How Important is Unity?

Published: Jan. 25, 2010, 1:07 a.m.

b'In his reflection on the home town crowd\'s reaction to Jesus\' sermon in Nazareth, Glynn Cardy challenges the church\'s notion that unity is a goal. Instead he argues it is an outcome of standing up for the marginalised. To get there we must sometimes be off-side with the majority.\\n"If Jesus had a PR advisor he could have done the whole preaching in the Nazareth Synagogue thing very differently.\\xa0He could have begun by saying that God loved everyone - \\u2018you, me, them\\u2019 - and God had chosen people for various tasks.\\xa0If it had been written by then [which of course it wasn\\u2019t] he could have used that Pauline body metaphor of us all belonging to each other.\\xa0He could have helped them to see that he was their expression, their ambassador of God\\u2019s love to others.\\xa0He could have worked them round so that they could have all affirmed each other and had a nice hug at the end.\\n\\xa0\\nInstead he got them offside.\\xa0Like prophets of the past he wasn\\u2019t much of a crowd pleaser.\\xa0He failed diplomacy school."\\n\\nText and video links available at www.stmatthews.org.nz'