1 Corinthians: Day 39
SCRIPTURE
2You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. 3Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
4Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit: 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
12For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:2-13, NRSV)
WHAT
After our lengthy introduction yesterday to the topic of spiritual gifts, or charismata, today we dig in to what Paul had to say.
As his way into the topic, Paul writes:
You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:2-3, NRSV)
Here is another clue that the Corinthian church consisted mostly of converted Gentiles (the Greek uses the word for Gentiles) and not Jews. But it also shows us that Paul thinks of “Christian” as a new identity, maybe even a new ethnicity, which is neither Jew nor Greek. But whatever does he mean by what follows?
Paul reminds his readers that when they worshiped idols, they were sometimes swept away into ecstatic visions. But there was nothing “Christian” about those spiritual experiences. “Spiritual” experiences per se are meaningless if not anchored in Christ,” he says.
N. T. Wright sees another interpretive possibility:
“It may be that some, in Corinth or elsewhere, were wanting to go beyond Jesus into new forms of spiritual experience, or, perhaps through Jewish influence, regarded him as cursed because of his crucifixion (see Galatians 3:13).”
Whatever Paul meant by quoting “Jesus be cursed,” the key thought here is “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” There are two important implications of the use of the word “Lord.” William Barclay points out that this was the earliest form of Christian creed. We see it, for example, in Philippians:
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11, NRSV)
First, it was a political statement because if Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. “Lord” (GREEK: kurios) was the official title of the Roman emperor. The demand of persecutors to later Christians was always: “Say, ‘Caesar is Lord!’” Failure to do so usually meant death. The Roman emperors did not take kindly to anyone claiming to be Lord other than them.
Bishop Wright notes:
“…those who name Jesus as Lord, experiencing the power of God’s Holy Spirit in doing so, are thereby brought into the social and political battlefield. The Corinthians were in danger of looking at spirituality as an area of personal growth and experience. Paul wants them to see it as the place where the one true God, known in the three ways he outlines in verses 4-6 [i.e., Spirit, Lord, and God], equips people to advance his kingdom in the face of the principalities and powers of the world.”
But more importantly, it is a profoundly theological statement. “Lord” was the substitute name given to Israel’s God, Yahweh. Whenever a Hebrew read a scripture scroll and came upon the name “Yahweh” (written as YHWH) in the text, because they came to believe that this personal name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14) was too holy to pronounce, they would substitute Adonai, which is Hebrew for “Lord.” (Incidentally, whenever you see LORD in all caps in your Old Testament, the translators are telling you the underlying Hebrew word is YHWH, the personal name for Israel’s God. Think of it this way: “God” is his job description, “YHWH” is his name.) Some of your Jewish friends today may write “G-d” for the same reason. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the translators chose the Greek word kurios to translate Adonai, and its reference to YHWH. So, to say “Jesus is Lord” is to say, “Jesus is God.”
Thus, when someone can say and mean “Jesus is Lord,” it means that they give to Jesus the supreme loyalty of their lives and the supreme worship of their hearts just as they would to God. Paul says this can only come about through the Holy Spirit. Professor Barclay notes, “The Lordship of Jesus was not so much something which people discovered for themselves as something which God, in his grace, revealed to them.” (Emphasis mine)
For Paul, being able to say “Jesus is Lord” came with consequences, and one of those was spiritual gifts, or charismata, gifts of God’s grace given to individuals in the Church. Notice this amazing passage:
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit: and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. (1 Corinthians 12:4-6, NRSV)
“Spirit,” “Lord,” and “God.” This is a very early – and undeveloped – Trinitarian statement. This is one of the breadcrumbs that later Church Councils would pick up to develop what became the Trinitarian understanding of the nature of God.
In context, Paul is trying to put an end to the attitude of the elitist pneumatikós in the Corinthian church that their “superior” intellectual wisdom and giftings – such as speaking in tongues -- made them special. “There are all kinds of gifts God has given to this church,” Paul is saying. “Your gifts are just some of them. To each disciple of Jesus is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, not for bragging rights!”
Then Paul lists nine spiritual gifts that we looked at last time:
To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledgeaccording to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. (1 Corinthians 12:8-11, NRSV)
A church needs all of these varieties of gifts to be operative – along with the ones we saw yesterday from other scriptures -- in order to survive and thrive; NOT just the gifts the “spiritually elite” bring to the table.
Then Paul introduces us to his favorite metaphor for the church – the human body.
As a preacher and a writer, I’m constantly searching for illustrations, analogues, and metaphors to help me communicate my point. Sometimes I find one that lands as I intended, sometimes my illustrations fall flat. But Paul’s use of the human body as a metaphor is not random nor hit or miss as mine often are.
Paul was not the only one to use the human body as a metaphor. Long before Paul, the Greek philosopher Plato had drawn a famous picture of the human body as an illustration of the essential unity in manyness. He had said that the head was the citadel; the neck, the isthmus, the narrow route between the head and the body; the heart, the fountain of the body; the pores, the lanes of the body; the veins, the canals of the body. In all this, there is an essential ONENESS. Plato pointed out that we do not say: “My finger has a pain,” we say: “I have a pain.” In the human body, there is one personality, which gives unity to the many and varying parts of the body.
