Worldwide Communion Sunday celebrates the miraculous cohesive force of Christianity. When this day comes and we take part in its celebration with the seven hundred million other Christians from fifty separate nations of the world we feel ourselves to be a part of the fulfillment of Christ’s prophetic word. “I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto me.” Our spirits thrill today with the consciousness  that God is using us now to do what that unknown writer of the Epistle to Diognetus in the second century said: “We Christians hold the world together.”

Have we not all been impressed with the strange mixture of men that gathered around Jesus, their diverse natures, their antagonistic dreams and purposes? How much there was to drive them away from each other! There was Simon the Zealot — an enthusiastic patriot who was all for starting a rebellion against Roman rule. There was Matthew the Publican, that quisling who made his peace with the despised Roman conquerors and earned his living by collecting taxes from his own countrymen to fill the Roman treasury. There was Thomas the doubter and James and John of the violent volcano like spirits ready to erupt in anger at the drop of a hat. Yet these different and conflicting spirits found their reconciling center in Jesus and were bound together in so tight a unity that their fellowship could not be broken even by persecution or martyrdom.

“It is one of the supreme achievements of Jesus that He can enable the most diverse of people to live together without in the least losing their own personalities or qualities. G. K. Chesterton writes about the Biblical text which says that the lion and the lamb shall lie down together (in the Messianic age). . ‘But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is constantly assumed that when the lion lies down with the lamb that the lion will become lamb-like. But this is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is — can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the church attempted, that is the miracle she achieved!” (Wm. Barclay — The Gospel of Luke — Westminster Press. 1958)

But how? How bind the lion-like and the lamb-like spirits of men together in one fellowship round the whole world without doing violence to the nature of each? The Writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says that God has done it through the Everlasting Covenant He has made with His people, which this communion celebrates.  For the God of peace, the peace-making God, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep — our Good Shepherd who laid down His life upon the cross for our sins — this God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, through the blood of the everlasting covenant is making imperfect and fractious men and women perfect enough or complete enough to accomplish His will for bringing in God’s kingdom of love and brotherhood.

In the United Nations deliberations, a speaker rises and begins to address the assembly, and even as he talks in his own native tongue translators begin to interpret his speech in other languages so that everyone present can put on earphones, tune to the particular translator that is interpreting in his own tongue and understand the speaker. This is, in a measure, illustrative of what Jesus Christ does for men of differing temperaments, civilizations, cultures. He interprets each to the other so that in the language of God’s love we understand our brothers from whom we may differ so greatly. But more that that, in the Christian fellowship, by God’s grace, we become reconciled to our brother not because we thoroughly understand and agree with him, nor because we give up our own convictions. We are reconciled to him because we have become reconciled to God who has accepted us as sons, so then in the awesome consciousness of that glorious fact, we are willing to accept others of God’s children just as unworthy as we ourselves who have been reconciled to Him through Christ.

“Muretus was a wandering scholar of the Middle Ages. He was poor. In an Italian town he took ill, and was taken to a hospital for waifs and strays. The doctors were discussing his case in Latin, never dreaming that he could understand. They suggested that since he was such a worthless wanderer they might use him for medical experiments. He looked up and answered them in their own learned tongue: ‘Call no man worthless for whom Christ died.’” (Wm. Barclay — Gospel of Luke p. 10, Westminster Press, 1958)

Mr. C. E. M. Joad has observed of our particularly gifted, yet demonic generation that: “We have the powers of gods and use them like irresponsible schoolboys.” How right he seems when we think of the armies of scientists and acres of laboratories dedicated to turning out striped toothpaste or concocting a new hair spray devoid of all goo and gumminess.

“Powers of gods, used like irresponsible schoolboys” — that sentence reminds one of those old myths and legends we read as school children in Bullfinch’s Mythology, where Greek and Roman gods were always using their powers capriciously to vent their spite or exercise their lust by changing men and women into animals or plants: as the lovely Io was changed into a heifer because Jupiter had become smitten by her charms and Juno was jealous.

But it is the glory of the Christian faith and a fact of Christian experience, that the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ through the blood of the everlasting covenant has the power to change men and women, not in to cows and bears and birds and plants — but has the tremendous power to change the minds and hearts, the very souls of men, those powerhouses of personality, into centers of goodwill, thus channeling the gigantic forces men have grasped in their hands in our time to serve the purposes of a loving heavenly Father who wills only good and brotherhood for all his children.