MAY THEY BE ONE

Homily for Thursday after Ascension (7th Wk of Easter) 28 May 2020, John 17:20-26

Today, Jesus concludes his parting words to his disciples with a Prayer for Unity: May they be one. He repeats it four times in one paragraph. On the fourth time, he prays that we “reach perfection” in unity. I understand this to mean that Jesus is aware that unity is something we need to work on, constantly.

Many years ago, a girl was brutally violated and murdered by a group of college boys. Fortunately, through the testimony of an eyewitness, they were arrested, charged, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On the day they were convicted, one of them was accosted by an angry relative of the victim with a blunt question, “Bakit ninyo nagawa iyon? Wala ba kayong awa?” (How could you do such a thing? Have you no pity?).

A reporter was able to capture the convict’s reply and air it in the evening news. I was taken aback by what the young man said in reply, “Pakikisama lang po sa barkada, sir.” (Just going along with the gang, sir.) He just went along and became a partner in crime. Meaning, he valued the unity of the barkada. But they were united around an evil purpose. Can we really call that unity?

You see, not all forms of unity are good, just as not all forms of division are necessarily bad. Remember the story of the Tower of Babel? The storyteller tells us that once upon a time, people spoke only one language. But one day, they united themselves around a common project. They said, in Genesis 11:4, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.”

The storyteller then tells us that when the Lord saw what they were doing, he said, “If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another.” (Genesis 11:6). And so the Lord divided them into nations and allowed them to be scattered over all the earth, each one speaking its own language.

In today’s first reading, the Jewish Council of the Sanhedrin was united in their hatred for Paul and in their plot to have him arrested and convicted. Paul makes a clever move. Being himself a former Pharisee, he knew that the Pharisees and the Sadducees did not see eye to eye when it came to their doctrine and interpretation of the Scriptures.

The Pharisees believed in the doctrine of the resurrection and afterlife as well as the existence of angels, while the Sadducees did not. And so he delivers a speech before the Council and says, “It is for the hope in the resurrection of the the dead that I am on trial here.” Just that statement was enough to stir up an argument among them, causing a heated division in the whole assembly so that they were unable to have him convicted.

In 1 Corinthians 11:19, although he reprimands the Corinthians for being so divided into factions, Paul says, “Sometimes, there have to be divisions… in order that those who are approved among you may become truly known.” To me, this suggests that even if Paul values unity, he is also aware that the process of building genuine unity is not easy. He knows that, misunderstandings, quarrels, disagreements, arguments, are part of the process. They need not be negative, as long as there is still an openness and a willingness to listen, to dialogue, to gradually build a consensus.

Sometimes, even in the Catholic Church, some movements, communities and religious orders get split up because of irreconcilable differences. But for as long as they can still respect some higher authorities, they can still be part of the same Church, the same body of Christ. After all, even in a physical body, healthy cells split up in order to grow. The division need not always be bad; it can lead to a new dynamic of growth in the body.

We are sad that Christians around the world remain disunited. But we should be happy that despite all her flaws and limitations, the Roman Catholic Church remains united under the Pope and his brother bishops. We should be grateful that we still have leaders who function as “bridge builders,” facilitators of dialogue and consensus-building through what Pope Francis calls “synodality”, who strive at all times to keep us together. Nevertheless, we will never stop praying for unity.

This coming Sunday, we will be celebrating Pentecost, the climax of the Easter season. The story of Pentecost as narrated by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles is about the coming of the Holy Spirit as God’s way of reversing the curse of the Tower of Babel. There, the Spirit’s coming is symbolized by “tongues of fire,” meaning, a heavenly language that will allow us to work for genuine unity in the world. As Jesus closes his farewell address today, he refers to the Holy Spirit as that language. He calls him “the Love with which the Father has loved him,” and which he now bestows as gift to us his disciples so that we could gradually work on being one, just as the Father and Jesus are one.