NOTES for Co1 12:12-13

The Gospels often tell us of the reward that the Lord’s followers get. Thinking of this which is waiting for them, people can imagine really very different things. For some this will be a ‘blessing’ of wealth, prosperity, comfort, and health. For some it means no sufferings in the afterlife. For some – spiritual richness. But few of us would ever dare to think of the reward that Jesus is speaking about in today’s reading. Those who fulfill God’s will become His brother, sister and mother. They get as close to the Lord as possible to be to a person – they become his family. Not just a group of hired servants or sheep from his flock. Not even a community gathered around their Teacher and Master, but a real family. Their relationship would be the one of loving brothers, or the one between a brother and a sister, or between a mother and a son. And being God’s relative surely is a bit too much of a reward to hope for. Only God himself can reveal that reality to those who can bear it.

Here is the answer to the question: how is it that people, so different from one another, can still be one in the Church? "By one Spirit we were all baptized into one body," says the apostle Paul. From a human point of view, it appears that no group of people can do without disputes, quarrels, and divisions. But the Lord planned everything differently, and in Him unity in love is possible. So where is this unity?

What is the Church? The Church is us, believers in Christ, baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And if there is no unity in the Church, that means there is little love in us. And if there is little love in us, that means we have not yet been fully given to drink of the Spirit. Today, on the day of Pentecost, let us ask the Lord that rivers of the living water of the Holy Spirit may flow in our hearts, so that we can manifest this unity.

Apostle Paul says that the diversities of gifts sent by God, of services and actions does not mean the disunion and separateness of people receiving them. And Paul portrays the image of such a unity in diversities, which takes its beginning in Christ's words on the Last Supper (Jn. 15), - The image of one body, organism, in which all members are functionally different, but all are interconnected and all are necessary. Such is unity in Christ. What means to us dwelling in Christ? Simply an assurance in it? Or the understanding of our interrelationship and "complementarity" with all those, who" by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body"?

Baptize, in Greek " Baptisma ", means " complete ablution ", " complete immersion ". Apostle Paul underlines that life and the unity of the Church don’t root in the human efforts, but in the Spirit of God, in the unity of the grace of God, which we all drink.

Immerse into the Spirit, washed by the Spirit, we become members of the body of Christ - the body of the God-man, in which there are no divisions, oppositions between oneself and others, but where all the members form one body, in which everyone is the most necessary.

It is indeed the life of the Spirit in us that engenders our unity, and if there are divisions among us - it means that we weren’t yet drunk by the Spirit in good quantity. It is important that the apostle speaks especially about immersion into the Holy Spirit, about ablution by His Grace.

Behind this apostle’s idea stands a phenomenon difficult to express by words - the transformation of all human essence at the presence of the Holy Spirit, which, on one hand, doesn’t destroy individuality, uniqueness of the human personality, and, on the other hand, makes us capable of loving with the love of the Spirit, that is, in the proper sense of the word, with God's image and resemblance.

Every country has certain authoritative instruments to sustain order – some kind of government, judicial system, police, council of elders etc. are always there. And at first Israel seems to fit into that pattern. The country has its leaders, judges, elders. But the people of God are more than just a state machine. They are a community – a pre-image of the Church. And the services in such a community are assigned by God who entrusts to the people his prerogatives such as justice, power and counsel – the same way as in the first times of the new-born Church the Holy Spirit appoints faithful to various ministries necessary for the life and growth of the community. What differs – both in those days and now ministry from a secular service is the need to fulfill your duties in constant contact with God, listening to his will and commandments. And those who mistake duties for serving, risk separating themselves from the people of God.

Reflecting on the Church, Paul turns to the idea traditional for his time of God's people as a single spiritual body, and applies it to the Church, in which the apostle sees the new people of God. According to these traditional ideas, the Jewish people were sanctified through the presence of God that dwelt in the place chosen by God, and, being sanctified, became one spiritual whole. As a result, no one among the people, even if he lived in a diaspora community far from Jerusalem, felt useless or rejected. And the place of God's presence was the Jerusalem Temple, from which the whole people were sanctified, even those who physically could not be present in Jerusalem. Paul, however, speaks of the new people of God, who are sanctified not simply by the presence of God, as before, but by the whole fullness of that breath of God that permeates the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior.

For Paul the Church is the spiritual body of Christ Himself, living with Him the one life of the Kingdom (vv. 12-13). And each member of the Church is, in the spiritual sense, part of this one body of Christ (v. 27). And the apostle, apparently not by chance, pays special attention to the fact that everyone in the Church has his own place and his own ministry, so that speaking of anyone in the Church as more or less needed is as strange as speaking of whether one or another part of the body is needed or not needed (vv. 14-18).

Evidently, among the Corinthian Christians there were frequent conversations about "high" and "spiritual" ministries in the Church, or, on the contrary, "low" and "unimportant" ones, as well as about "strong" and "weak" brothers. That is probably why Paul had to remind his readers that all ministries are important for the Church, just as all the organs of which the body consists are important for the body, and also that in the body it is precisely the weakest and most vulnerable parts that require special attention (vv. 19-26). And the matter was not only that contempt for certain members of the Church, or for certain ministries, destroyed the church community. The matter was, above all, the Church itself, those who made up its body: for its normal functioning, which allowed all members of the church community to live a full spiritual life, was possible only if it had not been spiritually crippled by contempt for concrete people or concrete ministries. Such contempt destroys the body of the Church, not only depriving the destroyers themselves of the fullness of the life of the Kingdom, but also preventing the other members of the church community from living by it.

Continuing the conversation about ministries and gifts, Paul turns to the image of the Church as the body of Christ, an image he often uses in his letters. The origin of this image is connected with traditional Jewish ideas about the Jewish people as one spiritual body sanctified by God's presence dwelling in the Jerusalem Temple. The apostle transfers this idea to the Church as the messianic remnant of the people of God, sanctified in the same way by the presence of the risen Christ in church gatherings.

And everyone who belongs to the Church is part of the body of Christ, a spiritual unity that allows the Kingdom to remain in our world and transform it. But in that case the Church cannot simply function the way various organizations function in our world, including religious organizations. The Church's only task is to remain in the world and reveal the Kingdom to the world, and all church activity is only the forms and means of solving this main task.

That is why the significance of each member of the Church cannot be measured by the function he performs in the sense of external activity. The logic of this world suggests that in every organization the most important and most valuable people are those who perform the most important tasks. The director is more important than the cleaning woman, though at times a scientist may prove more important than the director.

However that may be, the cleaning woman in any case cannot claim the most important place. For the Church, such logic is unacceptable. It is unacceptable for two reasons. First, the fullness of life in the Kingdom of a concrete person is, as a rule, little connected with the function he performs in this world.

It may very well turn out that the cleaning woman is ahead of the director in this regard: her spiritual life may be fuller and more intense, and the work of cleaning rooms cannot in any way hinder such fullness. Then it will turn out that for the Church and its witness the cleaning woman does more than the director. And second, every person is absolutely important for the Church.

After all, the Church's only goal is to open the way into the Kingdom to as many people as possible. What ministry they will carry out in the Church once they enter it is a secondary question. In the end, ministry for a Christian is only a way and form of expressing his own spiritual life. The main thing is that life itself. And here no one can be told that the Church does not need him or that he is not important. If a person is faithful to Christ and lives the life of the Kingdom, then the Church needs him, and without him the Church will be incomplete. This, in fact, is what Paul reminds us of.