I and My Father Are One

Simply stated, the Communion Jesus made possible and inaugurated for men is nothing other than the common union that exists between the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. It is the eternal state of life which the three persons of the Godhead enjoy in one Being. The Lord Jesus came with the double intent of bringing men into the Communion in heaven, and establishing this same kind of Communion among men on earth. Because Jesus was in that heavenly Communion He was completely qualified to say:

(1) to men: 'I and my Father are one'; 'My Father worketh hitherto and I work'; and

(2) to His Father: 'as Thou Father art in me and I in Thee, that they may be one, even as we are: one'.

The degree of union known by God in Himself is unique; we understand it to be exclusive. With a hush in our hearts we read the simple phrases, astonished to learn the basis of the Communion opened to us. The perfection of union in God alone enjoyed by the three glorious persons of the ever-blessed Trinity is now ours, nothing less.

Of all the realisations to which the Church of God could possibly come, this is the most overwhelming. It is wonderful in the extreme. Yet more wonderful still, what appears to us men as so absolutely unique, is quite common and ordinary among Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It is almost unbelievable that He wishes to make this Communion which is the common state of God alone, common to us, but it is so.

This does not make us equal with God. It relates us to God and one another in the same kind of union by which God is one. It will at once be seen that this Communion cannot be achieved by any form of common decision or consent by people to belong to one another. Just as plainly also it is not an agreement among a group of people to become members of, and form, and belong to 'a church'. Again it is certainly not a method of establishing any kind of schismatic exclusivism among men, to which ends sadly enough some have misguidedly used it. This Communion is the actual experience of the state expressed in Jesus' words to His disciples, 'ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me and I in you,' and to His Father, 'that they may be one in us'.

In its outward form among us, the communion is a parabolic enactment, involving the use of minimal tangible elements perfectly understandable to men, and the purpose of it is to display the method whereby the Communion of God was established for men by Christ on earth. This method is plainly declared to us by each of the men who wrote about the ordination, whether they were present at the original gathering or not. That this is so is strong evidence of God's powerful insistence that this method should be kept permanently before us. All who participate in the feast must see it as clearly and cherish it as dearly as did those earliest members of the Church of Christ.