Many Members, One Body

Many Members, One Body
1 Corinthians 12.12-20

Paul uses one of his most spectacular and famous illustrations in this and the following passage. It would be gilding the lily to introduce it by another one of our own, so we may as well jump straight to the point.

But the point isn’t precisely what many people think when they read what he says about the foot and the hand, the ear and the eye. Many people have supposed that the main thing he’s saying is simply that all Christians have gifts which they must contribute to the overall life of the church, and particularly that no Christian must look down on another because they don’t share the same particular gifts. More positively, it has been assumed that he is simply painting a picture of the church as a place where every member has something important to contribute. This is true as far as it goes. Paul would have been shocked, possibly even amused in a sad sort of way, at the idea which has prevailed in much official Christianity, that ‘ministry’, or ‘Christian work or service’, is something engaged in only by those who are in full-time paid church employment. The phrase ‘every-member ministry’ would have rung bells with him. In fact, the word ‘member’, which we often use without thinking where it’s come from, owes its place in Christian thinking and speaking not least to this present passage, where the word means ‘limb’ or ‘organ’. The word started out as part of a metaphor – a single body, many ‘members’ – and has become flattened out into a more general word, ‘people who belong’...

Taken from Paul 1 Corinthians for Everyone – by Tom Wright