Paul was probably aware of Plato’s use of the human body as a metaphor for oneness out of many. But writing as a Jew highly trained in the scriptures, Paul would have had Genesis 1-2 constantly in his mind. That is where God creates human beings, male and female, and breathes into them the breath of life. That is where it is revealed that human beings alone among all the animals are created in the image of God and given the task of bearing and reflecting that image in God’s temple, which is all of heaven and earth. Of course, the rest of Genesis 3-11 reveals how humans failed at that task. This failure led to the calling of Abraham in chapter 12 and the blessing of his descendants. They were given the task of being a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6) calling them back to God’s original will, purpose, and intent for human beings. But alas, Israel failed at that task as well, falling instead into idolatry (failure to love God) and injustice (failure to love neighbor).
Paul would have seen the Church, the followers of Jesus, as God’s creation of a “new” humanity, new in the sense of “rebooting” humanity to accomplish what had been God’s will, purpose, and intent all along, ever since “in the beginning.”
In chapter 15, Paul will quote Psalm 8 which speaks of human beings being given authority over all the world:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands… (Psalm 8:3-6, NRSV)
For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. (1 Corinthians 15:27, NRSV)
For Paul, this metaphor of the human body for the Church is very intentional and goes way beyond Plato. It is theologically grounded in the idea of the New Creation. As Bishop Wright puts it, “The Church is to be the place where, together, we learn how to be God’s genuinely human beings, worshiping God and serving him by reflecting his image in the world.”
So we have from Paul the (restored and renewed) human body as an image of the Church, local and universal. Paul emphasizes the ONENESS of this body just as a human body, though composed of many members (arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, feet, mouth, lungs, heart, etc.), is ONE:
For just as the body is ONE and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are ONE body, so it is with Christ. For in the ONE Spirit we were all baptized into ONE body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and we were all made to drink of ONE Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of ONE member but of many. (1 Corinthians 12:12-14, NRSV)
Do you hear Paul’s emphasis – ONE, ONE, ONE…?
Paul has used an image of an organism for the Church, with its ONENESS in many parts, but most English translators have unfortunately chosen a word which has come to connote an organization. The Greek word translated “members” is melos, which means a limb or other part of the body. In Romans Paul uses this word in a way that clearly refers to parts of the body:
Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members (GREEK: melos) to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members (GREEK: melos) to God as instruments of righteousness. (Romans 6:12-13, NRSV)
We talk about “members of our church,” as when pastors ask one another, “How many members in your church?” In the United Methodist tradition, we even have to complete an annual report giving all kinds of statistics, and “membership” is one of them. We talk about XYZ Church being “the largest church in United Methodism,” and by that we mean the number of people on their membership roll. We have turned “member” into an organizational statistic, and lost sight of the organism of which a melos is a part just as a limb or organ is part of the human body.
Some churches, including some that I have pastored, promote “Every member in ministry.” One church I served even put “Yes, I am a minister” on their name tags. I think Paul would have been fine with that. He probably would have been saddened, however, to discover that in some quarters of the Church, “minister” is synonymous with clergy. Only the professionals are “ministers.” If Paul found a church that promoted that idea, I bet they would get a letter!
When I was serving a large church in Houston, people would ask me, “Where is your church?” (First of all, it is not MY church, it is Jesus’ church. But OK, I knew what they meant.) I would answer, “Well, let’s see. It’s Monday. So some of them are downtown, some are in school, some are home taking care of their children,” and so on. My point was the Church is a people to be, not a place to go. And every member, every melos (“limb, eye, nose, and toe”) is meant to be in ministry. Being a “member” of the body of Christ is not about on which membership roll your name is found or even where you belong, as in an organizational category. It is about what you do as part of an organism.
When describing my call, I try to carefully distinguish my call into the ministry – which occurred in my baptism – from my call into the ordained ministry. Every baptized Christian is a minister, some are called and set apart for the specialized ministry of the ordained. But we are all in ministry if we are disciples of Jesus. That’s why God had given us spiritual gifts.
These examples reinforce the point that words matter. We need to be careful with our words. For example, have you ever heard (or even said), “Jesus has no hands or feet but our hands and feet.” While I get the reference to our ministry, do we really believe that God would make himself so dependent on us to accomplish his purpose? I believe it is true that God has given us a whole lot of responsibility for accomplishing his purposes. That’s what the ascension of Jesus is about, at least in part. He left us to continue doing his work on earth. Again, that’s why he sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost who has given us spiritual gifts. But I don’t think that means Christ completely “left the building” at that point and relegated all authority to us. God the Father still exercises his sovereignty, with Christ at his right hand, and he does it through us, equipped with the Holy Spirit operating through spiritual gift, at least in part. But God still superintends the work.
In the next passage, Paul continues to apply the human body image to the Church.
APPLY
In using an organism rather than organization as his main metaphor, Paul is emphasizing that Church is a peopleto be, not a place to go.
PRAYER
I have long served the Church as an organization. And there is some need for that, O Lord. People need structure and direction. But help me serve the Church the organism through the gifts you have given me. In Christ. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What are the political and theological ramifications behind the expression, “Jesus is Lord”? Discuss what N. T. Wright meant when he wrote, “The Corinthians were in danger of looking at spirituality as an area of personal growth and experience. Paul wants them to see it as the place where the one true God …equips people to advance his kingdom in the face of the principalities and powers of the world.”
2. How does this passage fit into the context of Paul’s larger argument to the spiritual elitists in the Corinthian church?
3. What were the probable social/philosophical and theological backgrounds for Paul’s use of the human body as an example of oneness out of manyness?
4. What is the word in Greek translated “member” and what does it mean? What is the problem of moving this word from an organism to an organization?
How can you apply these insights in your life?