You are the Body of Christ

If all were a single organ, where would the body be? (1 Corinthians 12:19)

There is strength in diversity, Paul tells us: ‘If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?’ (v.17).

And if the whole body were an arm?

Louise Bourgeois presents us with this image: a useless limb, an arm with a hand at either end, one outstretched, the other clenched. This is the opposite of the body described by Paul, which is diverse in its members but unified by its relationship to the whole. Here instead the limbs are identical, but fundamentally at odds.

The arm and hands of Bourgeois’s sculpture are those of her studio assistant Jerry Gorovoy. She often represented their hands entwined together, as they must have been at times over the thirty years that they worked together in her studio. We could, then, read this sculpture as a figuration of our different roles in society—something to which Paul also alludes when he writes:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. (vv.4–6)

God is the beggar who is clothed, and the donor who offers her cloak. Both actions, giving and taking, have the same source: done to God and inspired by him (see Matthew 25:34–40).

But the title, Give or Take, offers us a choice: what do we do with that which we have? Paul describes the right use of spiritual gifts, not for our own exaltation, but in the service of the community: ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.’ (1 Corinthians 12:7). Bourgeois presents us with the same choice: keep what you have, or share it around? In the body, as in society, the part affects the whole: ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together’ (v.26). Give or take, open or closed: what will we choose?

References

Madden, Allan. 2014. ‘Louise Bourgeois, Give or Take, 2002’, Tate Modern Online Catalogue [accessed 27 April 2020]

During the global pandemic of 2020 it was bin (wo)men, supermarket staff, public transport and delivery drivers who kept society clean, fed, and moving, often at great personal risk. The renewed attention and respect these roles subsequently received might seem in stark contrast to the abuse that many faced before and even during the pandemic: threatened, attacked, bearing the brunt of frustrations and prejudices. Alongside doctors and nurses, they were acknowledged as ‘key workers’.

Paul reminds us of the vital role played by everyone in the community, particularly those whose roles might not be recognised or respected: ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”, nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you”’ (1 Corinthians 12:21).

In John Riley’s seventeenth-century portrait of a scullion, or college servant, at Christ Church College, Oxford, the viewer is asked to pay renewed attention to a person who might have been overlooked before. His dark clothing melds into the background, as it no doubt did with the shadowy corners of the halls and staircases where he served dons who were more usually the subject of the college’s portraits. But Riley illuminates his sitter’s careworn face with a radiant light. The portrait is sensitive, dignified, even sacred in its atmosphere, presenting the hard, manual labour of this man with leather protective gloves, who carries a heavy pewter dish, almost as a holy act.

It reminds us, as Paul does, that each person has different gifts, and a different role to play in society, and that each is valuable. Duties—like parts of the body—which might be considered ‘weaker’, ‘less honourable’, or ‘unpresentable’, are in fact ‘indispensable’, having ‘greater honour’ and ‘greater modesty’ (vv.22–23).

There is no doubt that a society’s enthusiasm for honouring these roles—whether through a weekly clap, or a sanctifying oil painting—can easily stray into the realm of lip-service, using superficial acknowledgment to avoid addressing deeper questions of ingrained economic and social inequality. Yet, as Paul suggests, no society—whether the microcosm of an Oxford College, or the macrocosm of a nation or Church—can function without the harmonious activity of all its members.

References

Thalmann, Jacqueline and Christopher Lloyd. 2008. 40 Years of Christ Church Picture Gallery: Still One of Oxford's Best Kept Secrets (Oxford: Christ Church Picture Gallery)

Eyes and ears, hands and feet, breasts and genitals. Such a clamour of body parts would have greeted visitors to many ancient healing temples, suspended from walls and ceilings and lining the floor. About five centuries before Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, locals worshipped at the shrine of Asclepios, an ancient god of medicine, leaving offerings of terracotta body parts in thanks for successful cures.

These examples from Corinth were buried sometime in the fourth century BCE so would not have been seen by St Paul when he visited the city in the late first century CE. However, he probably saw similar examples elsewhere, perhaps in Ephesus where he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians.

The origins of the bodily imagery in 1 Corinthians 12 have been much discussed. In the ancient world the body was a popular metaphor for harmonious government, but the sacrifice of Christ’s body on the cross and his subsequent resurrection gave it added significance for Paul. The Incarnation, and God’s role in anatomical arrangement, blesses the human body as the post-ascension instrument of Christ in the world: ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ (v.27).

Among the terracotta offerings unearthed at Corinth, two examples are gilded, presumably as a mark of honour: an eye and a set of male genitalia. The latter of these is identified by Paul as a ‘less honourable’ part (exposed genitals are an object of shame in the Old Testament (Genesis 9:22; Habakkuk 2:15)). Yet he complicates the hierarchy of bodily members he has inherited by arguing that such ‘inferior’ parts are—paradoxically—due ‘a greater honour’, just as those individuals within Christ’s body who seem weaker are to be the focus of special care (v.25) and rejoicing (v.26). 

Paradoxically, in the honour he bestows on the genitals, Paul seems close to those pagans who celebrated the phallus (as the gilded Corinthian terracotta genitalia show). But here he challenges and reverses a different set of assumptions—those of his contemporary Hellenistic context—for the honour he advocates is not a celebration of, say, sexual potency, but a bestowal of dignity on what would otherwise be an object of shame.

We are reminded not to assume that our expectations accord with those of other cultures, or with God’s, and that things we might consider lowly may be exalted in God’s sight.

References

Fee, Gordon. 1987. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Michigan: Eerdmans), pp. 582ff.

Hill, Andrew E. 1980. ‘The Temple of Asclepius: An Alternative Source for Paul’s Body Theology?’, Journal of Biblical Literature 99.3: 437–39

Hughes, Jessica. 2017. Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (Cambridge: CUP)

Oster, Richard E. 1992. ‘Use, Misuse and Neglect of Archaeological evidence in Some Modern Works on 1 Corinthians (1Cor 7,1-5; 8,10; 11,2-16; 12,14-26)’, Zeitschrift Für Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Und Die Kunde Der Älteren Kirche 83, 1–2: 52–73

Roebuck, Carl. 1951. Corinth: Volume XIV The Asklepieion and Lerna (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens)

Wedderburn, A. J. M. 1971. ‘The Body of Christ and Related Concepts in 1 Corinthians’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 24.1: 74–96