One Body with Many Members (1 Corinthians 12:12-31)

“Because this act was done by this one, there and then, acts of reconciliation are more than an attempt to create reality by establishing imagined communities which offer a different sort of social space from that of the world’s routine violence.  Human acts of reconciliation are in accordance with the structure of reality which God in Christ creates and to the existence of which the gospel testifies; and therefore they are acts which tend toward the true end of creation which God’s reconciling act establishes once and for all in Christ’s person and work.”

— John Webster

Spiritual Gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1-11)

“Paul’s emphasis on unity-in-diversity is grounded in the nature of the one God, who is holy Trinity. … Paul sees all persons of the Trinity as involved fully in creation, redemption, and salvation. All gifts come ultimately from God the originating and loving Father, but God gives them through Jesus Christ as Mediator, and they are appropriated by the enabling work of the Holy Spirit.”

— Anthony Thiselton

Jesus's Prayer for Us: Unity (John 17:20-26)

“[There] is nothing so social by nature as man, nothing so unsocial by corruption.”

— Augustine of Hippo

“[R]edemption being a work of restoration will appear to us by that very fact as the recovery of lost unity – the recovery of supernatural unity of man with God, but equally of the unity of men among themselves.”

— Henri de Lubac

Fulfillment of the Promise (Revelation 7:9-17)

“Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy.”

— Thomas Aquinas

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. “

— The Apostle Paul to the Galatians

What is the Blessing? (Ephesians 2:11-22)

“A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love. There can be as many different kinds of people as there are different things for them to love. … The better the things, the better the people; the worse the things, the worse their agreement to share them.”

— Augustine, The City of God XIX.24