Unity with God and Radical Compassion
Oftentimes, when we imagine God, we think of this personal being of great and unimaginable power. We imagine a man in the clouds, or perhaps a dove, or even see in our mind’s eye the image of one of the many paintings of Jesus we have seen. This gives us the idea that God is separate from us, an entity “out there” somewhere. And this gives us the idea that our love for God really, ultimately, has little to do with how we treat, speak to, or think about other people. Other people are not God. God is “out there” and they are here.
Often, this image of God becomes little more than a divine judge sitting far above us and marking down our actions as good or bad. Many even seem to convince themselves that so long as they “follow the rules” and believe the “right” things (there’s that danger of orthodoxy again), then their actions towards others really don’t matter all that much. I disagree.
The King will reply, ‘Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
This New Testament passage (Matthew 25:40) is arguably one of the most well known statements made by Christ in the Gospels. It’s plenty powerful on its own, but I like to connect it with another selection, this one coming from chapter 17 of John’s gospel:
…that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me —so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
And, of course, we can’t forget Galatians 3:28:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
All of these passages share something in common: a belief in the ultimate unity of all things in God through Christ. For all of these passages, there is no distinction between me and you, or even really any distance between us and God. God is one with Christ, and so, too, are we are one with Christ. Further, Acts 17:28 says of God that “in Him we live and move and have our being.” There is no distinction here.
Contrary to popular belief, I do not believe these are not statements are pointing at a symbolic type of unity. I don’t believe the message is that we are “one” with Christ in the same way that a family is “one” in terms of being a singular unit. No, I believe these passages are making a clear statement that we are truly one with Christ, and therefore one with God.
What this means is that what one does to another, they do to God. And, yes, in that sense, what one does to another they also do to themselves. There is, in my view, little way around this. And why would we want there to be a way around it regardless? Why is unity with all things seen as a negative and not as a deeply beautiful and moving take on reality? Even the Eastern Orthodox Church teaches that one may become one with God’s energies (more on the energy-essence distinction another time) through a process known as theosis.
Put simply, I believe that God is not a being “out there” beyond an infinitely large chasm of difference. I believe God is truly omnipresent. In fact, I believe he is at our very cores. And since he resides at my core as much as at yours, then it seems to me that we resides within one another as well. And what a world it would be if we truly considered the suffering of others to be our own. How much farther would we be willing to go to alleviate another’s pain if we saw ourselves in it - not metaphorically, but actually.
For this reason, I pray that we all strive for theosis (deification in the Western church). Let us all pray the prayer of Christ, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
