Not long ago, I found myself at Mass with a person whom I don’t really like.
I hate to put it so bluntly, but there it is. This individual—let’s call him or her N to keep things completely anonymous—is not a bad person. N just isn’t someone I particularly want to be around. If N moved to a different city and I never saw N again, I wouldn’t be sad. I wouldn’t try to keep in touch or even be terribly interested in what N was up to or how N was doing. To be quite honest, I’d probably be somewhat relieved. It would be nice not to have to put up with N. Frankly, I suspect that N feels the same way about me. I know enough about N to be confident that we have different views on a range of important topics, including political and theological questions; we don’t have overlapping interests and hobbies; we don’t laugh at the same jokes; we aren’t from the same place; we didn’t attend any of the same schools… in short, there’s virtually nothing N and I share that could plausibly serve as the foundation of a real, authentic friendship.
And yet, as I stood in line for Holy Communion and watched N receive the Eucharist, it struck me in a very vivid way that N and I are united—we share a common life; we participate in an organic and metaphysical union—in a manner and to a degree that I’d never seriously considered.
Years ago, long before I converted to Catholicism, I heard someone say that orthodox Christians (that’s orthodox with a small ‘o’) of all stripes have more in common with each other than they do with the dissenting members of their own communions. That is, those who sincerely and unequivocally affirm the Nicene Creed, who believe that the Scriptures really are the Word of God, and who embrace ancient Christian understandings of the nature of the family and related social issues share a fellowship that transcends the standard divisions within the Christian world: Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Evangelicals, Anglicans, and all the rest, when they are faithful to the core tenets of their own traditions, are ipso facto closer to each other in faith and practice than they are to the progressive and dissenting Christians found within their own churches. This struck me as basically correct when I first heard it, and I’ve repeated it myself many times since.
Now, I’m not so sure.
The idea isn’t flat-out wrong; indeed, in important ways it is obviously true. The Southern Baptist who soaks in the Scriptures and longs to see everyone she loves cultivate a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ is a kindred spirit, and someone much more likely to become a close friend of mine, than the Catholic who dismisses the miracle stories in the Gospels and sees environmental legislation as the most pressing issue for the Church in the twenty-first century. But that same Catholic, believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and faithfully receiving the sacrament, is knit together with me, and I with him, in deeper and more profound ways than mere agreement or affection. In the One, we are one.
A lot has happened in the weeks since I last wrote one of these essays, including the election of a new pope, Leo XIV. If you’ve been following the news surrounding the first few weeks of his papacy, you probably recognize that phrase—“In the One, we are one,” which is also the title of this post—as Leo’s episcopal motto. It’s been on my mind quite a bit, and it seems to me to be deeply linked to the readings for today, the Fifth Sunday of Easter. There are two things in particular I’d like to highlight.
First, there’s the bit about Paul and Barnabas calling together the church at Antioch and sharing with them the news from their travels: above all that God “had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.” I won’t go into great detail on this point here… suffice it to say that the idea that Gentiles (i.e., non-Jews) could be full-fledged members of the Christian community, and could participate in that community without submitting to the requirements of the Jewish law, would have been utterly mind-blowing to those who first heard it, and it would have required an extraordinary degree of humility for Jewish Christians to accept and embrace it. I’m trying and failing to think of a contemporary illustration that might capture what it must have been like. Perhaps the integration of racially segregated schools comes close, though that’s not really a “contemporary” example. Maybe imagining that the Trump administration decided to make Spanish the second official language of the United States and began to mandate bilingual legal documents and road signs… something like that might capture the radical nature of Paul and Barnabas’s announcement that Gentiles could be Christians too. Or if the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced that there are quite a lot of legitimate viewpoints concerning the development of life on earth, and issued a recommendation that every biology department in the country ought to have at least one faculty member who denies the basic claims of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. Again: not a perfect analogy, but maybe somewhere in the right ballpark. What would a devoted MAGA Republican, or a tenured professor of life sciences at Harvard, have to do in order to embrace changes like these? What kind of self-reflection and humble reassessment would be required in order for everyone to get on board? Taking a moment to reflect on these hypothetical transitions may help us to conceive of what it meant to the Jewish Christians at Antioch that God “had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.”
Something like this happened to me as I stood behind N at Mass. For all the differences and disagreements between us, N and I “partake of the one bread,” and we thereby, as St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, “participate in the body of Christ.” In the One, we are one.
The second deep link between today’s readings and the Holy Father’s motto is found in the Gospel. Today we hear the familiar and, I daresay, terrifying mandatum of Our Lord:
I give you a new commandment:
love one another.
As I have loved you, so you also
should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.
