The Body and the Members

“And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.”—1 Corinthians xii. 26.

The passage: If one member of the body suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honoured, all the members rejoice with it.

Lent, I have been trying for two Sundays to show you, is not a time for confessing that we have fallen short of some high, imaginary standard of excellence. It is a time for confessing that we have departed from the actual law under which we and all human beings are placed. It is a time for individual confession. Each of us remembers acts that he can charge to no one but himself. But these are acts against the peace and order of society, the kind of acts that make society untenable.

We cannot press this truth on our minds too much. It needs constant repetition, because we have a hundred loopholes for escaping it. We keep persuading ourselves that the Bible has a special vocabulary about Sin and Holiness. Sin, we think, means disobeying some theological rule, and Holiness a peculiar state of mind that a few exemplary people may reach. We must settle it in our hearts that Sin is being unmanly and inhuman, and that Holiness is the simple, natural, orderly condition of a creature living among creatures like himself.

When we read this twelfth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, our first thought is how different the world it describes is from ours. Everyone there feels his neighbour’s sufferings and joys as his own; selfishness neither directs society nor freezes hearts. We may then slip for a moment into a sentimental dream that such an Elysium might some day be created on this earth or on some distant planet. We may even ask whether, if species are not permanent, we might be transformed into fit inhabitants of such a place. But after a little of this we sensibly decide that this is a waking world, and that whatever may happen in time to come, we must conform to what actually exists now. We say it cannot be meant that we should waste our energies fighting the conditions we are put in, however ignominious; we must adapt to them as well as we can.

That, I repeat, is a sound and healthy resolution, and we should keep to it. We can understand St. Paul on no other terms, for he was no dreamer; he lived to scatter dreams. He was a practical man and a fighter, but a fighter against his own inclination to disobey the constitution he was born under. That constitution belonged not to some society that may exist hereafter somewhere else, but to the society of the Greece, Italy and Palestine of his day, which is the France, Germany and England of ours. He would have the Corinthians, and us, struggle ceaselessly, not to create a new order, but not to contradict in every act of our lives the order to which we actually belong.

I. And what is that order? St. Paul takes the simplest method imaginable to make us understand it. He points us to obvious facts that everyone admits, and that the keenest experience forces us to recognize every moment. He asks us to consider the structure of our bodies, not the secrets known to anatomists and physiologists, but what every mechanic knows. Each limb has a power or work of its own, which no other limb can exercise. “The foot cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee; neither the hand to the foot, I have no need of thee.” And, as broad a commonplace, “though there are many members, there is but one body.” Then he appeals to anyone who has ever felt pain in any part of his body: if one member suffers, do not all the members suffer with it?

So far he is certainly dealing with facts, not dreams: universal facts, which concern the scholar and the saint no more than the fool and the sinner. The scholar and the saint, if they are not to turn into fools and sinners of the most hopeless kind, ought to count these facts more significant than all the novelties we run to the ends of the earth to find. These are laws of the Universe, laws about our own selves, which no one can reverse. No industry or discovery can add a cubit to your stature, or make one part of your body not suffer with every other part, or make the whole not be affected by the well-being of each part. The doctor or surgeon does not aspire to alter these facts. He conforms to them and regulates his treatment by them.

II. Then what does the Apostle do? Show his wit by pointing out some resemblance between these facts and an opinion he wants us to accept? Nothing of the kind. He never dreamed of comparing things that cannot be compared because they are not of the same kind. Let the dead bury their dead; let those who spend their time defending opinions set other opinions against them. St. Paul’s work lay elsewhere. He cared only for facts. He had found one set of facts to which he could appeal to the experience and conscience of mankind, and which would bear the test of all time. He goes on to speak of other facts, which concern each of us and the whole race as nearly, and to which he can appeal to the same conscience and experience and submit to the same test. He asks for no special field in which to prove them, no sheltered spot the winds of heaven do not visit too roughly. He takes the world as he finds it. A Greek city with all its corruptions, or the Roman empire with its tyranny, serves his purpose better than an Atlantis.

We speak of human society as a body, and men have done so in every age. The Roman historian repeats the apologue that tradition attributed to Menenius Agrippa during the secession to Mount Aventine, remarking that it bore traces of the rudeness of the age (Livy, l. 2, c. 32). He suggests that men in the simplest times adopted this comparison instinctively; they could not do otherwise. It is worked into the very tissue of human language, and you can scarcely invent phrases that avoid it. We would have to revolutionize the speech and thought of all nations to be rid of it. And civilization does not weaken its hold on our thought and talk but strengthens it. The polished Roman of Livy’s day might have dressed Agrippa’s argument in more seemly phrases, wrapped it in historical illustration, or flavoured it with Greek philosophy. But whenever he spoke against Anarchy and pointed out its results, he fell back on the same analogy. The more plainly he brought it home to his countrymen, the more their consciences would respond, and the more pointedly they would feel it applied to their own time or the time coming.

