What is your desire? What are you longing for?
The “O Antiphons” can help us to connect with our longings. Longings for a better world, longing for peace, for justice, for wholeness, healing and restored relationships. We know that all these things find their fulfilment in Christ, and each antiphon reminds us of an aspect of our yearning. Today, we read:
O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.
Human empires, manmade nations – all of them are both temporary and infused with notions of power, of force, of self-preservation. When God is King, it looks like what we see in Jesus: Self-giving love, including and empowering the weak, bringing together those things that seem like they cannot be reconciled. Jesus is the desire of nations, the hope of all people, it is in him that we can find those things we yearn for.
Jesus is the cornerstone, holding together humanity, and he is “making both one” – this refers to the Jewish and Gentile believers as in Ephesians 2:14-16.
“For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death.”
There is a lot of unrest in the world, and we pray that the uniting power of God’s kingdom will spread and overtake the powers that work to divide and conquer.
But primarily, this passage speaks to the differences that can exist within the Church (the global one) or our churches (locally). And there is something in what Jesus did on the cross which builds bridges between people, breaking down barriers, creating one people out of us, one body, even.
It struck me as I was reading this, that just like God bent down and formed humanity out of clay, whispered his breath into the lifeless form that he had just created with his own hands, so God in Jesus through the Spirit whispers life into those folk who together are called church (or ekklesia, those who are called out to be gathered together). Lovingly, we are all being shaped into one body, all us different particles and parts, perhaps not always sticking together so well, but being moulded and formed, perhaps held together by the glue that is baptismal water and infused by the lifegiving breath of the Spirit.
O King of the nations, come and save the human race which your formed from clay.
What does salvation look like for you today? Talk to Jesus about that for a few moments.