Union with God

John 17:20-26

…“that they may be one. As you are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us… I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one. ...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” -Jesus’ High Priestly prayer as remembered by the writer/disciple John, offered on the night he was betrayed.

Jesus is praying for us, for a relationship of union which already exists between himself and God. How is it that Jesus, fully human, has this relationship of union with God and somehow we do not? Or, is Jesus’ prayer that we reclaim what is ours and we have lost sight and reality of it? Is union with God something that God must grant that has not been granted before? Or is union with God something that we need God’s presence and power within in order to fully grasp what is already ours?

I confess that in the past I have approached this prayer of Jesus as his desire that we later day followers get along with each other; that we don’t allow denominationalism to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, that our disunity with one another does not become a stumbling block - if the world is to ‘come to Christ’ then we need to get along with each other. I confess that I have differentiated union between humanity from union with God, favoring being “like” the Christ/God union with other people. Now I believe this passage goes deeper. While inclusive of our human unity with one another it is the mystic’s prayer of union with God, the Holy One, united and fully present in each and all as all things are united in God and in God’s love. That, is a whole different kind of union.

Is this union something new? or is it something that we have missed all along as God’s intent for us? I am wondering about and leaning toward the notion that union with God is a reclamation of God's intent rather than something new. Our disunity with God and with one another is part of a lost and broken world, part of what some what call a “fallen nature”, the tendency to go away from God rather than toward God.

Our American westernized ‘rugged individualism’ seeks to be so self sufficient. How often I have prided myself on not needing anyone or anything; to go it alone, go solo in the deep woods, to survive the odds and obstacles alone, to be a McGiver or Rambo overcoming the problems and forces that emerge, a god unto myself, ‘I am Woman, hear me roar!’ I am invincible. On the other hand we also live in desperate fear, even when we plaster “No Fear” bumper stickers on our vehicles, reminders more to ourselves than some proclamation to others. While projecting an image of self sufficiency we are long for communion but dare not admit our loneliness. Can we let go of idolizing the images that bear false witness and return to what is given?

I wonder about the story of “the Fall” in Genesis 3. Was the temptation and the sin stepping away from reality; not so much having ‘open eyes’ to see separating factors, but becoming blinded by the thought that the forbidden fruit would enable them to “become like God”, get closer to godness, when in reality they already had union with God? The ability “to see good and evil” was what Franciscan priest Richard Rohr might say was the dualistic start of missing God’s intent for us. Perhaps “the fall”, the first sin, was to think and act on the notion that we are not like God or united with God but somehow have to work at or connive becoming or being God-like, when in reality God’s very likeness has already been implanted from the very beginning, within each one of us in creation (Gen 1:26-27). Did not God come looking for humankind who had separated themselves from God’s presence? God asks, “Where are you?”

I wonder if the whole sacred story of scripture is God’s work at reuniting all things, all people, all creation into oneness in holiness, in love, in God. God’s calling Abram and Sarai, calling a people, a community of faith, calling through prophets and stories, calling through John the Baptizer and Jesus the Christ and the apostles and saints and sinners and mystics everywhere, is it all a long love song, a high godly prayer to us that we might return to our source, the first love, the first life? Does God plead for us to ‘come home’ from Genesis, the prophet Hosea (11), to the Prodigal (Lk 15) and finally in Revelation wherein once again the full dwelling place of God is within us (Rev 21:3)? The Apostle Paul quotes the poets of his own day as he speaks to the Athenians telling them of the “unknown god”, this One “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He writes to the church in Colossi reminding them (in similar words found in John’s gospel to be written later, Jn 1:1-5) that in Christ God unites all things visible and invisible, in heaven and on earth. All things are held together in and through him in whom the fullness of God is pleased to dwell (Colossians 1:15-23).

Jesus prays that we might be one in him as he is in God and God in us as in him, that we might live and move and have our being fully in God who is our beginning and end. Christ prays for us. Certainly God hears prayer. Do we? Do we hear Jesus’ prayer and to some degree are we like God and have the ability to answer that prayer, to facilitate its reality? to be who and what we are? united, one with God? In early church theology, this notion may have come close to heresy, considering that we might become God. Well, if God is love and God is life and if God was more, or could be more, fully present on earth, would that be bad? Why do we insist on being separated from God or God being distant and distinct from us? Could we become God's intent for us? Might not the whole world be transformed? Healed? If we are to be that Body of Christ, the flesh and blood of Christ in whom God was fully present and pleased to dwell, what might that mean for us? for our world? for relationships? for attitudes toward all others who are in Christ and God as well? Can I see God in me? Can I see God in all things, visible and invisible? What might happen if all the world would come to see God within themselves and within all creation? How would it effect politics? environmental issues? economics? abuses? Would we be able to continue to separate and divide that which God’s love and life and presence unites? What would it be to live into the answer to Jesus’ prayer that we might all be united fully in God?

Holy God who is closer than our breath,
who is in all things and in all places all the time,
give me eyes and ears and mind and heart to
comprehend the length and depth and breadth and height
and wisdom and grace of your amazing love and life
within each and all.