Biblical Call to Unity

	Fr. Roger Vermalen Karban

The readings for Sunday, January 27, 2002, the Third Sunday of the Year, are Isaiah 8:23-9:3, I Corinthians 1:10-13, 17, Matthew 4:12-23.

Everyone agrees: Christians are people who answer Jesus’ call to follow him.
But what does Jesus actually call us to do?
One thing is certain: Jesus’ initial disciples didn’t think they were becoming “other Christs” just by having faith in him. Unlike many Christians today, their discipleship revolved around daily attempts to make Jesus’ faith their faith. Remember the famous quote from Father Ed Hays? “Jesus’ first followers imitated him long before they worshiped him.”

The first thing they imitated was his response to his own call from Yahweh. We hear in today’s Gospel pericope that it was a call “to repent” — to risk going through a “metanoia” in his life. This well-known Greek word describes a 180 degree turn from what one thinks important to what God thinks important. It presumes a total switch in one’s value system. It’s clear from Jesus’ proclamation, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” that he believes only those who make such a turn can actually experience God working in their lives.

Matthew also tells us that the first four Christians in his Gospel imitate Jesus by responding immediately to God’s call; generously leaving family, possessions, even their occupations, to follow someone who has yet to show them exactly what road they’re going to take.

Yet at this point of Matthew’s Gospel the only thing Jesus tells his followers is, from here on, people are more important than fish. We have few specifics about the demands of Jesus’ call. In today’s liturgical readings, such details are left to Paul.

At the very beginning of his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle mentions one of the most serious ways in which a person can betray his/her call from Jesus. “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.”

He then reminds his readers that they’ve wandered so far off of Jesus’ path that they’ve actually started to form factions based on the apostles who originally evangelized them. “Each of you is saying, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas . . .’ ” Paul’s forced to ask rhetorically, “Is Christ divided?”

Those familiar with Paul’s Christian value system understand why such divisions in the Corinthian community cause him so much pain. He believes each follower of Jesus is to imitate Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Though he finds little reluctance to experience the latter, he constantly surfaces opposition to the former. So much opposition, that he actually talks about the cross of Christ being “emptied of its meaning.”
For Paul, the number one way a person dies with Jesus is by becoming one with all those in the Body of Christ. Throughout his letters — but especially here in I Corinthians — he hammers away at Jesus’ call to unite with those around us. Becoming one with others is how each Christian is expected to die every day.

Because many of us Catholics get lost in the non-biblical calls of priesthood and religious life and ignore the biblical calls to unity, we never experience Isaiah’s vision of a people walking in a “great light.”

If, 2,000 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, we’re still living “in a land of gloom,” either we don’t understand what he’s calling us to do, or we simply refuse to endure the pain which responding to his call to oneness entails — the pain which he himself first experienced.
By the way, at last count, how many Christian denominations are there today?