That they may be one: Homily for Thursday, June 5, 2025

In today’s first reading, there is such a marvelous scene. The shrewd Saint Paul exploits his audience for the truth. Jesus understands the challenges of unity by praying we may all be one.

That they may be one

This courtroom scene of Saint Paul is one of my favorites. It would be a great made-for-tv movie or something like that about how all this happened. Now I’m told actually that the makers of The Chosen are going to make the Acts of the Apostles, so we might actually be able to see it.

But it’s such an amazing scene and we’re going to continue it. It gets even more amazing tomorrow with this poor guy Sosthenes who is going to be beaten right in the view of the bench because they want to use him to get the judge to do something.

It’s an interesting courtroom scene because as we get into this phase of Paul’s life, it seems that wherever he goes, trouble follows. He is convinced that the faith that he has grown up with since he was a child has been fulfilled. So I would argue that it’s not so much that Paul made his conversion really was about moving from being a Jew to a Christian. It was about recognizing in Jesus, that Jesus was the fulfillment of everything he believed as a Jew.

And so his look at the world, his way of seeing the world really has to do with the fact that God ultimately keeps promises because he sees the fulfillment of the promise in Jesus himself, and then because this is so important, sees that in fact he has an obligation to share this good news with everyone.

Unfortunately for him, his sharing with the Jews does not go so well. In many respects, his sharing with the Jews does not go so well because they are like him before his conversion. So Paul, when he had not encountered the risen Christ, was of the mind that the Messiah would not come until Israel perfectly observed the law. And so that’s why he was so zealous. That’s why he was running around persecuting Christians and dragging them out of homes because they were standing in the way of the coming of the Messiah because they were ignoring the law.

We live in a world where in some ways it’s very much like what we encounter with Paul. It’s a mess. If we look around the world, we can see that almost everywhere it seems that people are fighting with each other.

There is in fact the known wars that get all the attention in this country, the Middle East, Gaza, Ukraine, but that’s hardly the only violence that’s occurring in our world. There’s violence in Congo. There’s violence in South Sudan. There’s violence in what is now known as Myanmar. There are persecutions happening in Cameroon, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head, but there are others too.

Our world is a mess because as Mother Teresa said, we have forgotten that we belong to each other. And so we are more focused I think today on saying, I need to make sure I got my stuff, but I don’t need to worry about the homeless or the poor or the marginalized or those without health care, whatever.

Jesus recognizes the tremendous pain of division. He recognizes what happens to us when we lose sight of the truth, which for us is first and foremost a person. When we lose sight of the importance and priority of Jesus, then we need Jesus to pray for our world that we would be one, that there would be unity.

Unfortunately, even among Christians, there’s the pain that we are not one. I would say mostly the pain that two Christian denominations, so to speak, that are so close in belief, agreeing on almost every aspect of the faith, can’t come together. Our Eastern brothers and sisters and the church in the West.

Do we promote unity? Do we hear the prayer of Jesus and work to be one among ourselves first? You know, the purpose of religious life is that on one level it’s a school of charity. By living in community, we learn better how to love. We could say the church is a school of charity.

By coming together, we learn better how to serve the poor, those in need, sharing the message with people whose lives are broken, who don’t have fulfillment in their life, who are empty inside. Saint Boniface actually did much for the unity of Germany, and dioceses that were founded in his time still exist today. His work in unifying Europe was really marvelous. He worked for unity, and ultimately it cost him his life, which seems like a contradiction, but in fact was not because he unified and baptized so many of the people in the area he was. Let us ask the Lord today to help us work for unity.

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