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Why this passage from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians this evening?
Well, this Sunday we’re bang in the middle of the week of prayer for Christian
Unity, and it seems that there is nothing new under the sun.
All those centuries ago Paul was trying to tackle issues of unity in the
small church at Corinth. As you can imagine, scholars have set to work
to try and find out what the problems were at Corinth. Why did Paul write
as he did? What were the local social issues in these congregations that
prompted his words? By attending to the ways he tried to persuade people,
it is possible to glimpse the issues and concerns that they faced, and
that he sought to address. It was not an easy task: Paul had to try and
create a group with a clear sense of its moral and theological identity
while at the same time incorporating a heterogeneous group of people:
Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free. Paul was struggling
to bring together disparate groups into one—and he wasn’t exactly of high
status himself: Paul was an artisan, and probably therefore unacceptable
to the wealthy social climbers at Corinth, of whom there were many in
the city. And yet it was these rich people who offered meeting places
for the Christians in their home (see 1 Cor. 16.15,19). At 1 Cor. 1.28
and 11.22 there are hints that there were poor and relatively poor people
among the converts so Paul was faced with the task of addressing the socially
advantaged, and reminding them of their ‘unity’ with the poorer elements.
A tall order.
So when St Paul wrote to the new Church at Corinth he did something rather
different in this passage we’ve heard this evening. He was he who first
used the notion of the Body of Christ and applied it to a Christian community—and
we have this passage tonight because we are encouraged this week to think
and pray about the ways in which we can grow together in unity, despite
our differences, as Christians.
James Dunn argues that Paul’s use of the Body of Christ in his letters
to the Corinthians was in response to factionalism (1998: 562). In novel
ways, Paul took the idea of the Eucharistic sense of the Body of Christ
and applied it to the local church community. He also—and this was the
really radical bit—he also borrowed from and transformed a current Stoical
allegory. There was an allegory by Menenius Agrippa that made the links
between society and the body—but in this version the Greek writer emphasised
that the weaker members needed to respect the more senior, stronger members.
Had Paul simply followed the original argument of Menenius Agrippa’s fable
on the body, he would have sought to persuade those of lower economic
status to submit to the authority of the more wealthy members for the
sake of the whole body. But Paul makes the metaphor of the Body work differently:
He puts the onus on the strong members, urging the well-to-do to give
more honour and respect to the weak, and so cease their factious behaviour.
It is the ‘more respectable members’ (v24) to whom this argument is directed,
since it is they who might be tempted to say to the weak ‘I have no need
of you.’
Perhaps because he identified with those of little status, Paul used his
forceful rhetoric to call the wealthy and powerful to account at Corinth.
He used the Body of Christ to challenge the dominant. By arguing that
weaker and seemingly indispensable members need to be treated with greater
respect (1 Cor. 12:23), and by claiming that… God has so arranged the
body in this way, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that
there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the
same care for one another … (1 Cor. 12:24-25)
Paul was deliberately trying to shift the power relations at Corinth.
Instead of consolidating the power of the strong, Paul’s writing was designed
to destabilise the strong and shift the balance of power towards the weak.
Paul was saying that those who, on the surface, occupy positions of lower
status are actually more essential than those of high status and therefore
should be accorded more honour.
The result of this letter was a radical reworking of the original intent
of Menenius Agrippa’s stoical fable which advocates the status quo. Paul
challenged the dominant – and he used the metaphor of the Body to do so.
Reshaping M. Agrippa’s original ‘body’, Paul now called it the Body of
Christ, and argued that its members should relate very differently to
each other than hitherto.
Where does this leave
us—during this week when we think about Christian Unity, and at this Eucharistic
service when we offer the ministry of healing?
We come to worship seeking wholeness, seeking healing—for ourselves and
for others. Let us also come seeking healing for the churches—throughout
the world. St Paul reminds us, I think, that differences and diversity
are nothing new—just as Corinth struggled with rich and powerful people
who wanted to sustain the status quo, so we too need to think about power
relations as we seek healing and unity in the churches. We need only consider
the Anglican communion at the moment; but also the ways in which as Anglicans
we relate to other denominations and churches around us. I think of a
meeting I attended on Friday lunchtime at the Roman Catholic Church of
St Mary up the road as they seek to find a way forward for the buildings
there and the user groups that currently want to continue using them.
And so it’s important that as a Cathedral we offer ways in which we can
serve them, and through them the community around as they seek to meet
the needs of asylum seekers, homeless people, young people. WE are so
much further ahead than even a generation ago in our relating with others—no
longer competing but now co-operating and working together. But there’s
always further to go to mend the torn and broken body of Christ and make
it whole.
An essential question Paul wants us to ask of ourselves and of any situation
we’re in: who is served by the status quo here? Is it the poorer brothers
and sisters? Are we, as Jesus preached in the Synagogue, bringing good
news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, sight to the blind,
letting the oppressed go free? Or do we seek to further our own well being,
and security?
Whatever the healing we seek—individually, within the church, as we pray
for the healing of the nations—whatever the healing, it cannot be at the
cost of addressing issues of power and issuing a challenge to the dominant
status quo wherever it is to be found.
Let us come to the altar rail this evening mindful of the Body of Christ,
broken for us in order that we might be made whole. Let us be prepared
to question our own dominance and status for the sake of a gospel that
turns the world upside down. Let us, in this week of prayer for Christian
Unity, pray that we might find unity in our witness to a gospel of justice,
good news, freedom and release for those who are downtrodden and most
in need of Christ’s healing and wholeness.
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