by Lauren Winner
Epistle Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
For Sunday, January 27, 2013: Year C—Epiphany 3
There are plenty of fun ways to avoid the real challenge of this passage.
I like to ask people which part of the body of Christ they are: are you the cerebellum? The heart? The hands?But that droll exercise evades the many challenges of this text (a text that is, admittedly, easier to read when your local church or your denomination is not in conflict than when it is).
Let’s zoom in on one half verse—the one about suffering: “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.”
An Apt Metaphor
One of the reasons this eye-hand-body passage is so popular is that it doesn’t really require exegesis. You hear it from the pulpit, and you get it—I cannot say I have no need of you; I am part of a body, and obviously a body’s eyeball is not going to tell its thumb to get lost.
When Paul specifies bodily suffering, the metaphor keeps on working. Often, when any part of your body suffers, the whole body suffers. As Richard Hays notes in his commentary on Corinthians, we all actually know that an ear ache or an upset stomach or a twisted ankle can define your whole day: the suffering of one part of the body really does make the entire body suffer.[1]
But this is also where the metaphor may reach its limits (the limits being not a flaw, but precisely the way the metaphor unsettles us). When I have an earache, the rest of my body does indeed naturally suffer. But when other people suffer—frankly, when Miz Eloise at church is widowed I don’t really suffer, but when Frank gets a cancer diagnosis, when the Smythes’ baby is stillborn—occasionally I feel a pang of something. Occasionally I get overwhelmed and cry. But usually I am inured to it. Not indifferent, exactly, but certainly not suffering with the suffering.
Paul’s statement is hortatory[2]: he is telling us how it is supposed to be in the body of Christ. In the body of Christ, we are to cultivate empathy. I am an eye. I am to do things, as an eye, that make me open to the suffering of the hand. And very often, we do not. Very often we remain buffered from the suffering of the rest of our body.
The Metaphor, Globally
AIDS/HIV activists, among others, have claimed Paul’s language in an especially pointed—and convicting—way: the body of Christ has AIDS. That is to say, when one person in the body of Christ has AIDS, we all have AIDS. As Denise Ackerman has put it: “Paul describes us as the Body of Christ, a body that though it has many members, is one body . . . The picture here is one of solidarity in suffering, of mutual support and of a moral community in relation with one another and with God, practicing an embodied ethic of resistance and affirmation. Just imagine what that could mean in the midst of an HIV/AIDS pandemic!”[3]
Emmanuel Katongole, another theologian who has written in this key, has named this as an interruption. “HIV/AIDS is a radical interruption for the church…[and] it is only by being so radically interrupted that the church can offer any hope of healing—which is to say, interruption—to the social history of Africa.” In other words, if the church is going to be the church, the western church must stop thinking of AIDS as an African problem, as someone else’s problem, as a problem we may be able to help solve by giving money. When the western church allows those assumptions to be interrupted by the pause-giving statement that we have AIDS, too, then we find ourselves in a moment of truly becoming church.[4]
The Metaphor, Locally
And there are all the sufferings of my local church neighbors to which I am too often indifferent. (Of course, one of those sufferings may be AIDS. How many pastors have heard a congregant say “I don’t know anyone with AIDS,” when the pastor knows darn well that two or four or seven other members of the congregation are keeping their HIV-positive status quiet?)
I don’t know if the novelist Jane Smiley is religious or not, but I often find that she writes something that gets to the heart of the (religious, existential) matter for me. In The Age of Grief, narrator Dave Hurst seems to have come to a place in life where, rather effortlessly (and, indeed, against his will), he finds himself feeling the suffering of other people. “I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all - after all that schooling, all that care.''[5]
There it is: the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all.
That breaking down is what this Corinthian verse is after. As a preacher and pastor, it is your job to help provoke it. To provoke—perhaps gently--the breaking down of the barriers that keep the men and women in your congregation (indeed the barriers that keep yourself) tucked away from the circumstances of the rest of the world.
The Hardest Question
You are the pastor—you have been set aside by your congregation to do the secret, intimate work of pastoral care, to go into people’s sufferings with them, and you carry the knowledge of those sufferings with you when you step into the pulpit. You know the sufferings of your community in a way that most other members of the community do not, and you are reading the biblical text partially through the knowledge of those sufferings. We don’t stand in the pulpit and spill the secret sorrows of our parishioners, of course. But we do preach sermons that are shaped by what we know of those sufferings.
So the hardest question may be: How do I as a pastor and a preacher provoke in my congregation true empathy for the sufferings of their neighbors in the pew?
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[1] Richard Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 216.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ackerman quoted in Adriaan S. van Klinken, “ When the Body of Christ has AIDS: A Theological Metaphor for Global Solidarity in Light of HIV and AIDS,” International Journal of Public Theology 4 (2010) 452.
[4] Kantogole in ibid, 455.
[5] Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief (New York: Ivy Books, 1993), 132.
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
