One with the Father

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My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one.” John 10:27-30

I have been thinking a good deal about families lately, about parents and children, and our interconnectedness and interdependence. No matter how far we run from each other, no matter how hard we cling to each one, we are inexorably linked and bound together. DNA science had demonstrated what we knew before by experience, we share blood and traits, strands of behavior and conditions, some inevitable, so not so much. But we are part of the same cloth, fabric from the same loom, people woven together despite all the differences and discord.

Jesus was being pushed and tested again y the religious authority. They wanted to understand his role and his authority, challenging his claims and his relationship to God. Jesus reply was familial and connected - we are one. Jesus knew that his relationship with God was solid and at a fundamental level, not happenstance nor a silly unfounded claim. Like all close family ties, we cannot run from those we are tied to, we are linked together completely. And in this statement of Jesus, we find ourselves inexorably linked with the Creator through him, a people made of the same fabric.

Today I want to be grateful for the immediate family I have, but also for the wider family of God. We are not so different in our differences. We are socially, culturally and linguistically diverse, but at heart we are children of a loving God, who aches for us to see our similarities and not our differences, the commonalities and not the boundaries. May we be agents of inclusion, agents of creative solutions and active in the reconciliation of the world.