[stephenkhoo]

Scripture Reflections
11 May, 2012, Fifth Friday of Easter
UNITY IN ESSENTIALS AS THE WAY TO LOVE
SCRIPTURE READINGS: ACTS 15: 22-31; JN 15:12-17

Yesterday, we were told that Jesus came to give us joy, a joy that is complete because it is His own joy. What then is this joy? It is the joy of loving unto death. So great is His love for us that He calls us ‘friends’, because He has made known to us everything He had learnt from His Father. But most of all, He proved His love when He died for us, for “a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” This, then, is the joy that Jesus was speaking about. The joy that comes from self-emptying love is the most complete joy that anyone can possibly have. But we all know that loving each other is not so simple. All of us want to love but when we live in a community where the members come from different background with varied interests, talents and personalities, such harmonious and fraternal concern is certainly very challenging. This was the reality that confronted the early Christians. With the proclamation of the gospel to the Gentiles, the early Church was faced with the difficulty of living with the non-Jews who did not observe Jewish customs and sensitivities. Although the Jews had been converted to Christianity, many of them still could not give up their customs and beliefs. Consequently, they found themselves discomforted by the behavior and life-style of the non-Jews. As a result, some tried to impose their Jewish customs on the non-Jewish Christians. Inevitably, this brought about resentment and grievances.

How, then, can we preserve unity and love in community life? The key to unity in diversity is simply this: distinguish the essentials from the non-essentials. This was the basic principle that guided the apostles and elders in Jerusalem in their decisions. Whatever guidelines that were given, were motivated by this one principle, namely, that the gentiles should not be saddled “with any burden beyond these essentials.” In other words, the apostles recognized that there were things that were truly essential and there were practices that were non-essential. Only what was essential were insisted upon. Everything else was negotiable and was not to be imposed on others.

This is certainly a very important and enlightened manner of building community life. Very often we fight over non-essentials and petty matters. And the irony of it all is that so often the community breaks up over petty problems rather than over fundamental principles. This should not be the case as most of our disagreements are over minor issues, e.g. over some secondary rubrics in liturgy; the way we dress, pray and sing; live our lives and over some material needs.

But the fact is that small matters soon accumulate; hurts are built up and the more essential matters of life are soon forgotten. Yes, we lose sight of the common vision which we all share and have come together for. We clash over whether something should be done this way or that way. We confuse conformity for unity. We have not learnt from the experience of the early Church. They knew the importance of community building through a sincere respect for diversity in unity. In a nutshell, we must only hold on to those things that really forge our unity and not allow insignificant issues to divide us.

Having laid down the fundamental principle for community living, we must next ask what then should be considered ‘essential’. This is an important question because while all may agree on this principle, we might not agree with how the essentials and non-essentials should be understood. Once again we look at the early Church’s injunctions. According to the leaders in Jerusalem, the Gentiles-Christians must “abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from fornication.” Why were these considered essentials for the Jewish-Christians? Because these were matters that were highly sensitive to the community! They had to do with one’s fundamentals of faith, life and love. We must remember that the Jewish-Christians still carried with them the time immemorial tradition of Moses. Somehow they could not overcome their legalistic upbringing.

What about us? We too have to decide what are really the essentials for the unity of faith, the practice of love and the respect for life. In the area of faith, the Church’s doctrines, canon laws and the rubrics must be respected as far as possible. Yet we must be careful that such observation will not reduce us to mere robots or legalistic people that we lose our life of joy. This is true with respect to some doctrines and spirituality in the Church. There must be some freedom to interpret doctrines in a way that does not contradict the fundamental truths of Christian belief. In the same way too, when it comes to spirituality, we must respect that different spirituality appeals to different temperaments of people. This is on the level of the Church and faith.

But what about on the level of our community life and the living out of love? Here we too must decide for ourselves, what are those things that are essential for the harmonious living of the community and what are those things that we need to give liberty to each other. For example, while we agree that we all must have some interaction, we cannot insist that all do it the same manner. Just because we like to watch TV, it cannot mean that community building requires us all to watch TV. What is important is that each one of us must find ways to relate with each other and share common interests.

But in order for us to transcend our myopic ways of seeing life, there are some pre-requisites that must be observed. Firstly, we must really want to love. Love, as Jesus tells us in the gospel, is to lay down our life for our friends. But how can we speak of laying down our life for our friends if we are not even willing to let our friends be what they are? Love demands that we respect the uniqueness of those we love and not impose our standards and fancies on them. Love always considers the other person’s interests before ours. It means that we are always asking how we can make the other person’s life more comfortable and happier. Love requires us to give in to others and not put our happiness before theirs.

Secondly, this self-giving love must not be given slavishly. In other words, it must be done not because of fear or coercion but because we want to. Precisely, Jesus tells us that He has called us to be His friends not His slaves. To be called a slave is not something totally negative in the time of Jesus. For being a slave in the understanding of the bible is to be a servant of God. All prophets, including Jesus Himself, are portrayed in scripture as slaves of God. But for Jesus, even such a dignity is still not befitting enough. He says that we are all called to be His friends. He wants our relationship to be one of mutual love rather than one of subordination and obligation. Consequently, in our relationship with others, we do not make them slaves for us. We must not expect them to live up to our expectations and serve our interests. Rather, we must treat them as friends and seek to please them. Perhaps, if our relationships are cold and formal, it is because we do not regard each other as friends but as mere colleagues and working partners. We have not yet deepened our relationship to that of true friendship.

Thirdly, only with intimacy in friendship, can we now speak of sensitivity. If we defer to each other and try to protect each other’s interests, it is only because we know how to be sensitive to each other’s needs and weaknesses. Hence, sometimes in community living, certain members cannot be as generous as they would like to or should be. With such people, we learn to accept their limitations in giving. Like the early Church, we learn how to adapt to each other because we recognize that we all have our psychological baggage with us. We are the product of our environment. Our tastes, feelings and judgment are influenced by our upbringing. Hence, we have to recognize that we are different, whether in spiritual growth or maturity. The letter from theChurch ofJerusalem toAntioch therefore is a model letter because it is balanced and sensitive to the needs of both the Jewish-Christians and the Gentile-Christians.

Finally, for self-emptying love and sensitivity to others to occur, we need to be filled with the love of Jesus. We cannot love each other the way Jesus loves us unless we are filled with His love. For this reason, like the apostles in the early Church, we need to pray to the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Spirit so that we might all be one in the Holy Spirit. Such prayer will certainly help us to know our own sinfulness and weaknesses, leading us to be more compassionate and understanding to others who also are struggling in their call to love like Jesus. The love of God will enable us to accept that in the community, we are all on different levels of growth and maturity. So whilst we must help each other to grow in grace, we must be patient with each other and accept that our pace for growth would be very different. We cannot impose our level of spiritual life on others, expecting them to love the way we are able to love. After all, the ability to love the way Jesus loves is indeed the grace of God.

The Holy Spirit will ensure unanimity in our decisions, as He will enable us to understand and feel with each other. Let us remember the exhortation of St Augustine when he summed up the fundamental principle of Christian living. He said, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials or in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.”