1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. The metaphor of Christ’s body made up of each and every one of us is one of Paul’s most loved images, and continues to speak to us as it spoke to his first audience in Ancient Corinth. This letter, among other things, is a pastoral message to the Christians in Corinth who seem to have strayed from the central truth of the Gospel. Some members of the Corinthian church have received the gift of tongues, a vocalizing of the Holy Spirit’s presence, and these gifted individuals have been elevated in status by their fellow Christians above all others. This has disturbed the unity of the congregation, creating ranks of importance and competitiveness where there should be an egalitarian family with the lowest and the least at its center. Instead of recognizing the giver of all good gifts and giving glory to God, human beings are being glorified and the needs of the community are getting lost. Lovingly, urgently, and at times not so gently, Paul is seeking to guide them back to center. The Corinthians are invited to imagine themselves as ears, hands, feet, eyes while they are at each other’s throats. The body of Christ, the image that has stood the test of time, was born amidst conflict. The unity of the Church is reflected in wounded, weakened, vulnerable humanity, one body of many parts.
As with many of Paul’s metaphors, there are some nuances that can get lost. Paul seems to assume a healthy body, an able body, a body within which all the parts work equally well and in tandem. As we all know, sometimes eyes need help to see, and some eyes don’t see at all. Sometimes ears need help to hear, and some ears don’t hear at all. Some bodies don’t have all the expected limbs, others are susceptible to seizures, fainting spells, sicknesses. Bodies get injured, they fall ill. And while Paul doesn’t mention this in our passage to the Corinthians, I think vulnerability of the body was as much on his mind as the importance of each of its parts. He may have had a different view of disability than we do now, but Paul himself was blinded at his conversion and relied on others to care for him until he regained his sight. And still he asks the Corinthians, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” Even having lost one of his senses for a time, Paul understands that no one sense, no one member can exist without the others.
The body which Paul describes is one that contains a multitude of members with various skills, functions, and gifts. We know now through the wonders of scientific discovery that the bodies God has given us are even more diverse and intricate than Paul’s wildest dreams. Not only do we have eyes and ears and hands and feet, we have electricity in our hearts and synapses in our brains and organs and systems we still don’t completely understand. The bodies God has given us and the Body God has made us through baptism are both equally complex, equally vulnerable, equally resistant to change and intended for growth. No two members are exactly the same, not even our ears or our fingertips or our eyes, and that’s as God intended it. Knowing this, knowing that we are not all the same frees us to be more ourselves instead of attempting to be someone else. It frees those of us who are hands from attempting to force ourselves into the shape of mouths, frees feet from the impulse to take over the tasks of ears. The roles of each member of this body are defined not by status or by financial contribution or by age or by gender, but by God-given gifts and skills discerned in community.
Every cell in our bodies and every person in the Church is defined by its presence in the whole, and belonging means participating in the unbelievable life we have been given in Christ. Participation in the body is not, nor has it ever been, uniform. Paul himself strongly disagrees with the tendency to value one particular type of gift or style of prayer over others, and encourages compassion toward differences between diverse communities. No one ministry, whether it be musical or educational or liturgical or communal or visible or invisible, exists in isolation. The person sitting quietly in the back pew participates in worship just as much as I do, and the person worshipping from their couch in their PJs participates just as much to the life of this body as the person who chose the hymns and proofed the bulletin. At various times and in various seasons of life, participation in the body looks like teaching Sunday school, writing a birthday card, reading scripture, running the altar guild, leading the vestry, loading boxes of food, dropping in to a Zoom call on a Thursday afternoon, sending a text of gratitude, singing in the choir, staying home, travelling to where you’re needed most, and praying quietly over the prayer request that comes to your inbox. To be a member of the body of Christ does mean participating, but that doesn’t always look how we think it ought to, or how it used to, or even how we want it to look. The life of the Body of Christ is not defined by outputs or even by functions, but rather by the source of our life himself. The head of this body is not me, or Paul, or the vestry, or the senior warden, or even our senior pastor the bishop. The head of this Body is Christ. And Christ has called each of us to look at one another and recognize an indispensable part of ourselves. The things that make us different from one another, the ways we participate and the gifts we bring, are evidence of the Holy Spirit continuing to animate, sustain, and inspire us. These are the greater gifts.
Mother A Writes 