Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. 1 Corinthians 12:12-14
“The image of body suggests that the community of believers is an active organism of complex parts, all of which are interconnected into a functioning living agency. On the one hand, Christ as the “head of the body” means that Jesus does the thinking for the body, that is, provides the guidance and assurances that define the body. On the other hand, the members of the body, enumerated as bodily parts, are interconnected and depend on each other for vitality and effectiveness.
Such imagery refuses the mistake that so besets much Protestant privatism, in which it is all about “me and Jesus,” as if other congregants as well as other neighbors had no significance for “my faith.” The imagery of “the body of Christ” at the same time refuses the institutional reductionism of the organized church that imagines that rules, protocols, and organizational charts constitute the character of the church. Such reductionism leads to struggles for authority and eventually to “guidelines” in the service of an imagined certitude.
Against such a temptation, the image of “body” means that all members, even “lesser members,” are essential to the full functioning of the body in response to its head. The claim is that we belong to each other, thus another dimension of the same fidelity that we have noted in our discussion of sexuality. This declaration concerning “the body” in the several epistles voices the character of the church as an assemblage of interrelated members who are connected to each other, who rely on each other, who have the capacity to “speak the truth in love” to each other (Eph. 4:15).
As the epistles develop, however, it is clear that this body does not exist for its own well-being. It exists to act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel in the practice of neighborliness that contradicts the anti-neighborliness of the old order. This body is fully committed to the work of Christ, relies on Christ, and is sustained by Christ.”
Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 46.
I am safely home. Some statements are worth repeating.
“Christ as the “head of the body” means that Jesus does the thinking for the body . . . this body does not exist for its own well-being. It exists to act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel in the practice of neighborliness that contradicts the anti-neighborliness of the old order.”
Consider the connection to generosity.
We only grasp life as Jesus intended for us to live it when we follow His explicit, otherworldly, and counterintuitive instructions. Only those who seek find this alternative reality. Sadly most people rationalize disobedience by choosing to do the thinking (acting like they know better than Jesus) and then doing something neighborly (thinking they have done their part). That’s privatism.
No wonder the church as a business or a building appears lifeless.
Only when we act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel do we find life. Or as I like to say, we do not figure it out until we live it out. And when we do this together, we appear as a body. As we grow we need order and oversight, but the ministry is not done by ministers. That’s institutional reductionism.
God’s servants equip the saints for works of service to show the “lesser members” matter too.
We exhibit generosity, which is a fruit of the Spirit, when we act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel. It’s not something we do but something God does through us, as He neither needs our support nor relies on our service. We need to give it and do it. Obedience comes into view as the pathway to sustainability.
Is it time for you to abandon the anti-neighborliness of the old order?