One Body, No Spare Parts

Paul had not finished his letter to Corinth. Across the sea in the city of Ephesus he kept going, and the next part was about a quarrel.

The church in Corinth had written to him with questions, and travelers had brought him news. God's Spirit had given the believers there all kinds of gifts. Some could heal the sick. Some could teach. Some could suddenly speak in languages they had never learned, and those ones made sure everyone heard.

"Listen to me!" they said. "God gave me the best gift!"

Others watched from the back of the room and went home thinking, "I can't do anything like that. Maybe I don't really belong here."

(In the rest of Corinth, a slave and a rich man never ate at the same table. In this church they were supposed to, and some days that went better than others.)

So Paul drew them a picture with words, and the picture was a body.

"Suppose the foot says, 'I am not a hand, so I don't belong to the body,'" Paul wrote. "That would not make it any less a part of the body. And suppose the ear says, 'I am not an eye, so I don't belong.' It still belongs."

Then he asked, "If the whole body were an eye, how would it hear? If the whole body were an ear, how would it smell anything?"

(Picture one enormous eyeball rolling down the street to church. It could see every pebble, but it would never hear the singing, and it could not smell supper cooking.)

"But God has put every part in the body just where he wanted it," Paul wrote.

Next he turned to the showing-off ones. "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don't need you!' And the head cannot say to the feet, 'I don't need you!'" (Try picking up a cup with your eye.)

"In fact," Paul went on, "the parts that seem weaker are the ones the body cannot do without." The heart and the lungs are tucked away inside, where no one sees them, and they keep the whole body alive. (No one has ever looked in a mirror and said, "What a handsome liver." Everybody keeps one anyway.)

God built the body that way on purpose, Paul said, giving the most honor to the parts that seemed to have the least, so the parts would care for each other instead of splitting apart. "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honored, every part is glad with it."

When a toe gets stubbed, the whole body hops. The eyes water, the hands grab the foot, and the mouth shouts, "OW!"

Then Paul wrote the line his picture had been heading for: "Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it." Back in Corinth, when those words were read to the church, the loudest ones had some thinking to do. A slave by the door sat up straight.

But hands and feet and ears tipped out in a basket are not a body, even if every part is there. A body has to be somebody's, with one breath moving through all of it.

What held them together was the one Spirit poured on all of them, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free. And this body belonged to someone who once had a body like theirs, born a baby in Bethlehem. The night before he died, he broke bread and said, "This is my body, given for you." On the third day God raised that same body from the dead.

Now he lives with his Father, and here on earth Jesus moves through a body made of people: fishermen and grandmothers, rich and poor, loud ones and shy ones, kids in pajamas. He put every part just where he wanted it, and in his body there are no spare parts.