Bishops' Blog

Communion Matters 3: What Does Communion Mean?

The place is begin is with what the word means, and the answer is ‘lots of things,’ and in lots of different spheres.  Communion, in Greek koinonia, means ‘the shared.’ But this can be referred to the sacrament, or to having goods held in common, or to a quality of relationship between friends, or to the inner life of the divine Trinity, or to a state of mutual recognition of different churches (especially our fellow Anglicans), and, by extension, other groups, and doubtless others as well.  Communion’s power is its span and its flexibility. 

Whether we are looking at the religious or economic or inter-personal, or divine, or diplomatic, (or others), what is common to their sense of commonality?  Being in communion means we are together, really and deeply, without being identical. In philosophical jargon, to be is to be with. For the opposite of blending all into one, is to stand apart and be separate. To be I is not to be you. And this too is what ‘communion’ is not saying.  By nature a family is communal, while a business organization is not, though it may strive toward such a state on occasion.  Needless, to say we resist communion as much as we want it, we who are made to be related to God even as we are prohibited from identifying ourselves with Him.

Christian being is indeed communion, undergirded by the divine communion, constituted in the communion of the Church, displayed in the act of communion, instructive for humanity made for a being as communion, etc.  There is indeed a kind of ladder, an interlocking chain, which helps us to understand, as we look from one to another, what life in the Spirit as life in communion is.  In other words, ‘who God is’ leads to ‘who we are’ leads to ‘what we do together Sunday’ leads to ‘how we conduct ourselves in the world.’      

+GRS

Communion Matters 2: Dramatis Personae

While the Bible offers a wide variety of genres and emphases over a millennium, it has a clear narrative, the story line of humanity with God. It begins at the beginning and ends with the end (which is a beginning of its own).  A similar metaphor is that of a drama, perhaps like one of Shakespeare’s historical plays, but with a much wider period attended to (the theologian Kevin Van Hoozer has written, for example, of The Drama of Scripture).  And others have emphasized that throughout the main actor is God Himself, even when He remains off-stage (for example in the narratives of the Israelite kings).  And of course the main inter-locutor is Israel, God’s people, both in their faithfulness and their rebellion.  They celebrate the promised land, are railed at by the prophets, go in exile, hope for their Lord’s decisive return, etc.

But there is another character (or better yet, class of characters).  They are prominent at the beginning, center, and end, though theirs is a bit part of stretches in between. I am thinking of course of us- the nations, the Gentiles. (in Anglicized Greek).  In the beginning God created the human, and soon thereafter they divided themselves ethnically. The nations are in the Old Testament raging (Psalm 2), and yet receptive to God (e.g. Naaman in II Kings 5).  They move to the margins, and yet they are never forgotten. In the exile, it turns out that disaster is actually also a divine strategy so that Israel might be ‘light to the nations.’ (Isaiah 42:6). 

In the mission of the Church after Jesus’ resurrection the nations come to the fore. Now is fulfilled the prophecy that the nations would be the prize of victory at the ascension of the Son of Man, Messiah, Jesus (Daniel 7:13-14).  Their coming is in fact a confirmation of the resurrection, of which it is a sign (so the Book of Revelation).

The point is this: the nations across the globe are not just a matter of philanthropy or curiosity to us. They are crucial to the salvation narrative of the New Covenant. And they are we.  Mission, what we are to do, and theology, who we are by grace before God, are inseparably knit together.

+GRS