I Have No Need of You

The epistle for next Sunday (1 Cor. 12:12-31a) is a beautiful passage about our importance to one another.  It is fundamentally about loving one another and comes immediately before Paul’s famous passage about what love is.  Paul wrote:

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. . . .  If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?  But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.  If all were a single member, where would the body be?  As it is, there are many members, yet one body.  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.”  On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.

So who am I to question with St. Paul?  Alas, it is not the first time.

Jesus used the same metaphor of the body to quite a different end.  He said: 
If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.  And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.  (Mt. 5:29-30; see also 18:8-9) 

So what’s that about?  Well, of course, there is the issue of context.  Paul is addressing a different problem, which is the Corinthian church’s tendency to distinguish between its members based on irrelevant details of social status.  He makes the point at the very beginning noting that all are baptized into the same body—Jews or Greeks, slave or free.  He reinforces the point close to the end of the passage:  “But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.”  (vv. 24b-25)  Paul’s point has to do with radical equality within the Christian community.  That’s not the part I disagree with.

The part that causes me concern is the metaphor, which taken out of context, appears to say that the individual members of the body are dependent on one another.  One cannot say to another, “I have no need of you.”  Dependence, though, is not conducive to the body’s health. 

Jesus knew that.  Jesus was saying that the body cannot be dependent on any single member, that any individual member is expendable for the health of the whole.  He used the metaphor in a different, though certainly also radical, way.  Dependency poses such a danger, he said, that one must be prepared even to pluck out an eye or cut off a hand to avoid it.  And his words become an important corrective in understanding Paul.

One of the great dangers to a community’s wellbeing, now as always, is dependency.  Dependency is no healthier when it comes to one another than it is when it comes to chemicals.  It just looks sweeter when it does and somehow it seems vaguely Christian.  It isn’t.  It is admittedly a hard lesson to learn and even harder to practice.  So it is with a great many of the teachings of Jesus.  That is why being his disciple is a lifetime’s endeavor. 

We are made to love one another.  How to do that radically is what Paul was talking about.  But needing one another gets us into some very real and great danger.  That’s what Jesus was talking about.  Together they make a lot of sense.

Peace,
+Stacy