As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.[1]
This passage from St Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus spoke to me recently. Being in prison is something that perhaps we can all relate to at the moment. We don’t know what the conditions of Paul’s imprisonment were. Was he chained up? What was his food like? Could he get out of his cell, breathe some fresh air and maybe stretch his arms and legs? What the passage does tell us however, is what his preoccupations were. What he was thinking about, what were his main concerns about the new Christians for whom he cared.
Unity among them seems to be a priority. However, the fact that St Paul speaks so much about the unity of the Church shows that it was by no means an obvious, or easily achieved, fact. “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” has echoes in many other places in the Epistles: “But God has put the body together, giving greater honour to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it[2]. And so on…
When people from my tradition approach the subject of unity in the Church, they very often start to talk about diversity. One of our great teachers says: For many and of nearly boundless number are the men, women and children who are distinct from one another and vastly different by birth and appearance, by race and language, by way of life and age, by opinions and skills, by manners and customs, by pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation, fortune, characteristics and habits”. He then goes on to say: all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in the Spirit. To all in equal measure it bestows one divine form and designation: to be Christ’s and to bear his name.[3]
Difference quickly becomes apparent in any group of people, and no less in the Church. Peter and Paul do their apostleship in very different ways and their differences were public and well known. In Galatians 2 Paul says: “I opposed Peter, because he was wrong.” These differences can often be bewildering.
Surely, as is so often the case in our lives in Christ, the answer is to go deeper.
The Scripture passage quoted above starts with the words: “As a prisoner for the Lord… I urge you…” What finally unites Peter and Paul is their martyrdom. In the zoom group recently some friends talked about martyrdom and someone remarked on a characteristic of the modern martyrs to whom she is close: that their martyrdom was a continuation of the established pattern of their lives. Their discipleship had created habits and patterns, that, given the particular conditions of persecution, could lead naturally to martyrdom. Following Christ had become embedded. A long series of daily choices for Christ led, one could almost say automatically, to the final big decision for Christ.
So perhaps one could say that to live lives worthy of the calling we have received, being completely humble and gentle and so on we have to continually unify our centre of attention, so that everything is focused on Christ. Whether physically or metaphorically, (which is the case for most of us), we have to become prisoners for the Lord so that we can receive the grace apportioned to us by him.
Just in case this feels a bit too dismal, I would like to finish with a quote from a homily by Rowan Williams, which I think wonderfully sets the scene for what being a “prisoner of the Lord” should mean:
As Christians, we are not serving the world in order to solve problems, but to bring joy. We are serving God’s future, that will for the joy and fulfilment of all upon which the whole world, human and non-human, rests. That constant exchange, that passing from hand to hand, of the promise of joy – that is how God relates with the world, that is how Christians relate with one another, that is how Christians relate with the entire cosmos.[4]
Mother Sarah
[1] Ephesians 4: 1 - 7
[2] 1 Cor 12:24-26
[3] Maximus the confessor quoted in Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology p 94
[4] Rowan Williams 28.02.2012 in a Sermon preached in Geneva
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