Author: Eddie O'Neill

Is oneness even possible? Is the Church one today? Is Christian unity possible at all? These are all reasonable questions, which is why we must follow Jesus to the very end of John 17.

“And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one … ” (Jn 17:22-23). Notice Jesus is not letting go of the point. In John’s Gospel, it seems whenever Jesus teaches something necessary but scandalous — so scandalous that even his disciples think he should tap the breaks a bit — Jesus only presses the gas more. Like in John 6 when Jesus said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” people started to murmur (Jn 6:41). So then he said, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you,” which, of course, made the situation even more tense (Jn 6:53). But still, he made the point even more strongly, saying, “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” (Jn 6:55). All the while, the disciples are in the back wishing Jesus would zip it as people start to walk away. But that is not what Jesus does. He keeps hammering the point, probably because eternal life depends on it. And so, here we are again: may they be one, may they be one, may they be brought to perfection as one — just in case we were not getting it. By this stage in our close reading of John 17, do you think Jesus thinks Christian unity is important? Or, do you think it is something Jesus would say is not all that significant, take it or leave it?

But how can we even begin to imagine Christian unity is possible? Notice Jesus is still talking about glory: “I have given them the glory you gave me.” Is the glory of God insufficient? Is the glory of God weak? Did not the angel Gabriel say to Mary that nothing is impossible to God (Lk 1:37)? Is the glory of God not enough to make Christians one? What are we saying about God when we say Christian unity is not really possible? Are we saying he may not be almighty after all?

“…that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17:23). Again, why struggle to be one Church? Why struggle for unity? The answer is: for the sake of love. Because we believe God created the world in love, sustains it in love and redeems it in love. And the way that love is revealed to the world is through Jesus’s disciples who are in love with each other in oneness. St. Thomas Aquinas put it this way: the world will see “in amazement the glory of the saints” in unity and love.^[1] That is how the world will see love, by seeing Christian love.

I mentioned earlier the unique love I have for my wife and children: I love them as a father should love his children, and as a husband should love his wife, loving them more than I love your wife and kids. But that is so they can learn how to love and be loved; so that they in turn can love others well, which in turn makes the world a more loving place. Again, that’s how love grows. And, thinking about this in terms of the Church, that is how the rest of the world knows God’s love — by seeing it in Christians, in the Church. So, how can we Christians more credibly tell the world God loves them? By being one. Everything Jesus has been praying about — the oneness of his disciples, the oneness of believers today — is for the sake of love, so the world may see it.

“Father, they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be, that they may see my glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (Jn 17:24). Jesus’s eternal glory is now revealed as love. He desires that we be one so that we may be with him. Jesus desires it. He is not indifferent about whether we are one; he is not neutral on the question — he desires it! Jesus prays to his Father desiring our unity from the deepest core of his being. Why? Simply so that we can share in the glory of God together. And, again, remember the context: Jesus is praying that his disciples be one, that they be where he is, at the disciples’ worst and weakest moment. Jesus is praying they remain with him as they are doing the exact opposite, as they are scattering in darkness. This is strangely comforting, that at our worst moments, at our moments of scattering and sin — whether personal or ecclesial — still Jesus wants us with him.

When you sin, what do you think God is thinking? Is he mad? Do you think God wants nothing more to do with you? When I get into a fight with someone, I want to avoid that person, avoid the awkward encounter. It is human to avoid the person we are in conflict with. But the problem is that we sometimes project that very human instinct onto God, fooling ourselves into thinking God wants to avoid us after we have sinned. But that is not true. It is not in God’s nature to do that. After Jesus’s prayer in John 17, all the disciples scattered and left him alone. One of them betrayed him, and still, Jesus wants them and prays to be with them. You, at your worst moment — or me at mine — still have Jesus praying for you, loving you, wanting you. Never fool yourself into thinking that God will ever say to you, “I’m done with you.” Because he will not. “I am with you always,” Jesus said after the resurrection (Mt 28:20). He meant that. At the least, this reminds us of the good of hope. No matter what, Jesus will always want us. We can always return to him.

