Harmony

Isn't it great that the Lord Jesus chose to be his disciples people from different walks of life, different perspectives, and different backgrounds? It is such an ideal to think of compiling a hodge-podge group and making a unified team . . . even family . . . of them. But living it is a challenge that seems to sometimes elude us.

When Jesus proclaimed the greatest commandments--to love the Lord God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and out neighbor as ourselves--his listeners wanted clarification: "Just exactly who is this neighbor that we are to love?" I think they might have been hoping (as I often do) that the neigbor they were prescribed to love was the friendly one across the street whose children got along well with theirs, or the well-off couple around the corner who invited them over for lavish, snooty dinner parties. Jesus lures their imagination with a tale of man who is tramatized by robbers and who is ignored and left for dead by all of the people who should have helped him. Jesus' listeners are hoping to jump into the story as the knights in shining armor to rescue the neglected victim. Instead, Jesus has the audacity to make the hero of the story a Samaritan--a character with whom his listeners felt they had nothing in common. Jesus' listeners did not understand their northern neighbors with their loosy-goosy religious practices and foreign traditions. They prefered to keep these odd Samaritan "neighbors" at arms length (at least!). But it is this Samaritan who is cast as the "good" hero in the story; he is the rightly-loving one.

Perhaps it is as hard to allow ourselves the vulerability to even receive love from those who are different from us--who are outside the tidy boxes of "good neigbor" that we draw for ourselves. Evenso, isn't it the most challenging of feats that are most worth our persistent effort?

It is not the unison of tune (or thought, or perspective) that creates the most meaningful music, but the harmonization of different notes and rhythms that completes the fullest score. It is the bringing together of the different, in creative tension with each other that brings tears to our eyes and joy to our hearts. I am convinced that this is the kind of harmonic relationships that the Lord God has invited in our journey with Christ. Not an invitation to befriend the neighbors who are just like us or who are exactly like the people we want to become, but an invitation to be joined in meaningful, though sometimes tense and difficult, relationship with those who look and sound different from ourselves.

That is what it means to be the Body of Christ. It is at the very heart of what it means to be Christian.