I’ll be honest. This is not a message I want to hear. I would strongly prefer for Jesus to have said something like “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you clearly and unequivocally affirm the theological doctrines spelled out in the 1993 edition of The Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Or maybe the true sign of our discipleship could be a willingness to submit to the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics. That’s not easy, but it’s definitely something I can aim for. Better yet would be if the true sign of discipleship was, like, having some nice Catholic art on your walls and participating in reading groups at your local parish, occasionally getting together for drinks with the members of those groups you like best. Now that, my friends, is a Christianity I can get on board with. Indeed, based on that metric, I can tell you without hesitation that I am an A+ Christian.
But that’s not what Jesus gave us. Instead we get “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” And not just any old love, either! Rather, “as I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” Foot-washing, self-giving, sacrificial-to-the-point-of-death love. That’s what we’re called to. That’s what’s supposed to let people know who and Whose we are.
What exactly does such love entail? What does love look like, beyond the true but very general assertion that it looks like Jesus? As is often pointed out, the English language is strangely impoverished in this regard: we use the word love to cover an absurdly wide range of distinct attitudes. I love going to baseball games; I love my children; I love my country; I love whiskey; I love my friends; I love my wife; etc., etc., etc. All of these statements are true, yet the word love means something different in each.
In John chapter 13, where today’s Gospel reading is found, Jesus uses the Greek word agape for love.1 In Latin, agape becomes caritas, and English-speaking theologians use the derivative charity to refer to this particular and exalted form of love, the quintessentially divine love. This is another unfortunate linguistic situation, as most people today use the word charity primarily to refer to giving money to the poor. This is obviously not unrelated to authentic love, but it’s a far cry from the depth and richness of agape or caritas, which goes well beyond mere generosity or addressing others’ material needs.
True charity, the love Christ commands us to have for each other, has four principal features worth highlighting here. First, love involves willing the good of the other. This is arguably the most important thing to understand about authentic love. Fundamentally, love—agape, caritas, charity—is a choice, an act of the will. It is not primarily a feeling, which is why Christ can command it. In loving someone, we intend that he or she obtain that which is truly good for him or her. Ultimately, this is peace with God through Christ; proximately, it includes the sundry and diverse blessings that make a good human life possible. To love someone is to will that he or she be blessed in all these ways. (Note, in passing, that it’s possible for us to be mistaken about what is good or to desire things that are bad; true love does not necessarily will that a person get everything he or she may want.) Second, love is self-sacrificing. If Jesus is the perfect example of agape, then this is perhaps the most obvious feature of authentic love. We love others by intending their good and by being willing to make sacrifices in order to bring it about. We accept suffering of various kinds and say “no” to our own desires when doing so is in the interest of the beloved. Third, love affirms the goodness of the other.2 This is not primarily or necessarily a moral affirmation. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that it is good that the person exists. To love another, I would argue, means acknowledging and even celebrating him or her as a distinct person made in the image of God, an individual whom God loves and for whom Christ died. This is true even in the case of those who have done horrible things or who have wounded us in various ways. It is also true of those who merely annoy us or make our lives marginally more difficult, whose absence would not sadden us. The universe is in some meaningful sense better by virtue of their presence in it. We do not love them if we deny this truth. Finally, and perhaps most difficult of all, true love seeks union with the beloved. “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” And how has he loved us? By willing our good, certainly; by laying down his own life to achieve it, yes; in demonstrating the value God himself sees in us, for sure; and also by giving himself to us that we may be united with him. In the extraordinary and mystical gift of the Eucharist, our lives are drawn up into his, and, by extension, into each other’s. In the One, we are one.
This applies to twenty-first-century Democrats and Republicans every bit as much as it applied to first-century Jews and Gentiles. It applies to rich people and poor people; to the cultural elite and the illiterate; to Ohio State and Michigan fans; to people who drive too fast and people who drive too slow… They will know we are his disciples by our love for one another. In the One, we are one.
Unfortunately, I think this even applies to me and N. In spite of N being so wrong about so much, in spite of N being kind of abrasive and difficult for me to talk to, N and I are in this thing together. And N, if you’re reading this, I have bad news: you owe the same to me. Not because I have done anything to earn it or to make you want to give it, but because the One in whom we are one commands it of us both.
If you’re reading this essay rather than listening to it, and if this Greek word is new to you, you may want to know that it’s pronounced, in American English, “uh-gah-pay,” and not like the English word agape (“uh-gape,” as in “they stood there with their mouths agape”). No, I don’t know how to write things phonetically like you’d find in a dictionary, and I’m not going to pretend to.
I’d like to mention in passing that I really wanted to write “the goodness of the biscuit” here. If you know, you know.
Hey Matt, linked to this Substack and gave you a shout out in this post: https://bobonbooks.com/2025/05/24/the-weekly-wrap-may-18-24/