Which reveals God’s justice. “Righteous Father, the world also does not know you, but I know you, and they know that you sent me. I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you love me may be in them and I in them” (Jn 17:25-26). Jesus ends his prayer invoking the justice of God. Often when we think of God’s justice, we think of the wrath of God, sometimes of some mean and nasty deity in the sky out to get us. We think of going to hell. But in this prayer that is not how Jesus thinks of the justice of God. He thinks of it in terms of love and knowledge. The justice of God is not the wrath of God sending you to hell. The justice of God is your communion with him, your love with him — a strange justice, because we certainly do not deserve it. God’s justice is our sharing life together with his Father with him in the Holy Spirit — in oneness and holiness. Also notice Jesus’s promise that he would continue to make his name known. The glory Jesus gave, he still gives. And so, what was true in John 17 — the call to oneness and holiness — is just as true now as it was then. And also, the grace available to accomplish oneness is just as available now as it was then. Again, millennia removed from this prayer, still this prayer claims us. We cannot ignore it — unless, of course, we no longer believe in glory, no longer believe what Jesus said.

A great deal of what we believe is found in John 17, especially that which we believe about the Church at its deepest level. Again, John 17 reveals the DNA of the Church. The Church is a sacramental entity, a sociological entity, an institutional and bureaucratic entity, all with a rather dusty, vibrant, glorious and squalid 2,000-year history. Yet in her essence, the Church is the oneness that the Father and the Son share in the Spirit. The Church, in its essence, is a communion — a communion in the Trinity that is open through Christ to the disciples, and which is also our communion and life together.

So, whenever you come into contact with the Church in her historical or her institutional forms — sometimes aggravating and sometimes glorious — we should always remember that the Church is first and foremost this — the oneness Jesus prayed for the night before he died.

Now of course, it is our belief that this oneness is in substance (although not entirely) the Roman Catholic Church. This, undoubtedly to many, is a scandalous claim. It certainly was to me. But we’ll explore that later, for that too is something we believe.

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books. Read more from the series here.

We have established that Scripture shows us Jesus. But why does that matter? As I have written earlier, the purpose of Scripture is to inspire belief, to reveal God’s justice and to call us to holiness in faith. But, as I’ve hinted, there is indeed more. The purpose of Scripture is also love, and before moving on to explore tradition, we should look at this more closely.

To do so, the great spiritual master St. Augustine can help us, and in an interesting way. To think about how we relate to God, he asks us to think of ourselves as exiles, hopelessly lost and lonely for home. “Suppose we were wanderers who could not live in blessedness except at home,” he wrote. Imagine, he said, that “we felt wretched in our wandering, and wishing to put an end to our misery, determined to return home” (“On Christian Doctrine,” No. 1.4.4). That, Augustine said, is what it’s like for humans after the fall. We’re miserably estranged from God and lost. This sets up a simple question: How do we get back?

St. Augustine’s answer was simple. Imagine we’re on the road home, but the road is “blocked, as if by a thorny ledge,” he said. What would be more merciful, then, than for someone to clear the road for us, opening a path? That’s what Jesus did, Augustine said; he forgave our sins, and he himself became the path back home. We’re lost, and Jesus helps us get home. But getting back to God is not a journey involving physical distance or travel; it’s a spiritual and moral journey. This road Augustine is talking about is not a physical road, not a road “from place to place.” Rather, it’s a “road of affections” — that is, a road of loves (“On Christian Doctrine,” No. 1.10.10). Jesus comes to us, Augustine said, lives among us and forgives us. He shows us the way to go and gives us the means to return to God by showing us how to love and live rightly.

Jesus quite simply shows us how to love and how not to love; he shows us through his love what it means to be fully human. And, through his passion (which we’ll talk about later), Jesus gives us the means to imitate him and walk with him back to God, to “our native place.”

