So, time to ask a question. How will church unity happen? What will it take to draw us together? Answer: Jesus Christ. . . .Our only loyalty is to Jesus Christ, who died so that something new might happen in the world. We are called to follow him all the way to the cross, willing to die as denominations for God’s future.
The good news of God is trapped in competitive Christianity. Yes, we know we are supposed to reach out with the gospel. And surely we are meant to spread Christ’s love throughout the earth. But, there are too many steeples to keep painted. Too many church lawns to be mowed.
The other apostle named James has been referred to as “the lesser,” “the less,” or “the younger” (Mark 15:40). We don’t know as much about this disciple as we do the others, because his name is mentioned in Scripture only a few times, and each time it is part of a list. All we know besides his name is that he was the son of Alpheus.
The last time we see Philip is in that great passage at the Last Supper, when Jesus was preparing his disciples for what was about to come. . . . In spite of all that Jesus had taught them, Philip asked for more: “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”
Jesus, having fulfilled his earthly mission, went to the Mount of Olives, took leave of his mother and the disciples, and ascended from there to his Father in heaven. It was his final act on this earth, but it was an act that opens to us, his followers, endless possibilities, for Jesus did not return to the Father alone.
The followers of Jesus came very early to the conclusion that he had lived in order to die, that his death was not the interruption of his life at all but its ultimate purpose. Even by the most generous reading, the Gospels give us information about less than a hundred days in the life of Jesus;
A common trick a lot of midlife women play on ourselves is to feel, and act, responsible for everything. But Jesus, via Catherine of Siena, doesn’t recommend this: “I in my providence did not give to any one person or to each individually the knowledge for doing everything necessary for human life.
The wisdom of the cross was, then, the disclosure not only of human morality but of divine love. Placing this at the center of his description of what Christ had done by his life and his death, Peter Abelard, in a sermonic essay entitled “The Cross,” emphasized that the love of God in Christ lay beyond “our own power to share in the passion of Jesus by our suffering and to follow him by carrying our own cross.”
If you love me, Jesus says, you will do something and I will do something. You will do what I have set out for you to do: Love one another. Serve others humbly. Reach out to those in need. Be an agent of healing and life. And, if you love me, I will provide you with another Friend. I will not be with you in the flesh, but Someone will be with you always: the Spirit of Truth.
Given the reality of medieval office politics (as real for us in the twenty-first century as it was in the thirteenth), Hadewijch offered two main pieces of advice: “be on your guard against instability” and “never abandon the true life of good works.”