These are tough words, and who knows whether they sank in. But Paul uses here a phrase that is not immediately explicable: what does it mean to recognize the Body? The elements of the Eucharist—the bread and wine—are somehow Jesus’s body and blood; but the Corinthians already know this, and long before Paul gets to the inexplicable phrase he has made this point. The Body of Christ, the Body that suffered, died, and rose, is now the mysterious Eucharist—but it is also the Church, the gathering of God’s people. No one knew this better than Paul, who had been given a privileged insight into this metareality: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”—me Jesus, me the Church. But it is one thing to have an insight, another to express it. Over the course of his many epistolary instructions Paul will attempt to communicate his insight about “the Body” to his many and varied converts. He recognizes the Body, and they must, too:
For just as the human body is a unity with many parts—all the parts of the body, though many, still making up one body—so it is with Christ [that is, in the Christian reality]. We were all baptized into one body with one Spirit, Jews and Greeks, slaves and freedmen, and we were all given the same Spirit to drink.11 And indeed the body is made up not of one member but of many. If the foot were to say, “I am not a hand, so I do not belong to the body,” it does not belong to the body any the less for that. Or if the ear were to say, “I am not an eye, so I do not belong to the body,” that would not stop its belonging to the body. If the whole body were an eye, how would there be any hearing? If the whole body were hearing, how would there be any smelling?
As it is, God has arranged all the separate parts into the body as he chose. If they were all the same part, how could it be a body? As it is, there are many parts but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” and nor can the head say to the feet, “I don’t need you.”
Rather, the very parts of the body that seem the most vulnerable are the indispensable ones, and the parts we think least dignified that we clothe with the greatest dignity; thus are our less presentable parts given greater presentability, which our presentable parts do not need. God has composed the body so that the greater dignity is given to the parts that lacked it, so that there may be no dissension within the body but each part be concerned equally for all the others. If one part is hurt, all the parts share the pain. And if one part is honored, every part shares the joy.
Now you are the Body of Christ, each of you with a part to play in the whole. And God has appointed in the Church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracle workers, then those with gifts of healing, those able to help others, administrators, those who speak in various tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? (By all means, set your mind on the higher gifts.)
In First Corinthians, the earlier of Paul’s two surviving letters to the crazy Corinthian church, this passage on what has come to be called the “Mystical Body of Christ” is followed directly by the “Hymn to Love.” In other words, those who recognize the Body—and therefore recognize that everyone they meet is part of Christ—are obliged above all else to charity, to the selfless love of everyone who falls across their path, for this alone follows as the necessary moral consequence of “recognizing the Body.” Those who recognize this obligation fully are likely to be already a conscious part of the Church. But everyone, whether he knows it or not, whether she wishes it or not, is “of the Body.” For whatever a human being’s disposition, he “does not belong to the Body any the less for that.” Individual believers in Jesus, gathered together in their weekly meeting, sharing the bread and wine of Christ, should be—consciously—his Body. But even the unconscious, even those who have never heard of Jesus, are part of the Body. The Jesus who suffered and died, now raised and exalted by the Father, has (as Jesus will say in John’s Gospel) “draw[n] all people” to himself. He has, in Paul’s vision, drawn all things into himself, which is why the inanimate realities of bread and wine can be his body and blood. But if all Creation is now identifiable with the glorified Body of Christ, how much more than inanimate matter are Jesus’s sisters and brothers, the adopted children of the Father—the peak of Creation—to be identified with Christ. All humanity—“all flesh,” in the ancient Jewish formulation—is subsumed into this cosmic Christ. For “the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” This enigmatic prophecy, delivered so long ago to the exiles in Babylon by the Second Isaiah, has, like all the prophecies, come true.
Paul knew perfectly well that his striking analogy would invite scatological speculation (“Which part of the Body do you suppose Bibulus is?”). But he hoped that when the laughter subsided, his recipients would continue to ponder the reality that lies behind the words: that all humanity is caught up in a great cosmic drama in which each one, however humble or ridiculous, has a significant part to play—and that we cannot do without one another.
Paul’s dramatis personae of the primitive Church is most intriguing: apostles like Paul—the traveling envoys who are witnesses to the risen Christ—head the list, followed by somewhat lesser instructors, the prophets and teachers, who, like apostles, tended to be visiting rather than permanent figures in the life of the local church. These were all offices of inspiration, certainly not of administration. “Administrators” will rise considerably in the lists of the later Church, gradually assuming the office of ruler, an office unknown to the primitive Church. Here, however, they stand just one step ahead of “those who speak in tongues,” the ecstatics, who could only have been another headache for Paul—which is why he tries to direct everyone’s thoughts away from becoming one of them (“By all means, set your mind on the higher gifts”). Even an administrator would be a better choice.