Which is what happens when we discover Christ in Scripture — we see Jesus and learn how to love as he loves. That is, the whole purpose of Scripture is the “love of Being” — the love of God and neighbor we discover in Jesus. That’s the purpose of “the whole temporal dispensation,” the point of all truth, all knowledge, and all that’s contained in Scripture: to teach us how to love (“On Christian Doctrine,” No. 1.35.39). That is, in the story of Jesus of Nazareth — in his life, death and resurrection — we see what it means truly to love. Specifically put, we see what it means to give up our will to God’s will as he gave up his will to his Father in Gethsemane. We see what it means to forgive like he forgave. And we see what it means to be holy like his Father is holy. To learn how to love like this is to experience what we call “salvation.” But, of course, Jesus not only shows us how to love, he enables us and gives us the grace to love. (This we’ll talk about later when we talk about the sacraments.)

Given all of that, Scripture is a tutorial in love, yes, but it is also more. To explain what I mean by that, I should say clearly what we’ve only hinted at thus far: that the reading or hearing of Scripture is a mystical experience. Scripture not only shows us who Jesus is, it genuinely introduces us to Jesus. Encountering Scripture is not like reading a novel, a biography, or a textbook. The difference is that Christ comes to you in Scripture through worship or through personal reading. The belief of the Church is that in such moments we encounter not just a historical record but a “living transmission” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 78). We believe that when one genuinely hears Scripture, it’s a moment of a personal encounter.

This belief is ancient. Origen, for example, said that “If the Scriptures are true,” then Jesus speaks “today too, in our congregation … not only in this congregation, but in other gatherings, and in the whole world” (“Homilies on Luke,” No. 32.2). There’s a contemporariness to the Christ we meet in Scripture. Among the earliest Christians, it was understood that Jesus was genuinely present in the community — especially when the Gospel was being announced. Early Christians, for instance, would likely have thought the old evangelical acronym “WWJD?” to be heretical. Never was it a question of what Jesus “would” do as if he wasn’t present. Rather, it was always a question of what Jesus “is” doing. His presence was never doubted. Never was there any sort of wistfulness that longed for the days when Jesus “was” present.

Early Christians knew that Jesus was present in word and sacrament, and that’s what we Catholics still believe: that the “Father’s self-communication made through his Word in the Holy Spirit remains present and active in the Church” (Catechism, No. 79). This, of course, is simply biblical belief in the Jesus who is the same yesterday, today and forever — the Christ whose mind we’re able by grace to make our own (Heb 13:8; Phil 2:5).

But if Christ is present among us today, then why do we need Scripture to discover the real Jesus? Why can’t we just intuit the truth of God? Why can’t we just close our eyes and think of Jesus? Why do we need oral and written communication, all these ancient texts? Why can’t we simply conceive God and commune with him wordlessly?

Again, St. Augustine — who clearly thought a lot about this — helps us think this through. “The scriptures,” he wrote, “employ no manner of speaking that is not in common human usage — they are, after all, speaking to human beings” (“The Trinity,” No. 1.23). The Scripture, he said, makes use of created things like words — “like children’s toys” — to help us learn how to seek what is above created things, “step by step as best we can” (“The Trinity,” No. 1.2).

Anyone who’s read poetry or a love letter understands this. It’s lovely how Augustine thought about it. He didn’t view Scripture merely scientifically or historically or even as mere literature. Rather, he understood that as humans — material and spiritual beings who speak — God lowered himself to speak on our level, with words, images, beauty and flesh, so that we could see the divine in and beyond material things. Angels, being purely immaterial and spiritual, do not need words to commune with God; humans, however, do. We, being material and spiritual creatures, need words and images to encounter God. That’s how God meets us where we are. It’s why ours is a religion of incarnation and Scripture.

The Second Vatican Council summed this up wonderfully: “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men” (Dei Verbum, No. 13). In other words, we have Scripture because we’re human; and God knows how to talk to humans — with words we understand.

So, Scripture, in the Christian sense, are the texts of the Old and New Testaments, believed by the Church to be the authentic and living witness of God’s saving work in history. Scripture witnesses to our belief that Jesus is the perfect work of God’s salvation. But it’s more than that. In reading Scripture, we encounter Christ in a mystical way, not merely in a historical report. Although there is indeed historical fact in the Bible, the Christ we encounter in Scripture is not merely a historical construction or even a purely literary construction. Rather, Jesus is mystically present in the event of hearing or reading Scripture itself — a “living transmission.” To put it simply, it’s the Body of Christ speaking.

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books. Read more from the series here.