NOTES for Pmn 1:7
As seen, Paul puts very high the brotherly love, even when it is about every member of the Church. Today, such a glance would have probably seemed to us a little bit strange. We are more used to think that we need the love of the Church, and not the Church of ours. And here is, for Paul, as seen, it is a mutual process. And it is not surprising. In fact, if the Church was an organization, whether it is even a religious organization, as a whole, it would surpass always and in everything each of its members, even the most eminent. But indeed, the Church is not a religious organization, but a community of people living in the Kingdom. There are here deep and personal relationships between people, but there is not this integrity or ensemble, which would have really proved manifestly more known than any individual. The Kingdom does not know the masses, the collective, and the group.
It only knows individuals. And the Church (the real, the one with the capital letter) does not also know the crowd and the collective; it knows only individual and the community, as the community of such people in all the depth and the uniqueness of their relationships between themselves. And here every person is already really important. And the love of each can really support the whole Church (the apostle in the traditions of the early Christians Church calls the members of the Church the "saints"). It turns out that not only everyone depends on the Church, but the Church also depends on everyone.
Depends, of course not as we depend in each other in the non transformed world - not knowing how to get along one without another and at the same time not knowing how to get on one with another - but as depend each other in the Kingdom, being connected by relationships, which certainly, we can’t in no way consider helpful in this sense, as the non transformed world understands the obligations, but which turn out to us nevertheless completely necessary, quite as turn out to be necessary these people, with whom these relationships connect us and without whom we would have nobody with whom to share this plenitude of the life of the Kingdom, that we receive, being attached to it. And this readiness to share, probably distinguishes the Kingdom from the non transformed world. Here we communicate in order to receive, there – in order to give. And each who gives, each, who is ready to share what he has, becomes in the Kingdom a notable figure. So notable that he is known by the whole Church.