Before I arrive at an airport I am just an individual. Once I arrive there I am part of a mass and I have no option but to go with the flow; my life is taken over by others and I might as well be anaesthetised on an operating table. It is an experience of freedom to walk through the doors of an airport on completing a journey.
We don’t like our freedom being taken over – even or a short while. Yet if we don’t surrender our freedom we won’t go anywhere. We are torn between a longing to be free and a desire to belong. One of the great paradoxes of life is that we become truly free when we belong.
The ancient prophets complained that the ‘shepherds’ didn’t care about the sheep and left them scattered over the mountains of Israel. Jeremiah tells us Yahweh himself reacts to this abandonment and will gather the flock ‘and Israel will dwell in confidence’ (Ch 23). In Mark’s gospel (Ch 6:30) there is a description of an airport: ‘there were so many coming and going that the apostles had no time to eat.’ Jesus ‘takes pity on the large crowd for they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he set himself to teach them.’
Mark is talking of something drawing people together: ‘from every town they all hurried to the place where Jesus was.’ The letter to the Ephesians speaks of Jesus breaking down the barrier that used to keep people apart and drawing them to himself. ‘He is the peace between us’ (Eph 2:13). Daniel Barenboim set up the Divan orchestra 13 years ago for young Jews and Arabs to play music together. ‘Once the young musicians agreed on how to play just one note together they would not be able to look at each other in the same way again.’
But Barenboim knows that music will not gather people overnight. When his choice of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, with its famous proclamation by Schiller ‘all men will become brothers,’ is played at the opening of the Olympic Games in London it will be apt, but in Barenboim’s words, ‘all men will become brothers with a few billion exceptions.’
Our task – and we know it in our bones – is to come together: to be one. Despite the frustration and despair we often feel, we are firmly on the road to unity or community. The Lord is gathering us together despite all the barriers we set up. All we have to do is drop those defences we cling to so much.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis