As I explained in an earlier post, I replaced my D&C reading for the week with a different spiritual discipline: praying in observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. At the center of that devotion was my meditation on D&C 38:27, "I say to you, Be one; and if you are not one, you are not mine."
In his novel Ender's Game, Mormon sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card has a scenario in which a platoon of children at a military school is torn by a rivalry between two boys, Ender and Bernard. The rift finally gets smoothed over when another boy, Alai, forges a friendship with both rivals. Here's how Card describes it:
Ender and Alai were friends. Now others might believe that Ender had joined his group, but it wasn't so. Ender had joined a new group. Alai's group. Bernard had joined it too.That serves—and Card may well intend something like this—as a parable for my understanding of why it's true to say that if we are not one, we are not Christ's.
It wasn't obvious to everyone; Bernard still blustered and sent his cronies on errands. But Alai now moved freely through the whole room, and when Bernard was crazy, Alai could joke a little and calm him down. When it came time to choose their launch leader, Alai was the almost unanimous choice. . . . The launch was no longer divided into Bernard's in-group and Ender's outcasts. Alai was the bridge.
What I understand D&C 38:27 to be saying is this: You can't claim to be one with Christ and at the same time identify someone else—anyone else—as an enemy or Other with whom you are not one, because Christ insists on being one with everybody. In 3 Nephi 27:14-15, Christ says that he was lifted up on the cross so that he would have the power to draw all people to himself. We are one with him, whether we know it or not, or accept it or not, or like it or not. And that means there's no division between in-group and outcasts. Christ is the bridge. If you're one with Christ, you're one with everyone. Like it or not.
Of course, when the scriptures talk of judgment, they inscribe an ultimate in-group/outcasts division between those at Christ's right hand and those at his left, those whom he lifts up at the last day and those whom he sends away into the fire, etc. And I discern truth in that to the extent that those potentially monstrous passages tell us that God demands justice, that God stands with victims and against oppression. I was careful to say "oppression," not "oppressors."
Those statements have to be interpreted in light of an understanding that, ultimately and above all, Christ loves all of us and suffers for all of us so that he can draw all of us to himself and make us all one. Which makes the statements very hard to reconcile. A few weeks back, reacting to the invasion of Gaza, I remarked on the difficulty of taking a stand, though I expressed my conviction that if we're going to talk about God taking a stand with one side or the other, he would be standing with the most vulnerable, not the most powerful. I believe that. And/But I also believe that Christ is one with all parties in that conflict, which means there's a sense in which he's on everyone's side. He is one with Hamas. He is one with the Israeli military. He is one with the Palestinian and Israeli populations. He has made all their suffering his own. He empathizes with all of them, utterly. And he asks us to do likewise.
This is the mystery at the heart of the gospel. It's by coming to understand and live that mystery, that we are transformed into the image of Christ, the way Moroni 7:48 talks about.
Pray to the Father with all the energy of heartI'm still praying, because I don't understand it yet.
that you may be filled with this love,
which he has bestowed on all who are true followers
of his Son, Jesus Christ,
that you may become the sons [and daughters] of God;
that when he shall appear, we shall be like him . . .
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