Richard Mallory

The scene in John 17 is not a lecture. It is not a farewell address delivered from a distance. It is something far more intimate—a last gathering of friends, close enough to hear one another breathe, close enough for a teacher to kneel and wash the dust from their feet. Jesus is giving his disciples his final teachings, and in effect his blessing, before he dies. The disciples are listening with rapt attentiveness, knowing, perhaps without fully knowing, that something is ending and something is beginning.

We are invited into this circle. Not as observers, but as participants. We are invited to allow our own feet to be washed, to receive the friendship Jesus confers on those he loves, to take into ourselves the new command he offers: that we love one another. This gathering is an icon of unity—a unity modeled on the oneness Jesus shares with the Father. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us. It is a unity not of uniformity but of belonging, of mutual indwelling, of love freely given and freely received.

After Pentecost, the circle widened. It became unmistakably clear that any and all are welcome at this table—that the fellowship Jesus embodied in that upper room was never meant to stop at the door. The Spirit blew where it willed, and it willed to include.

Richard Rohr, in The Universal Christ, captures the stakes of this widening with characteristic directness. Jesus, he writes, did not come so that theologians alone could understand and make their fine distinctions, but so that they all may be one. He came to unite, to reconcile all things in himself—everything in heaven and everything on earth, as Paul puts it in Colossians. Rohr anticipates the resistance this claim will meet: many traditional Christians regard universal inclusion as heresy, he acknowledges, and many draw lines of ethnicity or doctrine to determine who is in and who is out. He finds these convictions, in his words, quite strange for a religion that believes one God created all things. If God created everything, surely God is at least as large and mysterious as the universe itself—a universe still expanding, still unfolding, as human consciousness has been unfolding for centuries. How can anyone read even a small part of John 17, Rohr asks, and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? Father, may they all be one.

That question answers itself—especially if we have allowed ourselves to sit in that upper room, to feel the water on our feet, to hear our name spoken by someone who calls us friend. The unity Jesus prays for is not a doctrine to be defended. It is a reality to be inhabited, a table to be extended, a love to be practiced—one washing, one welcome, one another at a time.

Your fellow traveler,

—Richard