John 17:21

OUR UNHAPPY DIVISIONS

‘That they all may be one; as Thou Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us: that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.’

John 17:21

Some things are good, but not pleasant; others are pleasant, but not good; it is not easy to combine the two qualities; but in unity both converge; pleasantness and the highest good. This our Lord intended for his Church; this He prayed for (beautifully illustrated in Psalms 133).

Christ did not come down from Heaven simply to unfold a revelation of God’s love by His atoning death, and then return, leaving the Gospel leaven to work its own way in the world. He founded a visible kingdom, and called men out of the world to be its subjects. (Hence, Ecclesia, ‘called out,’ everywhere translated ‘Church.’) He instituted two sacred rites: one the means of admission and union with Him, the other the means of sustaining that union and spiritual life. Further, He provided for the continuity and propagation of this throughout the world; He appointed and consecrated officers by a solemn rite to preach and minister the Sacraments; and as the Creator breathed into the first man’s nostrils, so our Lord, in commissioning the representatives of the ‘new creation,’ breathed on them, and said, ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost.’

Now it was for this ‘Ecclesia,’ this universal body of His baptised people, that He thus prayed. Therefore it behoves all Christians ‘seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions.’

I. First, we must deplore the uncharitable spirit amongst ourselves.—United to our Lord, and through union with Him to one another, by baptism, confessing the Faith once delivered to the saints, and handed down in the creeds; ministered to by the same priesthood; worshipping in the common language of the Liturgy, kneeling side by side at the same altars, and receiving, ‘verily and indeed,’ the same Blessed Sacrament; we ought to be more lovingly united. ‘We be brethren,’ and the points of divergence are infinitesimal with the great body of truth which we hold in common.

II. Secondly, as we look round we are startled and ashamed at the number of ‘sects’ into which our common Christianity is subdivided. The most glaring fault of the nation’s religious life is the easy indifference with which men break away from unity and create new communities—between two and three hundred different religious sects—and the number grows! Do Christians attach no meaning to our Lord’s Prayer? or do the indurating effects of habit deaden our sensibilities, and make us impervious to the taunt that England has one dish and a hundred sauces?

III. Thirdly, taking a wider survey of Christendom, we find the churches of the East and West have mutually excommunicated each other, and the Anglican Church stands apart from both. History of rupture of some ten centuries since cannot now be discussed, but the ‘Reformation’ made no break in the historical continuity of the Anglican Church. There was no destruction of an old and setting up of a new Church. Unable to obtain redress of doctrinal abuses, the English Church reformed herself. The appeal, made by her bishops and clergy in convocation, was the same as made by all the great councils of the Church; it was to antiquity, Holy Writ, the Fathers, and the general councils of the undivided Church. Before the Reformation the Church was soiled by many impurities and abuses, and now it teaches only ‘the Faith which was once delivered to the saints.’ The Church in this land was never the Roman Church, though, prior to the Reformation, at times subject more or less to the Roman Pontiff, but always the Church of England, ‘Ecclesia Anglicana,’ as termed in Magna Charta and other documents. Our Church, when she recovered her independence, did not sever herself from Western Christendom; Rome caused the schism. The real obstacle still to reunion is the prevailing ambitious claim to lordship over God’s heritage by the Bishop of Rome.

There can be no more God-like aim than to seek to restore the Church’s broken unity. Disunion is weakness. We can individually do little beyond praying that it may please God to give to His Church, ‘Unity, Peace, and Concord.’ But we may minimise our differences, magnify our points of agreement, eschew elements of bitterness; the obstacles seem insurmountable; but the things which are impossible with men are possible with God, and we may be sure our Lord’s Prayer cannot ultimately fall to the ground. The day will come when the reunion of divided Christendom will impart new life to missionary enterprise, and will be the signal for completing the conversion of the world.

Canon M. Woodward.

Illustration

‘We may rejoice in that real but unseen spiritual bond which undoubtedly exists among all who love the Lord Jesus in sincerity; nevertheless, this cannot be accepted as an answer to his prayer, “That they all may be one; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.” The unbelieving world is to be impressed and converted by the spectacle of a united Church. “See how these Christians love one another,” and “are of one heart and one mind”; see how they “continue steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in the breaking of bread, and in the Prayers,” cannot, alas! yet be said. It is an awe-inspiring thought that the divisions of Christendom are delaying the return of the Church’s Head, and the fulfilment of the prediction: “The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ.” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

VISIBLE UNITY

I. It is perfectly clear and distinct that our Blessed Lord means to ensure, in this supreme prayer of His, a visible unity, a unity that the world can take cognisance of, a unity which is tangible, and which has a definite and specific object, that in and through it the world may be led to believe that the Father sent the Son to redeem mankind. It is of the very first importance that we should lay stress upon the fact that a visible unity was required by our Blessed Lord, because, however true, and however valuable it may be in its preparation for an external unity, the Unity of the Spirit, as it is called, cannot exhaust the meaning of our Lord’s words. It is perfectly clear, then that our Lord had the visible unity of his followers in mind, as a means whereby the world might be converted. And it is also important to dwell upon the fact, because men will continually try to escape from the full force of our Lord’s words. In hopeless despair of ever being able to achieve an external unity, they throw themselves back upon the idea that our Blessed Lord never meant anything of the kind.

