June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 167 – 16 June
Different on purpose
But now indeed there are many members, yet one body. (1 Corinthians 12:20, NKJV)
A creature made of nothing but one enormous eye would be a pitiful thing, rolling helplessly about the floor, taking in everything around it in fine detail while able to do precisely nothing about any of it, with no hand to reach out, no foot to carry it off, no ear to catch a warning shout. The image runs faintly grotesque, and that is exactly the point. Paul set this very picture before the squabbling Christians at Corinth, who had taken to ranking one another by their gifts, as though some among them were essential and the rest mere decoration. He asked them, in effect, to face the absurdity of a body that had been handed its wish for uniformity, and then he laid before them a single word that took the whole sorry competition cleanly apart.
What it means to be a ‘member’
The word was μέλος (melos, meaning a member or a limb of the body), and the verse gathers its force in the plural, μέλη (melē, meaning members), insisting that there are many of them held inside one body. Folded into that small word are three plain truths a proud or anxious heart badly needs to hear. To be a member is, first, to belong, since a limb means nothing on its own and exists only as part of a living whole. It is, second, to be different, because a body has no use for a second identical hand where a foot was wanted, and the parts earn their keep precisely by being unlike one another. And it is, third, to be needed, for the body that loses even a small part limps or aches or labours to manage without it. Hold those three together, and the word corrects two opposite mistakes in one stroke. The proud heart, sure it could manage alone, is reminded that a severed limb simply dies. The anxious heart, sure it counts for little, is reminded that the body misses every part it lacks.
Every trade the house needs
A house rising from a bare plot proves the principle better than any argument could. The empty ground becomes a home only through a procession of utterly different trades, each arriving to do the one thing it alone does well. The groundworker digs and levels what no one will ever see, the bricklayer raises the walls, the joiner hangs the doors true, the electrician threads the hidden veins of the place, the plumber brings it water, the roofer holds the weather off, and the plasterer leaves every surface smooth. Set a site full of brilliant electricians to lay the brickwork, and the walls would never rise at all. The labourer mixing mortar in the cold matters as surely as the master craftsman fitting the staircase, since the staircase has nowhere to stand without the walls, and the walls go nowhere without the foundations no eye ever admires. A church, Paul was saying, comes together in just this fashion. The steady administrator, the one who visits the sick, the person who simply prays, the teacher, the giver, the soul whose whole gift is warmth, are as unlike as bricklayer and electrician, and the whole thing rises only because they are.
When one part hurts
Paul pressed the picture one tender step further, onto ground no building site could follow him across. The parts of a living body, he reminded them, feel one another. Stub a toe in the dark, and the entire self gasps and folds towards it, the eyes watering, the hands flying down, the mouth crying out, every part rallying at once to the one small wound. So it should run, he urged, among people joined together in the gospel, where the ache of one becomes the concern of all, and the joy of one spills over into everybody’s gladness. Here beats the warm heart of being partakers together, and it lifts the whole idea well above mere usefulness. You belong now to people whose pain holds a claim on you and whose triumphs are partly yours to celebrate. Living for the gospel’s sake, as it turns out, was never a solo march towards a private finish line. It is a body moving together, each odd and necessary part of it leaning on the rest, until the whole arrives somewhere no single member could ever have reached alone.
Declaration
I have made my peace with being one part of something larger, in place of the whole of it. The very ways I differ from the people around me are the ways I was meant to serve them, so I have stopped wishing I were someone else and begun offering what only I can bring. I lean on the strengths I lack in others, glad of how unlike me they are, and I let them lean on mine in return. When one of us aches, I feel the pull of it and move closer, and when one of us flourishes, I find that a share of the gladness is mine as well. Today I take up my own small and particular place with calm confidence, needed exactly as I am, and I treasure the others as the parts of me I could never do without.
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