Just as fellowship with God in Heaven differs only in degree from fellowship with him here, so also does fellowship with his people.  In Heaven it is not only that each is in perfect love and charity with his or her neighbour, but all are united together by that communal relationship with God in which each shares.

On earth the counterpart of that bond is the unity of Christians within the Church of Christ.  For loyalty to Christ the Shepherd is inseparable from loyalty to his flock.  As Our Blessed Lord told his Apostles on Maundy Thursday night, the most solemn night of his earthly life, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (NRSV, John 13:34,35, our emphasis).

We see this loyal love for the Church and its members in its most illustrious form if we turn once again to the Saints and martyrs of the Early Church.  If that glorious company had put self before Christ and his Church, there would have been no Church left.  The reason why we are in this church now is that those unarmed but resolute men, women and children were so tightly bound together by their love for Christ and for his Church, that the vast embattled might of the whole Roman Empire was powerless to withstand them.  True indeed it was, as St Paul said, “…God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (NRSV, 1 Corinthians 1:25).