NOTES for Co1 12:12-31

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.