This word can serve as a link between today's Solemnity and our observance next week of Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. You see, all this talk of being transformed, of sharing in the divine nature, of being reborn in baptism as children of Father, through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit matters. It isn't, or at least shouldn't be, just a bunch of abstract twaddle. God, who is a tri-unity of persons, is koinonia. The Church, then too, is to be koinonia.
I'll be really honest. I don't think many people, at least in so-called "advanced" countries, experience the Church as kononia. This isn't just sad. It is catastrophic when the Church fails to be what she is meant to be. Because most Catholics tend to prioritize divine unity over God's revealed tri-unity, which really amounts to a kind of material modalism, most Christians remain, in the words of Karl Rahner, "mere monotheists." Mere monotheism has practical consequences. It tends to result in mistaking strict doctrinal conformity with unity. Conformity can't tolerate diversity.
Strictly policed conformity is not unity. Genuine communion, genuine community, real koinonia doesn't just tolerate or accept diversity, it positively requires it! Just look at the filoque, the phrase inserted very late into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed that asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son" (filoque means "and the Son"). At least for Roman Catholics, acceptance of the filoque is not grounds for not being communion.
Because whether one believes the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father only is very fundamental, it usually results in quite different doctrinal and even practical differences. Both are Trinitarian. This is the signicance of hearing what the apostle wrote a few decades after Jesus' resurrection concerning even an very early Christian understanding of God and of the Church.
The essence of koinonia, as our Gospel reading shows is self-sacrificing love. In the New Testament, especially in the Johannine corpus (i.e., the Gospel According to Saint John along with the first, second, and third letters of John), including our Gospel for today, the Greek word agape is used. Just as the essence of koinonia is agape, the essence of agape is kenosis. Kenosis is the ordinary Greek verb for emptying. In this context, it means emptying yourself out of love.
I realize this is a quite dense reflection. But I hope it is not abstract. On the contrary, I hope it is very concrete.
Next Sunday's Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ is not a celebration of the consecrated species. It is a celebration of what our communion makes us: the Body of Christ. Theologically, I am going with the late Jesuit theologian Henri DeLubac. In some of his work in historical theology, DeLubac noted that over several centuries there was a slow reversal in what was meant by Christ's "mystical" body (i.e., corpus mysticum) and his "true" body (i.e., verum Corpus). On this view, the Church in her members is the verum corpus and the mystically transformed bread and wine are the Lord's mystical Body.
Either way, koinonia created by agape made real by kenosis is what it's all about. If not this, then you must content yourself with abstract twaddle.
What I am trying to get across is stated well in our scripture reading for Evening Prayer on this Solemnity:
Strive to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were called to one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Ephesians 4:3-6- New American Bible translation differs slightly from the one in the Liturgy of the Hours)
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