them not to find a way to become all alike, but to learn to recognize a deeper unity binding them together, deeper than cultural practices or social position. He speaks of that deeper unity-in-diversity under seven headings, grouped into three layers: one Body, one spirit, and one hope; one Lord, one faith, and one baptism; one God “over all and through all and in all.”
In other words, he says to them, recognize that, despite any and all differences you may be acutely aware of, you are now one Body, breathing the same breath (“one Spirit”), the Holy Spirit that is Christ’s gift to us, and pressing on toward one and the same hope. You have been made thus one because you each became part of this one Body in the same way, through baptism, by which you professed one and the same faith in one and the same Lord; and thus the one God, the only God, is now over, in, and through all of us together. As Pope Leo’s motto says so succinctly, “In the One, we are one.”
And yet…there are still those sometime pesky differences among us! So living out our unity in the nitty-gritty of daily life is not always easy. Here in our diocese, in our parish, as in many places throughout the US, one form that challenge takes is in the consolidation and/or merger of several parishes, each with its own personality and traditions, into one parish—a work that sometimes feels like very heavy lifting indeed.
Both of our readings today speak to that heavy lifting. Paul wisely admonishes us to be patient, to be gentle, to bear with one another, to really try to maintain a spirit of unity.This is not just generic advice, but specific counsel given to members of two very different communities who were then being challenged to live as one community. And Jesus as recorded in today’s Gospel passage clearly anticipates that sometimes the stresses may reach such a pitch that folks may try to turn to outside authority to impose their favored outcome—an understandable reaction, to be sure.
But Jesus asks us to try harder, go deeper, to learn to “judge for ourselves what is right”—something that requires true conversion of heart, calling on those virtues Paul commends to us. Instead of authoritative coercion, Jesus tells us, really try to settle the issue ourselves. Under the admonition lies the implicit promise that , while it may not be easy, we can do it, because the grace of God is given to us, as Paul reminds us, precisely to build and deepen our unity.
-Margot LeBreton Merz