7th Sunday of Easter (B) : 16th May 2021

When Jesus prays that we may all be one, as he does in today’s Gospel reading, it is important to realise that he is not speaking about Church unity, but rather about the unity of the whole human race, for a total reversal of the disaster of Babel (Gen 11), where the unity of the human race was broken through the desire to build a tower reaching up to heaven and so on their own human terms attain to divinity, immortality and absolute transcendence.

The unity envisaged in the New Testament, especially in the Letters to the Ephesians (1:22) and the Colossians (1:18) is that Christ is the head of everything. A similar expression is also found in the theology of some of the early Church Fathers. It is also well expressed in the Third Eucharistic Prayer:

“Father in heaven, gather together all Your scattered children wherever we may be.”