NOTES for Pmn 1:7
Paul places a very high value on brotherly love, even when the matter concerns each individual member of the Church. Today such a view would seem a little strange to us. We are more used to thinking that we need the love of the Church, not that the Church needs ours. For Paul, as we can see, this is a mutual process. And that is not surprising. Indeed, if the Church were an organization, even a religious organization, then as a whole it would always and in every way surpass any of its members, even the most outstanding one. But the Church is not a religious organization; it is a community of people living in the Kingdom. Here there are deep and personal relationships among people, but not the kind of wholeness or aggregate that would automatically prove more important than any individual person. The Kingdom does not know a mass, a collective, or an aggregate. It knows only the individual person. And the Church, the real Church with a capital C, also does not know the crowd or the collective; it knows only the individual person and the community as a fellowship of such people in all the depth and uniqueness of their relationships with one another. And here every person truly matters. The love of each person can truly support the whole Church; following the custom of the first Christian Church, the apostle calls the members of the Church "saints." It turns out that not only does each person depend on the Church, but the Church also depends on each person. Of course, it does not depend in the way we depend on one another in the untransformed world, unable to do without one another and at the same time unable to live with one another. It depends as people depend on one another in the Kingdom, being bound by relationships that certainly cannot be considered obligatory in the sense in which the untransformed world understands obligations, but which nevertheless prove absolutely necessary for us, just as necessary as the people with whom these relationships bind us and without whom we would have no one with whom to share the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that we receive by becoming part of it. And this readiness to share is what distinguishes the Kingdom from the untransformed world. Here people relate in order to give; there, in order to receive. And every giver, everyone ready to share what he has, becomes a noticeable figure in the Kingdom. So noticeable that the whole Church knows about him.