But the cosmic Christ, whose glory knocked Paul from his horse on the road to Damascus, who sums up in himself the whole of the created universe, eventually leads Paul to thoughts that no one has ever had before—thoughts about the equality of all human beings before God. In this ancient world of masters and slaves, conquerors and conquered, a world that articulates at every turn, precisely and publicly, who’s on top, who’s on the bottom, Paul writes the unthinkable to his Galatians, who may just have been goofy enough to receive it: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
This list is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive, and Paul repeats it elsewhere with variations. Had he been writing to the class-conscious and conspicuously consuming Corinthians, he would surely have included “rich or poor, well- or lowborn.” He breaks the rhetorical parallelism of “Jew or Greek, slave or free” with “male and female” because he is alluding once more to the Genesis account of Creation—“Male and female created he them”—and directly contradicting the assumption of eons of interpreters that this sentence of the Torah announces not only la différence but the natural and necessary subordination of women to men. “In Christ Jesus”—in the ultimate cosmic reality—there can be no power relationships. The primitive Church was the world’s first egalitarian society.
NO ONE “in Christ” is permitted to lord it over anyone else. “There is one Body, one Spirit [animating this Body] … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, over all, through all, and in all,” writes Paul (or, possibly, one of his companions) in the New Testament letter to the church at Ephesus. This great cosmic unity does not bind but frees the believer. “Christ set us free,” writes Paul to the Galatians, “for the sake of freedom. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be bound once more to slavery’s yoke.” The yoke is, of course, the yoke of sin, the hamartia, or tragic fault, that runs through all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Like Moses leading the People out of Egyptian slavery, Christ the Redeemer has ransomed us all from the slavery of sin. We must go forward into freedom, not backward into chains.
The overwhelming majority of Jesus’s original followers—and all the witnesses to his resurrection—were Jews, as devout about their religion as Jesus had been. In their encounters with Paul’s gentile “Jews,” they often found themselves shocked at the new converts’ blank ignorance of Jewish law and practice. How could these strange new people, admittedly believers in the risen Jesus, be admitted to the fold of Judaism? They were unclean and knew nothing of the need for ritual bathings and washings; they ate anything; they did not keep the Sabbath; their men were uncircumcised,12 their sexual practices unspeakable. Most of those critical of Paul’s methods of instruction had, of course, never tried to carry the Gospel beyond their own comfortable circles in Jerusalem and Antioch, the old capital of Alexandrine Asia. They knew and cared nothing for his trials and labors through mountains and deserts and on the high seas, nor could they appreciate how the man’s unceasing work had flowered so dazzlingly in such places as Philippi and Thessalonica—“the churches of Macedon,” Paul’s favorites—“and how, in the course of continual ordeals and hardships, their unfailing joy and their intense poverty have welled up in such an overflow of generosity … beyond all their resources.”
Delegations of Judaizers began to follow in Paul’s footsteps, visiting the gentile churches he had established and telling them that, unless they learned and implemented all the laws of the Jews, they would be lost. If they were not “justified” according to the Law, they would be omitted in the great roundup of the saved when Jesus returned. You can imagine how puzzled this would have left the Galatians, how nonplussed would have been the worldly but infantile Corinthians, how confused the devout and generous Macedonians. It left Paul boiling with anger. How dare these busybodies interfere with his apostolate!
To an Orthodox Jew of a later period it would be clear that the observant Jews were right: one cannot be a Jew if one does not keep the laws of Judaism, as laid out in the Torah and interpreted in rabbinical commentaries to our own day. To a Christian of a later day it would be clear that what the observant Jews of Jerusalem and Antioch were trying to impose on the Greek converts—halakha—made no sense, for this whole system of “observance” lies outside authentic Christianity. In Paul’s day the issue was not nearly so clear to anyone. The word church was only gradually beginning to take on the meaning it has for Christians today, and no one had even thought of the word Christianity yet. Everyone—from emperors to rabbis—thought of the insignificant Jesus Movement, if they thought of it at all, as a variant form of Judaism. The Judaisms of the first century were myriad, a spectrum that ran from the completely apocalyptic obsessions of the Essenes and the strict observance of the Pharisees to the laxity of the Sadducees and the strictly political obsessions of the Zealots; and there was, in any case, nothing new about Messianism among the Jews, who had seen any number of announced “messiahs” come and go (and would continue to experience periodic waves of messianism right into our own time). The movements that would become normative Judaism and Christianity were, in this very period, in the process of being born. If these two children of ancient Judaism would soon enough come to view each other as implacable enemies, that time still lay in the future. And it remains for us—with the many advantages of modern scholarship and hindsight—to recognize the ineradicable bloodlines of these brothers, who have lost track of their relationship.