Well, then, St. Paul endorses this human language. He pronounces it sound and reasonable. He will not allow it to be figurative in any sense opposed to literal and true. It will bear, he says, the fullest unfolding. There are members of the body politic as certainly as there are members of the natural body, and each man is one. Each has a function assigned him in the body politic, as the hand or foot has in the natural body. One man can no more do another’s work than the hand can do the foot’s. One man can no more say to another, I have no need of thee, than the hand can say it to the foot. Here too the many members never let us forget the one body: every part suffers with every other, and no limb is honoured without every other sharing in the good.

III. Before going further, I must again press on you the two thoughts I began with. The first is that St. Paul’s description does not presuppose perfection but imperfection. He alludes to suffering in the natural body: the foot feels pain, and therefore the hand feels pain. The Prophet looks forward, no doubt, to a time when no inhabitant of God’s universe shall say, “I am sick,” and our hearts confirm the hope. We must believe that health is the law of the world and sickness the anomaly. Reason says so, and we must suppose the anomaly will one day be removed; our Lord’s miracles of healing bear witness to it. But St. Paul does not speak of this renewed condition. He speaks of men’s bodies as he saw them and as we see them. So too in the corresponding case: he speaks of suffering in the body politic. He takes for granted that it is subject to confusions and derangements, and that hand and foot are each liable to their own peculiar torture. No one knew this better than he, who had more to endure from others and for others than anyone. He was writing to a society full of tumults and parties, a Church whose members seemed least in harmony and least willing to acknowledge any relation to each other. He saw where its strifes might lead, and how each school was trying to make itself or its leader the centre of the body and to regard all other members only as they affected itself. Therefore he set out more plainly than ever before the order God had established for them, and to which, willingly or not, they must submit.

The other point I have already insisted on is that St. Paul was teaching an old doctrine, not a new one, when he declared this strict analogy between the physical and moral constitution of man. It was not new to his own countrymen. All their patriarchal records, which we are reading now in Genesis, contain it and witness to it. The sons of Jacob showed that they lived in a society they had not made for themselves but God had made for them. They showed it by their passionate and lawless assertion of family bonds and by the recklessness with which they broke loose from them: their wild revenge for their sister’s disgrace, their casting their brother into the pit. When they passed from a pastoral to a national state and felt the sternness and certainty of law, every step of their history showed that they were members of a body. It showed their strong inclination to deny it, and that by denying it they brought themselves into wretchedness and bondage. It showed that He who had made them a nation was determined to keep them one, and able to teach the most rebellious the blessing of His order and the curse of violating it. When the sanctions of Law proved unable to control men’s wills, each prophet spoke of a divine Ruler of those wills, an Almighty Word who governed the spirits of Angels and Men, and who would one day be shown mightier than all the enemies drawing His subjects from their allegiance.

Nor was it a new doctrine to the Greeks. Their earliest legends of family life, telling how the relations of husband and wife, brother and brother, were violated, taught the same. So did their dramas, with their awful punishments ordained by the Powers above for transgressing domestic order. So did their actual experience in their commonwealths: the struggles to make stern Law supreme over men’s inclinations, to find ground on which they could work together in freedom, and their united achievements, rivalries, hatred and dissolution. All of it repeated in different ways the lesson of the one body and the many members, and brought out in terrible facts the analogy St. Paul set forth, as far as words can, in language.

IV. What then did St. Paul add to these Jewish and Greek discoveries? What light could he throw on them? How could he harmonize them? They had been clear and decisive as far as they went, but they had not been satisfactory. They had proved that a law of fellowship exists between human beings, that it is constantly violated, and that its violation brings misery on the offender as well as on those whose claim he refused. They had proved that the tyrant suffers with the slave for his tyranny, that the slave’s spirit is in the tyrant and the tyrant’s in the slave. They had not shown how the Prophets’ witness to a divine Word and Ruler over their nation could be fulfilled for the blessing of all nations. They had not shown who was the Centre and Head of that body with its many members. They had not shown where a power could come from strong enough to make the members really and practically cohere, and to overcome the tendency in each to tear itself from the rest.

This great Hiatus in all the lore of past ages St. Paul fills when he says, “Now are ye the body of Christ, and members in particular.” He had said earlier in the chapter, “As the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.” Many find this language unintelligible and would like to explain it away as a figure or a mystical rapture, though everything before it is so strict and practical. So probably should we all, if there were not two powerful hindrances.

