Justice, Part 3 of A Unity That’s Big Enough

A third theme repeated in our reading this week is the theme of unity. Unity can be both life-giving and death-dealing. Like peace, unity based on silencing opposition or accommodating harm is death-dealing. And, like peace, unity that comes through justice, through ensuring everyone is being taken care of, is life-giving. As Ched Myers rightly states in his classic commentary on Mark, Binding the Strong Man, “We may rightly be suspicious of theologies of reconciliation that promote Christian unity at the price of political silence.”

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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)

I don’t believe that unity has to mean the homogeneous conformity of everyone involved. We can have unity alongside a beautiful, heterogeneous diversity where our differences are celebrated as the rich variations that we have as a human family, and where none are excluded or made to feel “less than” because they are different from those the present system prioritizes and privileges. 

If we want unity, we should be working for justice. We don’t want a unity that comes at any cost, a unity that results from people who are being hurt being told to sit down and keep silent. 

For many of us, unity now will have to come through reconciliation. And that reconciliation will have to come through restitution for past injustices and the transformation of our present system that corrects harms being committed. Unity depends on change, then. It has to follow present harms being remedied and made right. Until then, unity can’t be life-giving if it calls us to ignore or passively accept the concrete harms that have been and are being done to people made vulnerable in our society.

If we are praying for a unity that is the fruit of justice being restored and rooted in care that ensures everyone has what they need to thrive, then I’m all for it. But death-dealing unity that is mere silence in the midst of harm is not what I interpret our reading this week to promote. 

What we want is a unity that is safe for everyone. A unity that is compassionate. A unity that walks arm and arm with justice. A unity that’s big enough to wrap its arms around all our varied differences and call them “good.” A unity that at its heart holds the well-being of every member as its highest priority of value. 

If we, alongside the Jesus in this week’s reading, are praying for this kind of unity, then and only then can we say, “Amen.”

Herb’s new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is now available at Renewed Heart Ministries.