Christchurch Parish News, January 2019
A reflection on Psalm 133 as we prepare for the week of dedicated prayer for Christian unity.
Christian unity is hard.
It seems it’s always been that way. Our New Testament is full of letters written to young churches where there were heated disputes arising from strongly held but divergent beliefs about Jesus and what faith in him entails. Little has changed in the intervening 2000 years.
Definitions matter. Unity does not mean uniformity. As is often noted, there has always been great diversity within the church from the beginning. But this observation also has to reckon with the fact that most of the diversity we encounter in the church is rooted in disagreement that’s led to schism. For example: the split between East and West (1054 AD) over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone (the Eastern Churches’ position) or from the Father and the Son (the Western Church’s position); Catholic vs Protestant over various practices of the medieval church (for example, the selling of indulgences); the subsequent numerous fracturings within Protestant churches over ever finer differences of doctrine … to name but a few.
The theological causes of these disputes, which have often been mixed up with geopolitical power plays, are hard to roll back. Once you separate, because you hold that you can no longer stay in communion with your fellow Christian—literally, you no longer feel you can receive together the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ—history shows that it is almost impossible (at least for us) to overcome these divisions.
In our time, there are also other factors which both exacerbate our lack of unity and at the same time make it navigable.
For example, even with a church such as the Church of England, which is defined geographically (two provinces, Canterbury and York, 42 dioceses, 12,600 parishes), the reality of these geographical distinctions are all but irrelevant at the local parish level. This is primarily because of the car. Nowadays, most people choose and travel to their church of preference. There are a number of obvious criteria. What style of worship? What type of music? What’s the children and youth work like? Is the preaching any good (and how long)? Not to mention the architecture of the church in question. Birds of a feather stick together, and whilst such relatively homogenous groups are a far call from the kind of church envisioned by Paul, for the most part they enable us to live and let live, whilst paying lip service to our being united with our brothers and sisters in Christ in other churches as long as we don’t have to worship like them and we can continue to do things in our own preferred ways. And if we don’t like it, or someone within our existing church has offended us one too many times, we up and leave, often deeply hurt, and find safe harbour in another church elsewhere.
To make things worse, matters are complicated by the fact that the churches we join aren’t fixed bodies. They’re evolving traditions, no matter the tradition. And change, as we all know, can be a source of conflict and a significant barrier to unity within a church, with factions and cliques forming rapidly (or being the cause of the dispute in the first place). Changes to how we worship matter to us hugely because how we worship is one of the key ways we experience God. Hence any proposed change has the potential to upset someone deeply.
What makes this all the worse is that we know that we’re meant to be united. We know that there are numerous passages in the New Testament where we are exhorted to live in unity; most famously, in St. John’s gospel, where Jesus instructs his disciples to be united and gives the well- known metaphor of the vine. It’s an excellent image but it’s not the only one on offer.
For example, a few years ago, I heard Nicky Gumbel, the founder of Alpha, begin an address to a large meeting at the Royal Albert Hall by quoting Psalm 133. It’s one of the shortest psalms in the Bible, a mere three verses. It starts in a very accessible manner and it was the first verse that Gumbel quoted: ‘How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity’ (kindred can be translated in a variety of ways: some translations go with ‘brothers’, others ‘brethren’). This sounds very encouraging. It is indeed very good when this happens. However, as I’ve pointed out, living together in unity as the people of God is far from easy, and is normally not the case. Given that, I wondered what the rest of the psalm might have to say to help us.
At first view, it’s not too obvious. The next verse is a little strange: ‘It [kindred living in unity] is like the precious oil on the head, running down the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes.’ It’s an arresting image. Aaron, the High Priest of Israel, standing in the tabernacle with oil running profligately down his beard. Even doing the necessary textual spadework doesn’t really bring us any closer, at least not at first, even though the image of anointing with oil is one still associated in our own time with blessing—we annoint foreheads with oil at baptism, for example. But we tend not to use so much oil that it runs over onto the collar!
The psalm doesn’t make it immediately easier for us with the second image either. ‘[Kindred living in unity] is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion.’ Picking back up our textual spades, we discover that Hermon was a mountain in Syria. That doesn’t really help and many of the commentators scratch their heads at this point, some venturing that it has to do with a source of water in a dry land, whilst acknowledging that it’s hard to understand how something that happens in Syria can benefit the mountains of Zion.
But as usual, when we read such verses, especially when we read the psalms, we need to remember that we’re reading poetry, which is full of metaphor. It was when I remembered this that a possible way of reading the psalm struck me, one which I think supports its opening verse of affirmation. The key thing to notice in both the image of the oil running down Aaron’s beard and the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion is the direction of travel: downwards. The oil travels down Aaron’s beard and onto his priestly collar. The dew of Hermon falls on the mountains of Zion. Underpinning both images is the notion of liquid moving downwards. What happens at the top travels downwards.
This image of slowly moving liquid—neither oil or dew denote speed—is very important. The idea is that what happens at the top travels downwards affecting everything underneath it. When what moves downwards is good, like the oil of blessing or the dew needed in a parched land, then everything below benefits. It might not happen speedily, but it does happen in due course.
This image helps us to understand the reason why, day by day, week by week (and especially during Christian Unity week) we pray for our church leaders. Be it at national level for Archbishop Justin, diocesan for Bishop Tim and his suffragans, or parish for our vicar Charles and the team, the blessings descend when our leaders are united.
It is very hard for things to be united throughout the church in the absence of top level unity. This is not to foist the responsibility for church unity, or lack thereof, onto our leaders. Quite the contrary. It is to recognise the utter importance of our prayers for their facing the daunting demands that they do at all levels of leadership in the church.
But what to pray? This is where we need images to help us. Which brings us back to Psalm 133 with its generative image of bountiful descent. These images of things descending—the oil travelling down Aaron’s beard onto his collar, the dew from Mt Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion—points us to the one fundamental gracious descent, Jesus and his coming down from heaven to be with us on Earth, when God became human and, as The Message translation puts it, ‘moved into the neighbourhood’.
It also helps us because it reminds us that just as Jesus has come, so too will He return. As such, our unity, rather being defined by our past, lies in the future with the return of Christ. This enables us to flip the whole thing on its head, and rather than bemoan our current lack of unity, instead encourages us to view those areas of unity that do exist within the church as signs of God’s coming kingdom on earth, that is both now and not yet.
Rather than looking backwards to how things were in the past, acknowledging that there was no idyllic period in church history when everyone was in unity, we can look ahead. We can be grateful for when we do agree, not just because it’s good in the here and now, but because more fundamentally it gives us a foretaste of what lies ahead, when all will be brought to fulfilment and union in Christ.
Given all this, it is all the more important that we pray for our church leaders at every level, especially that they may draw ever closer to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Let us pray, too, that the blessing which they receive from ‘the Top’ may work its way downwards throughout our churches and out into our country bringing unity, healing and, as the psalmist concludes, ‘life for evermore’.