One, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are One

Jesus prayed, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” In the Gospel of John, Jesus prayed this as part of a much longer prayer, just after the Last Supper – or, more importantly in John’s telling, the Footwashing – and just before Jesus was arrested. This prayer is the touchstone for our final Lenten reflection on unity in diversity.

When Jesus said, “that they may be one, as we are one” – he meant “that my disciples may be one, as, Father, you and I are one.” In making meaning from this verse, we can make two additions: first, including ourselves as Jesus’s disciples with the first disciples; and second, including the Holy Spirit with the Father and Son. So God as Trinity – Three-in-One and One-in-Three – is unity in diversity within God’s own self. Unity in diversity is who God is. And our human unity in diversity reflects who God is. It is given, part of the gift of union with God.

Likely you have had some spiritual experience of this. A moment of great awe and fulfillment that comes with a spontaneous knowing at a deep level of friendship with God. Friendship is how John would say it. For the Gospel of John, knowing God is eternal life. Not knowing God is death. And this knowing is mystical, not intellectual. It transcends human understanding and explanation, involves mystery, awe, and wonder. It is life itself, opens a new dimension of living we otherwise would not have known. It reorients us, not least with a new thirst for such living water. “Abide in me, as I abide in you,” Jesus told his disciples. This mystical union is what Jesus meant. 

The spiritual experiences, we learn with wisdom and maturity, are almost beside the point. We learn to live without them, not needing constantly new spiritual “highs,” even as we honor and tend the thread of connection by remembering them and keeping Jesus’s Word. The point is, God is in eternal love with you, always and forever; God comes and participates in our life, without absorbing you or dissolving us. In this mystical union with God, we do not lose who we are, our identity; quite the contrary, we discover who we really are and who always have been, in our God-given uniqueness.

This unity with God is the basis of our unity with each other. Consider this extended reflection from The Challenge of Diversity by David Rhoads.

…religion is not what unites us. Religion is not God, but our human responses to God. All our ideas of unity are human constructs. Thus neither our doctrines nor our ethics nor our rituals nor our piety nor our customs, neither our commonalities nor our agreements are, in the end, an adequate basis for unity. The reality of God is the basis for our unity… [U]nity is a reality of life given to us in the life of God, a given to be accepted and achieved, a given to be received and yet still hoped for.

…Such unity lies in the mystery of God. In one sense, it is already achieved by virtue of our participation in the ongoing process of creation. On the other hand, unity is obviously not yet achieved. We await it and hope for it and work for it as agents of God in creation. When we understand that unity is God-given, then our efforts to come to agreement, to relish our commonalities, to become inclusive, to appreciate differences, to participate together in a process, can be seen as our human efforts to celebrate and to achieve the unity God provides.

Thus, in the end, the basis for our unity is not provided by what various groups agree to do or to believe. Unity is provided in and by the participation of God with us, for the Spirit of God unifies us at a level beyond words and actions, at a level too deep for words and actions, as we express our own longing to be part of God's people and to do God's work.

Because God is with us, we are one. Because God makes us one, we can seek out people who are different from us, seek to understand them, learn from them, and respect those differences. Because God makes us one, we can uncover and undo the ways of the world that turn differences into hate and oppression. In this and more, we simply point to what already is.

For the Gospel of John, Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, including his betrayer’s feet, stands with the cross as an ultimate sign of God’s gift of unity. It simply is who God is and what reality is. Unity, beyond words and actions, in love.

Thanks be to God.

Pastor Clark Olson-Smith