II. Notice, secondly, the deep significance of the fact that there never has been, and there is not now, a complete expression of that unity.—Sometimes we are tempted to think that either in the Middle Ages, or in the early days of the Church, things were very different from what they are now; and we are sometimes apt to draw conclusions concerning the quiet and devoted and united life of the Church in other days which have little basis in reality. Turn to the Holy Scriptures—look at the state of the Church of Corinth: ‘I am of Paul, I am of Cephas, I am of Apollos,’ were the party watchwords of the day, while a third section, out-Heroding Herod in its ideas of schism, dared to erect our Lord Himself into a party leader. ‘I am of Christ.’ Then, later on, you have the spectacle of a divided Christendom, such as shocked Constantine the Great, almost at the moment of his so-called conversion. Hardly had he become the patron of Christianity than he was called to deal with the schisms of the Church, first, with the Donatist schism in Northern Africa, and then with wider and more serious divisions incidental to the Arian heresy. As you carry your investigations into later history, you come across the spectacle of the great division between East and West; and then, later on still, the division in Western Christendom, until, as you look at the Body of Christ at the present time, it is seen to be split up into hopeless disunion, and the spread of the one truth hindered by contending factions amongst Christian men.

III. What, then, are we to say?

(a) First of all, this undoubtedly: we can refer the matter back directly to our Blessed Lord, and for this reason, that it was perfectly within the power of our Blessed Lord so to communicate His truth to the world in such a way that men could never have questioned either as to the subject-matter of the Faith, or the mode and manner in which it was to be propagated. But, apparently, for good and wise reasons, our Blessed Lord communicated His truth in such a way that there was always a possibility of divergence of opinion on both points. Of course, it goes without saying, that this was accentuated by the frailty of mankind, but still there was always in the nature of the case the possibility of difference of view on such points. We may always, therefore, carry the difficulty back to Him, and realise that in His inscrutable wisdom He knew that the truth had better so be communicated.

(b) Secondly, we must realise that all the marks of the Church are of vital importance to the spread of the Gospel. We have no right to single out any one mark of the Church like Unity in any exclusive sense, and press it, to the neglect of the other marks. In order that the world may be converted, the presentation of the Apostolic side of the Church, of the Catholic side, and of the side of Righteousness, are quite as necessary as the presentation of Unity. It is at least thinkable that these different marks of the Church may conflict with such other as the history of the Church progresses, and then I am quite certain that our Lord Jesus Christ would rather delay the rapid spread of His Truth, than that there should be loss from a neglect of the presentation of these other necessary marks of the Church. We must always set side by side with the mark of Unity which is expressed by our text, the mark of Holiness which is expressed by ‘By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one towards another.’ Moreover, and this always seems to me a most important consideration, it is probable, after all said and done, that there is a great deal more Unity amongst us than we imagine. The difficulty largely depends as to whether we conceive of unity as uniformity. Observe the basis on which our Lord prays for unity, ‘That they all may be one, as Thou Father art in Me and I in Thee.’ That does not seem to express a unity of uniformity. Rather it suggests something of a unity in plurality, the Holy Trinity in Unity. And is it not true that we are learning more and more in our day and generation the full conception of unity?

IV. There are many things we can do.

(a) First and foremost, every Christian man may make up his mind definitely and distinctly, that he will not acquiesce in the idea of disunion as a permanent factor in the life of the Christian Church. However far off may be the possibility of reunion, and however apparently difficult may be the conditions of reunion now, every Christian will make up his mind to have before him that hope clearly for the future; and never to acquiesce in the idea that it is all an impossible dream. Therefore he will never sit in the seat of the scornful when efforts are made for reunion.

(b) Secondly, we can at least try to get rid, in our own case, of those things which make for disunion. All pride, all self-will, all jealousy, all unkindness, must go, and the spirit of love and of a sound mind take their place.

(c) Above all things, we shall try to remember as members of the Church of England that we are also part of a much wider whole, that we owe a duty to that wider whole, that we should show interest in the other portions of Catholic Christendom, that it has a claim upon us, and that we should look forward to the time when, in the Providence of God, we may be brought into more direct relationship with it.

(d) Lastly, me can all of us pray that God the Holy Ghost will stir up into flame one great gift within us, which more than all else will bring forth the fruit of reunion both in our homes and in the Church of England, and in the wider range of Catholic Christianity. The Spirit of Wisdom is within us, and ‘the wisdom which is from above, is first of all pure, then peaceable.’

Rev. G. F. Holden.