The issue of whether or not to impose the Law on gentile converts became the first great theological crisis for the fledgling Church, and it took many years to settle. The issue first came to a head at a meeting of apostles and elders in Jerusalem—sometimes referred to rather too grandly as the “First Council of Jerusalem”—at which, at least according to the consensus-favoring Luke’s account, Paul’s approach basically carried the day. But according to the less irenic Paul, Peter, who appears to have been moderator of the meeting, was a shilly-shallier. And even though Luke presents Peter as having had a vision in which God told him that all food is “clean” (and could, therefore, be eaten without sin), Paul tells us that when Peter visited Antioch, following the Jerusalem meeting which had decided in Paul’s favor, Peter lacked the courage to stand up to the most insistent of the Judaizers:
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain people from James [Jesus’s brother and principal elder of the Jerusalem church] arrived, he used to eat with the gentiles; but as soon as these fellows arrived, he withdrew and kept himself apart out of fear of the faction of circumcisers. And the rest of the Jewish believers put on the same act he did, so that even [Paul’s good friend] Barnabas was carried away by this hypocrisy! When I saw, though, that they were not being true to the Gospel, I said to Peter in front of everybody, “You, a Jew, live like a gentile and not like a Jew. So how is it that you compel the gentiles to live like Jews?”
This passage, penned in the heat of controversy, can easily make Paul look as if he is rejecting Judaism, but that would be to consider what is happening here through the lens of later categories, long after positions had calcified. Paul gloried in what he would have called his essential—and fulfilled—Judaism. Though he was as indulgent and patient with his absurd gentiles as his urgent temperament would allow, he never forgot whence he—and Jesus—sprang. In the most considered letter he ever wrote—to the church already established at Rome, not long before he made his first visit there—Paul, the great nonboaster, who “boasts only of [his] weaknesses,” at last allows himself to boast a little of his background and to touch publicly on his abiding love for the People who gave him birth. By this time, it is becoming clear that that Judaism, as a whole, will never consider Jesus to be its fulfillment:
This truth I am speaking in Christ, without pretense, as my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit. There is great sorrow and unending agony in my heart: I could wish that I myself might be cursed and cut off from Christ, if this could benefit the brothers who are my own flesh and blood. They are Israelites; it was they [not the gentiles] who were [first] adopted as children. To them belong the glory and the covenants; to them were given the Law and the worship [of the one, true God] and all the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.…
But God does not change his mind: his gifts and his call are irrevocable.
PAUL INSISTED THAT since the Law of Moses is fulfilled in Christ, all the laws of the Jews, instituted to bring a certain righteousness upon Israel, are now beside the point and can only confuse converts, especially simple gentile ones with a tradition of magical thinking, who may imagine that all will be well for them if only they keep all these rules—613 halakhot, by the count of the medieval rabbis. No one is made righteous by keeping rules, thought Paul, who had spent half his life in their careful observance. It is God who makes us righteous through his grace (the bountiful strength of the Spirit), especially through the grace available to us because of the saving actions of his son, Jesus.
We are not asked to observe scads of minute (and sometimes contradictory) rules. We are invited to have faith in Jesus. Martin Luther, the revolutionary Augustinian
friar who initiated the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany, was right to see the many duties, obligatory rituals, and automatic magic enjoined by the medieval church as only too reminiscent of the laws of Judaism that Jesus had bracketed and Paul had rejected altogether—rules that enabled their keepers to pretend to a righteousness that could never be attained by merely human effort. But when Luther claimed to be Pauline by asserting that “man is saved by faith alone,” he was misunderstanding Paul—as so many have done in so many different ways. Unfortunately, it has taken four centuries to sort out the confusion, which still reigns in the churches if not in the universities, where scholars have come to a broad consensus. Yes, man is saved by faith, if by that you mean faithful commitment to the cosmic Christ—that is, to the poor, to the afflicted, and to the healing of the world. But this “faith” of which Paul spoke with such feeling is not a single thread, hanging above the abyss, by which the believer is attached to God—some new-fangled form of automatic, if perilous, salvation—nor is it Kierkegaard’s blind “leap of faith” over the abyss itself. For when you have sorted through the whole, long, tangled Judeo-Christian tradition, Paul would say, what remains is not one, sola fides, but three: “For in the end, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love.”
Poor Paul. In addition to being repeatedly misinterpreted, he has been convicted of everything: a traitor to Judaism, an oppressor of women, and, most recently, a self-hating closet queen. He was none of these, and I hope my presentation of his intimate, if anguished, relation to Judaism (which rests on the careful scholarship of many twentieth-century Jews and Christians) will erase the first charge from the minds of my readers. The charge of being a secret, self-hating homosexual comes from a recent book by a bishop of the American Episcopal church; I would pass over this in silence, except that it has been given so much publicity. So far as I can judge, the charge is without probative evidence of any kind and based on egregious misinterpretation and wild conjecture. The bishop, for instance, thinks that when Paul makes oblique mention in Second Corinthians to “a thorn in the flesh” he must be referring to this secret torment. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, who may have spent as much time with the texts and terrain of Paul as any living interpreter, suggests with sly Irish wit that Paul is referring here to his Corinthian converts, a far more likely conjecture.
Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Page 13