V. One lies in St. Paul’s other writings and in the whole Gospel he preached to the Nations. If this is figure and mysticism, then everything else he taught is too, and so it sounded to Jews and Gentiles. He said that one who died on a Cross at Calvary is the Head of every man. He said He proved Himself the Head of every man by taking the form of a servant, submitting to death, rising from the dead, and ascending on high. He could use no other language to describe His identification of Himself with men: “He was made Sin for us. He became a curse for us.” This is awfully profane language if it does not mean what it says; it trifles with men’s necessities and anguish, and with the Name and promises of God. If we give it its direct and mighty meaning, the Incarnation, Sacrifice, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, wonderful as they are, become necessary parts of a divine Manifestation. To lose them is to lose the knowledge of what we are, and of what He is in whose image we were created. If St. Paul deceives us here, he deceives us there too, and what he held the most glorious of all facts must be given up as the wildest fiction that ever entered a man’s imagination.

VI. That is one reason for not treating the words that crown the description of the body and the members as flighty words of fancy rather than reality. There is another, equally weighty for us, and perhaps of some weight even for those who have not yet accepted St. Paul as a true interpreter of human life. We cannot reduce to nothing all the past lessons of the world, drawn from its tears and joys, conflicts and hopes. We cannot purge our speech of the associations that have gathered round it. A body, with many members, we must still confess. “Oh yes,” you say, “if you will talk about a Universal Church, a Church of Christ, this analogy is inevitable. But we who are not theologians have no call to use that dialect, and for us it has little force.” I do not ask you to use it; so long as it has no force for you, I beg you to refrain. But I know that if you banish that kind of discourse, and every kind with a twang of theology in it, you will still have to recognize yourselves as members of a body, to ask what that recognition implies, and to ask how to fulfil your own functions in it. As English citizens you must do that, though a Church were a mere phantasy. And then another question arises: What binds me to the other members of this nation? What holds its limbs together? Brethren, that What must pass into a Who, or you will be dishonest citizens. Whether you are hands or feet in the body politic, whether you make laws or administer them, whether you bring them to bear on others or only submit to them yourselves, you will be tempted to deny your relationship to your fellow-citizens and to act unfaithfully by them, and so to lower and degrade yourselves. You will, unless you feel that it is not an abstraction but a Person who unites you to them, who admonishes you of your transgressions against them, and who makes you understand and fulfil your obligations to them. Perhaps it has never occurred to you that you have yielded to the temptation of sacrificing your fellow-men to party or self, and each of you can say, “I am clean from that sin.” Then I congratulate you. I suppose you have nothing to confess this Lent. All has been clean with you hitherto, and we may depend on you, in the strife that will soon come upon us, never to deceive any class with hopes you do not mean to realize, and never to speak an insincere or flattering word to win a supporter or overthrow an opponent. But if you have not this perfect clearness about the past or this perfect confidence about the future, then we may say to you: “You failed in your trust to the members of the body because you were not depending on the Head of the body and seeking grace and light from Him. That evil you may confess, and that grace you may receive: the grace of forgiveness, of purification, and of remembering in time to come that no one member can suffer without all suffering too. You cannot wrong one class without wronging all, and you cannot deceive one class without spreading the habit of deception through all classes and becoming its victim yourselves.”

VII. Brethren, it is easy to say such words about men in different positions from ours, with temptations we are not exposed to. I know it too well. The remembrance often closes one’s lips when one ought to speak, and we fail in our duty to you by not speaking. Criticizing other men’s evils from a secure height of our own is a horrible temptation and disease of our time, and we are all disposed to it. We preachers sometimes feel we have a divine right to indulge in it, but we have less right than anyone. Lent tells us so, for it is a time not of criticism but of confession, common and united, and special and individual. I said I did not ask you to think first of all about a Church; I was content that you should strive to realize your position as members of a family and of a nation. The meaning of the other word would come to you then, in due time and with its proper force. I do ask you to think of yourselves as members of a Church now, because I can dare to tell you that the name has no artificial, technical meaning. All the artificial, technical meanings given to it shall perish. This meaning shall remain, which connects it with the natural body and identifies it with that universal body politic of which Christ is the Head because He is the Head of every man. You can no more rid yourselves of your relation to this Church than you can change the law under which your natural bodies and their members exist. You must confess it along with us, because you are human beings as we are. It must be the ground of a confession, for you and for us, to the Father of our spirits: that we have forgotten we are His children, and therefore that His Son is our Lord, and therefore that His Spirit of Love is working in us to bind us to all the members of His Son’s body. It must also be the ground of a prayer, for you and us, to the Father of all, through the Son in whom we are one with Him and with our brethren, despite all our efforts to tear ourselves apart and become separate creatures. We pray that He will renew the whole body with His quickening Spirit, so that every member may submit to the law and give thanks for it, which declares that if one suffers all must suffer, and if one is honoured all must rejoice with it.