No Need of You

It is the middle of the night, and the smallest toe on the left foot finds the leg of the bed. What follows is not a discussion. The breath stops, the eyes fill, both hands go down, and the whole of us folds over one insignificant knuckle of bone. Nobody takes a vote on whether the toe has earned the attention. The body simply goes where the pain is.

Paul is writing to a congregation in Corinth that had begun ranking itself. Gifts had turned into grades. Some Christians were impressive in the meeting and some were not, and the unimpressive were drifting quietly toward the door with the foot’s own argument in their mouths: “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body” (1 Corinthians 12:15). Into that he sets a picture so familiar that we read straight past its hinge. “For just as the body is one and has many members … so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12). Not so it is with the church. So it is with Christ. The body has a name, and the name is his.

Which means the belonging was never ours to arrange. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:13) — the verb is done to us, not by us. “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Corinthians 12:18). We did not apply and get in. We were put in, by a decision made well above our heads, and that placing is what makes us members — not our usefulness, not our visibility, not how the meeting went.

Then the strangest sentence in the paragraph: “God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it” (1 Corinthians 12:24). Honor, in this body, moves toward whatever has none of it. We have watched him do that once at full scale. The Head of this body was himself “despised and rejected by men” (Isaiah 53:3) — the part we would have covered — and it was in a body, a real one, broken, that he made us his own. Paul can say “so it is with Christ” because Christ took a body and then gave it away.

So the therefore in this passage does not run uphill. Paul never tells us to make ourselves indispensable. He says we already are — “the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22) — and then names what a body does with that: “that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:25). Which is less a program than the ordinary traffic of a common life: the person nobody has asked after, the one whose gift does not show, the member we have quietly filed as a pleasant presence at the back of the church.

A body in the dark does not deliberate. It does not ask whether the toe is worth the trouble, or whether tending it is a good use of a Tuesday. It goes, because the pain is its own. “If one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Corinthians 12:26). We are joined that closely — not by temperament or preference, but by one Spirit and by a Head in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). So we can stop auditioning for a more honorable position and go find the member we would have covered. He is not spare. Neither, it turns out, are we.