During the first weeks of our Easter season we focused on the effect of the Resurrection, both on those earliest disciples and on ourselves, in all the varied ways that played out and continues to play out. We’ve thought about how all those relationships with God developed: how Peter changed; how Thomas came to experience the risen Lord; how we change; what it means for each of them and us to have a new life, to be reborn.
Today on our fifth Sunday that focus shifts. We begin to notice a larger story, almost as if we’ve switched to a wide-angled lens. Today’s story from the Act of the Apostles (Acts 6:1-7) tells us about life for the early followers as a group, and how those seemingly inevitable human divisions emerge between different factions feeling that others were being treated better. It describes the first attempts to organize roles and responsibilities within this new society – new, but still subject to all the challenges of human nature.
Peter’s letter (1 Peter 2:4-9) also moves beyond the individual to the group, but in the spiritual dimension. We come into relationship with Christ not as individuals but as a group – Peter uses the metaphor of bricks in a building. Paul, we know, makes the same point with his metaphor of a body with its parts, acting as one. For Peter Christ is the foundation stone, for Paul the head, but the message is the same – we are bound together in a larger entity, there is no one-to-one relationship with Christ.
And John, in his special way, wants to take us deeper into how this complex set of relationships works (John 14:1-12). It works because our relationship with Jesus is not a relationship with another person, however remarkable, however special he was in having been resurrected. Our relationship is with the reality of God himself. In Jesus we experience the fullness of God.
Paul made the same point in his letter to the Colossians: in him the fullness of God came to dwell (Col 2.9). We are joined in that oneness: you share in this fullness in him. As John puts it in another passage, where Jesus prays for us: that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us (Jn 17:21).
Our risen existence is not as individuals, but as people bound together in the most intimate relationships possible. We live one life in God. And this is true despite the entirely human, practical, challenges of sharing our food and our world and our successes and failures. God has made us one, a royal priesthood, people set apart, a single building in which each stone is necessary to hold the others up, a single body in which every part has its place and its role.
All so that we may praise God and do his work, together.