Psalm 133:1-3

Of all the pictures available for unity, the psalmist picks one that is almost embarrassingly messy. Oil. Not a tidy drop on a fingertip, but anointing oil poured on Aaron's head until it runs down the beard and over the collar of his robes.

Unity we arrange for ourselves must be enforced, negotiated, or finally abandoned. The oil does none of these: it was poured over us before we chose each other, and oil runs downhill. Hermon's dew falls, unasked. We cannot resign from a body we did not join on our own terms.

Anyone who has tried to build community by determination has watched it crack under ordinary people. “For there the LORD has commanded the blessing” — there, at Zion, not where we have arranged each other to our liking. We are there because we are in Christ, the temple and the anointed Head; the friction is covered by his location, not our tolerance.

Behind Aaron stands the greater High Priest, who was not spared the mess but died in it. The charge stands at full weight: our divisions are an argument against what we preach, and we have no rebuttal. The oil is not an excuse for the mess; it is the only solvent that has ever worked. We do not manufacture it; we stay under it — and the blessing commanded at Zion is life forevermore. Our Head is alive, which is why a congregation that looks dead can still bud.

Bonhoeffer knew how easily we love our picture of a community more than the people actually in it. That dream is a disguised search for a verdict on ourselves, and the oil has already handed it down from a Head who went down to death for the body. Oil runs downward. So do we — toward the ones beneath us, the ones we would never have chosen.