How Important is Unity?

In his reflection on the home town crowd's reaction to Jesus' sermon in Nazareth, Glynn Cardy challenges the church's notion that unity is a goal. Instead he argues it is an outcome of standing up for the marginalised. To get there we must sometimes be off-side with the majority. "If Jesus had a PR advisor he could have done the whole preaching in the Nazareth Synagogue thing very differently. He could have begun by saying that God loved everyone - ‘you, me, them’ - and God had chosen people for various tasks. If it had been written by then [which of course it wasn’t] he could have used that Pauline body metaphor of us all belonging to each other. He could have helped them to see that he was their expression, their ambassador of God’s love to others. He could have worked them round so that they could have all affirmed each other and had a nice hug at the end.   Instead he got them offside. Like prophets of the past he wasn’t much of a crowd pleaser. He failed diplomacy school." Text and video links available at www.stmatthews.org.nz