A parable: A few years ago I was part of a group that organized a large celebration event in the University Concert Hall in Cambridge. In one item we asked the whole orchestra to improvise on a given melodic shape and chord structure, in the midst of a giant chorus of praise sung by a sizable congregation. The majority of players were Christian. But some were not, among them a 14-year-old in the second violins. Later, she told others that she came to faith during this extravagant extemporization. Normally when she played in an orchestra she would play exactly the same notes as the seven others in a second violin section. Here, for the first time in her musical life, she discovered her own “voice,” but she found it through trusting, and being trusted by, others””and in the context of praise.
What was enacted for that girl through music was what the New Testament describes as koinonia, variously translated as fellowship,” “communion,” “togetherness,” “sharing.” In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we are told that on the Day of Pentecost, with the coming of the Spirit, three thousand converts devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers and had all things in common. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s metaphor of polyphony comes to mind here. In polyphony, more than one melody is played or sung simultaneously, each moving to some extent independently of the others. A central cantus firmus gives coherence and enables the other parts to flourish in relation to one another. Bonhoeffer uses the image to speak of the relation between our love of God and the loves and desires that shape the rest of our lives. But we could also use it to speak of the relation of Jesus Christ to his church, and us to one another. polyphony of the Trinity, and by the Spirit we are granted, through him, a share in this trinitarian “enchantment.” Christians are thus polyphonic people. At Pentecost, in opening the disciples and crowds to Jesus Christ and his Father, the Spirit opens people out to one another. Those otherwise closed in on themselves””because of language, culture, race, religion””now find themselves resonating with one another, communicating, and living together in radically new ways. Later, Jew is reconciled to Gentile, the stubborn apartheid of that time subverted. People become responsive to one another, tuned in to one another (the reversal of Babel, where confusion and dissonance reigned). But uniqueness is not erased; the crowds in Jerusalem were not given one language. They heard each other in their “own tongues” or “native languages.”
More than this, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, the Spirit not only allows difference but also promotes it: in 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul speaks of the church as the Body of Christ, the Spirit generates and promotes diversity, allotting “to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.” I discover who I am in koinonia””as I am loved and as I love in the power of the Spirit, with a forgiving love, rooted in God and now opened out to us through Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. My identity is discovered not despite but above all in and through relationships of this kind. The contemporary Greek Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas is sometimes cited in this connection, in his insistence that my particularity is discovered in ecstatic love, “a movement toward communion,” as I am turned outward, as I am directed by and toward another person in love. We have all known what it is to greet at the station or airport a very close friend we have not seen for years: we don’t care what we look like; we run toward that person with a self-forgetful joy. We recall the father running out to greet the prodigal son, and the son discovering who he really is as he is embraced. Such is the ecstatic love at the heart of the Triune God, in which we are invited to share.
–Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker, 1997)