A Family With Many Hands

In a house in the city of Corinth, Paul paced the room, talking, while his friend Tertius bent over the page and wrote as fast as he could. A while back they had written the part about God's love, which nothing can pull anyone away from. Since then Paul had been talking about God's mercy to Jewish people and to everyone else, and he had just finished with a great shout of praise. Paul stopped pacing.

"Now write this," he said. "Because God has been so kind to you..."

(Near the very end of the letter, Tertius squeezed in a hello of his own: "I, Tertius, who wrote this down, greet you.")

The letter was going to Rome, to Christians Paul had never met, who gathered in houses across the great city. Some had grown up Jewish, and some had grown up bowing to Roman gods. Now they were meant to be one family, and they did not always get along. Some had neighbours who mocked them for following Jesus.

"Give God your bodies," Paul said, "as a living sacrifice."

At the Temple, an animal given to God was killed on the altar. Paul meant your whole self, alive, given again every morning. Hands, feet, mouth, the lot.

"Don't copy the way everyone around you lives," he went on. "Let God make your minds new. Look at a body. It has many parts, and they don't all do the same job. We are like that. Many parts, one body, and each part belongs to all the others."

God hands out different jobs: serving, teaching, cheering people on, giving, leading. "If yours is giving, give generously. If yours is kindness, be cheerful about it!"

Paul was only warming up.

"Love each other for real. Hate what is evil and hold tight to what is good. Try to beat each other at showing honor." (That would be a very strange race, with everyone trying to let someone else win.) "Be joyful in hope and patient in trouble, and keep praying. Share with God's people who need things. Invite strangers to dinner. Bless the people who are cruel to you. Bless them, and don't curse them. Be glad with people who are glad, and cry with people who are crying."

Then came the hardest part.

"Never pay back evil with evil. Don't take revenge. God says, 'It is mine to pay back. I will repay.' If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink. That way you will heap burning coals on his head."

(That sounds alarming. It means your kindness will make his face burn hot, the way cheeks go red when someone is nice to you right after you were mean to them.)

"Don't let evil beat you," Paul finished. "Beat evil with good."

When the letter was finished, Phoebe carried it across the sea, and in crowded rooms all over Rome it was read aloud, with Jewish and non-Jewish Christians sitting side by side.

It was a long list, and the Christians in Rome would still argue and still want to get even. Knowing how a body ought to live is not the same as having the life to live it.

Paul knew one body that had already lived every line of it. Its hands broke bread for hungry crowds. Its eyes cried at a friend's grave. When soldiers drove nails through those hands, its mouth blessed them: "Father, forgive them." It was a sacrifice that was killed, and then it got up again, alive.

The one who got up again is alive today, and now his life moves in his people. In Rome, in Corinth, and in every town since, the hands that feed an enemy and hold a crying friend belong to the family of Jesus, and the life in them is his.