Peace be with you.
In the midst of the chaos of the Passion, there is this very fascinating turn-of-events that may, very understandably, be missed. “Herod and Pilate became friends that very day, even though they had been enemies formerly.” Now, you may wonder why, in this midst of this very long, very detailed story about the condemnation, torture, and death of the central person within Christianity, I would choose to focus at all on the two civil leaders mentioned in this passage. Isn’t it interesting, however, what it takes for these two powerful leaders to become friends: the common struggle against a crowd braying for the death of an innocent. Their power hungry attitudes set them against one another but it will be a common enemy that will unite them and make them friends.
In a past assignment involving several parishes in different towns, I was dumbstruck as to how to get the people in the parishes to get past differences in order to work together to build up the body of Christ. They seemed to be only concerned with being Christian if it helped their town and hurt the towns (and parishes) close by. After all, if we close a parish next door, maybe some of those people will come to our parish and they won’t be able to close us. There was even a point where I found myself wondering if I were to do things to make myself hated by the people in the parishes, if they would come together out of hatred for me.
The “why” of unity is just as important as unity itself. If we are working together to bring criminals back to God, to reconcile sinners around a campfire, and helping people deal with the reality of death, we are reconciling as Christ would. But, if we are united in mutual hatred of a common enemy, we may find that we are, in fact, crucifying our Lord more than we are the Lord himself.
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