When preparing a homily on today’s reading (1 Cor. 12:12-31) from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, it is tempting to focus on the spiritual gifts due to their popularity in some Christian circles. But if we do, we will be missing an important idea that Paul develops in today’ reading. A summation of this idea can be formed from several key verses in the passage.
"A person has only one body, but it has many parts. Christ is like that too. God put the parts in the body as he wanted them. He made a place for each one. God wanted the different parts to care the same for each other. If one part of the body suffers, then all the other parts suffer with it. Or if one part is honored, then all the other parts share its honor. All of you together are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of that body."
This particular Christian belief is known as the doctrine of the Body of Christ. The local congregation of the faithful is like a human body. It is a single body made up of parts like our bodies. Each member of that congregation is one of its parts. God puts us in a particular congregation as he wants us. God wants us to care for each other exactly like we care for everyone else. We are not to treat anyone better than everyone else, nor are we to treat anyone worse than everyone else. It does not matter if we were not present when the congregation welcomed a new member and made a commitment to nurture them in the Christian faith and life and to include them in the congregation’s care. God expects us to care for them. We cannot avoid them or ignore them because we have taken a dislike to them or caring for others is not one of our strengths.
Christians who were forced to take care of themselves as a child and are very independent may struggle with caring for others. They may not be able to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. They may not be able to understand the feelings of others nor feel any desire to help them. However, they can develop the ability to imagine how someone else feels and become more empathetic.
This concept may be a difficult one to grasp in our culture which emphasizes the individual, independence, and self-sufficiency. We repeatedly hear the message that we are not responsible for others, only for ourselves. Jesus and the apostle, however, take a different view; we are interdependent, that is, we depend on each other. We help each other. We look after each other.
As Paul points to our attention, our lives are intertwined with the lives of the other members of the congregation. What we do to someone else affects the whole body. What happens to one of us affects all of us. When we do something bad or hurtful, the entire congregation suffers the consequences one way or another. We may damage the public image of our congregation. Our congregation may acquire a reputation of being unfriendly and unkind. When we do something kind or good, the entire congregation benefits. Our congregation may receive praise and approval from the community. The members of our congregation feel good about their church and themselves.. Our congregation’s public image gets a boost.
Bad blood between two members of a congregation can spread to other members of the congregation and eventually disrupt the life and ministry of a church. Reconciliation between two members can lead to restored friendly relations between other members. We cannot underestimate the impact our words and actions may have upon the rest of the congregation.
We must be careful about becoming out of misplaced sympathy an enabler, someone who allows or makes it possible for another person to behave in a way that damages that person. We may not have all the facts. Things are not always what they seem.
We need to be cautious about becoming involved in a relationship in which we contribute to someone else’s problem because we have a strong emotional need ourselves.
For example, we do not help anxious people to deal with their anxiety by making it possible for them to avoid anxiety-triggering situations. They need to deal with their anxiety in situations that trigger anxiety for them. Helping them to avoid these situations reinforces an existing unhealthy behavior pattern of behavior. It will actually make their anxiety worse.
If they are not facing any risk of physical injury or severe and lasting emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience, they should be encouraged to cope with the anxiety. The anxiety that they are feeling may be disproportionate to the circumstances and unrelated to the facts or events that make the situation the way it is.
Removing the anxiety trigger is not the solution. Working through longstanding and unreasonable feelings of anxiety about a particular feature of themselves or a particular set of circumstances is the solution.
The spiritual health of a local congregation of the faithful is tied to the spiritual health of the individual members of the congregation, just as the physical health of a human body is tied to the physical health of its individual parts. The spiritual health of the individual members of a congregation is tied to their physical, psychological, and emotional health. If we want our congregation to be healthy as possible, we need to be attentive to state of each individual member’s health.
We need to keep two things in mind. Because a person is functioning, exhibiting what we consider normal behavior and doing what is expected of them, and is not complaining of any kind of distress, does not mean that they are in tiptop condition health-wise. They may not recognize their physical and behavioral health problems, or they may be hiding them. The environment in which they are function may enable them not to experience any distress.
A second thing to remember is that what clinicians called “presenting problem” or “chief complaint” is the initial symptom that causes an individual member of a congregation to turn to the pastor or some other church leader for help. To the clinician it is the initial piece of information that they will use in an evaluation.
Pastors and other church leaders should treat the concerns that an individual member of the congregation shares with them in the same way. They may discover on further investigation that the individual in question is accurately reporting a situation, or they are misinterpreting someone else’s word and actions.
Pastors and other church leaders may uncover additional information that sheds a different light on what that individual is defining as the problem.
For example, they may discover that the individual who came to them with the problem is wrongly imagining that someone else is feeling an emotion or desire where in fact they are the one who feels this way.
They also need to be aware of what is known as the negativity bias. This is the tendency to take a negative view of other people, to give more credence to negative information about them than to positive information, to exaggerate in our minds the seriousness of an individual’s negative qualities, and even to add imaginary details to the someone’s account of what happened. We look for the worst in other people, and not the best in them. The negativity bias can prejudice our opinion of someone and our assessment of the situation.
At the same time pastors and other church leaders will want to give someone who comes to them with a problem the benefit of the doubt and not to dismiss their concerns out of hand. It is helpful to keep in mind what Paul wrote the Corinthians about God wanting the different parts of the body to care for each other the same. In practice, pastors and other church leaders will need to do their best to be impartial, judging or considering the matter fairly without letting their own feelings or sympathies to influence them. This may be difficult when one of the parties involved may be a newcomer to the congregation and the other party is longtime member of the congregation whom they have know for a while.
Something to remember is that we may not know someone as well as we may think. What we may know is their persona, or social image, the particular type of character that a person seems to have and that is often different from their real or private character. This does not mean that they are secretly bad people who are deceiving us. Rather they may have personal qualities or character traits that they prefer to keep from the view of others out of the fear that others may reject them. They therefore will project what they consider their most desirable qualities, the qualities which they believe will please other people and which they want most people to notice about them.
In writing the church at Corinth about God wanting the different parts of the body to care for each other, Paul is echoing the new commandment that Jesus gave to the disciples—the commandment to love one another as he loved them. This is evident from the section of Paul’s letter that follows today’s reading. It is the way of life that Paul tells the Corinthians is better than the spiritual gifts. In that section Paul describes the kind of love that Christians should show other people and their brothers and sisters in Christ.
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