NOTES for Co1 12:12-31
In his widely known discussion of the Church as the Body of Christ, which we read today, the apostle Paul seems to consider this image from every possible angle. Behind his words are several exceptionally important ideas that form the foundation of our understanding of the Church. First, the apostle says that the Church consists of many different people whose functions in the body differ. Moreover, the apostle emphasizes that this diversity is fundamentally necessary, and that the “arrangement of the parts of the body” is carried out as God wills. It is evident that the structuring of the Church is not a human undertaking, but God’s.
The apostle then says that a person’s sense of self within the Church should not be determined by a jealous view of oneself or others. The fact that you are not a hieromonk does not separate you from the Church; you too are a necessary part of it. In addition, the apostle rejects the tendency, which arose early, for some members of the Church to exalt themselves over others because of their position. If verses 19–22 are stated “explicitly,” the apostle’s thought comes down to this: the episcopate cannot say to the laity, “we do not need you,” and the laity cannot say to monks, “we can manage without you.” Both the clericalist ideology of the Byzantine and Roman Middle Ages and the pseudo-democratic ecclesiology of extreme forms of Protestantism are shattered against this thought as against a rock.
In the second part of this remarkable passage, the apostle speaks about things that often escape our attention, probably because of their immense spiritual meaning. It is not the strongest, the most “advanced,” or the most spiritually exalted parts that the apostle calls the most necessary, but quite the opposite: “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are much more necessary.” This is the great and astonishing mystery of the Church, which rests upon human weakness, in which the power of God is made perfect.
This strange relationship of “necessity” stems from the fact that, in the apostle’s understanding, the Church is not a pyramid with barely spiritualized laypeople at its base and an episcopate close to the Holy Spirit at its summit (it is precisely this idea of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite that the apostle refutes). In his understanding, the Church is an organism in which it is not structural hierarchy that matters, but the mutual service that binds the members of the body together. The apostle singles out sharing one another’s sufferings as the most important thing.