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.

Lent, I have been trying for two Sundays to show you, is not a time for confessing that we have departed from some high and imaginary standard of excellence. It is a time for confessing our departure from the actual law under which we and all human beings are placed. It is a time for individual confession. Each one recollects acts which he has done, and which he can impute to no one except himself. But these are acts against the peace and order of society. They belong to the class of acts which make society untenable.

We cannot impress this truth too much upon our minds. It requires continual repetition, for there are a hundred loopholes by which we escape from the acknowledgment of it. We are always persuading ourselves that the Bible has some special nomenclature about Sin and Holiness; that Sin means disobedience to some theological rule of right; that Holiness means a peculiar state of mind which a few exemplary persons may attain. We must settle it in our hearts that Sin is the being unmanly, inhuman; that Holiness is the simple, natural, orderly condition of a creature living amidst creatures like himself.

When we read this 12th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, our first thought is, What a different world is described here from that in which we dwell! Every one is supposed to be feeling his neighbour’s sufferings as his own, his neighbour’s joys as his own. Selfishness is not directing the movements of society, or freezing the hearts of individuals! And then we possibly fall for a few moments into a sentimental dream about the possibility of such an Elysium being created some time or other upon this earth or in some distant planet. We may even ask whether, if species are not permanent, we might not be transformed by some process into fit inhabitants for such a region. But after a little indulgence in such visions, we wisely determine that this is a waking world; that whatever may happen at some future time, we must conform to what actually exists in the present time. It cannot, we say, be meant that we should waste our energies in struggling against the conditions into which we are put, be they ever so ignominious; we must adapt ourselves to them as well as we can.

That, I repeat it, must be a sound and healthy resolution: let us adhere to it. We can understand St. Paul upon no other terms. For he was not a dreamer; he lived to scatter dreams. He was essentially a practical man,—a fighter, no doubt, but a fighter against his own inclination to disobey the constitution under which he was born,—the constitution, not of some society that may be hereafter somewhere else, but of a society that was in the Greece, Italy, Palestine of his day; that is, in the France, Germany, England of our day. He would have the Corinthians struggle incessantly, would have us struggle incessantly, not to create a new order for ourselves, but that we may not in every act of our lives be contradicting that order to which we actually belong.

I. And what is that order? St. Paul takes the simplest method one can conceive for making us understand what it is. He leads us to notice obvious facts, which every one admits; and not only admits, but is compelled by the keenest experience to recognize every moment. He asks us to consider the structure of our bodies,—not any secrets about them, which anatomists and physiologists may know,—but what every mechanic must know. He says that each of our members or limbs has a power or work of its own; that no other limb can put forth the same power or do the same work. “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.” He goes on to utter what is just as broad a commonplace, that “though there are many members, there is but one body.” And then he appeals to every one who has ever had a sensation of pain in any part of his body, whether if one member suffers, all the members do not suffer with it.

So far assuredly he is in the region of facts, not dreams,—of universal facts, not of partial facts,—of facts which do not concern the scholar and the saint more than the fool and the sinner; of facts which the scholar and the saint, if they would not be changed into fools and sinners of the most hopeless sort, ought to think of and to count more significant than all the novelties and rarities which we run to the ends of the earth to seek for. Here surely are laws of the Universe,—laws concerning our own selves, which no one can reverse. By no industry or discovery can you add one cubit to your stature. By no industry or discovery can you cause that one part of your body should not suffer with every other part, that the whole should not be affected by the well-being of each part. The practitioner in medicine or surgery does not aspire to alter these facts. He conforms himself to them, he regulates his treatment in accordance with them.

II. Then the Apostle goes on—to do what? To exhibit his wit by pointing out some resemblance which he has perceived between these facts, and some opinion which he wishes us to accept? No such thing. He never dreamed of comparing what cannot be compared, because they are not of the same kind. Let the dead bury their dead. Let those who spend their time in defending certain opinions find certain other opinions to weigh against them. St. Paul’s work did not lie in that direction. He cared only for facts. He had found one set of facts about which he could appeal to the experience and conscience of mankind, which would bear the test and trial of all time. He goes on to speak of other facts as nearly concerning each of us individually, as nearly concerning the whole race, about which he can appeal to the same conscience and experience, which he can submit to the same test and trial. He does not ask any special field for the proof and examination of them. He asks for no choice spot which the winds of heaven do not visit too roughly. He takes the world as he finds it. A Greek city with all its corruptions, the Roman empire with its tyranny, answer his purpose better than an Atlantis.

We speak of human society as a body. Men have done it in all ages. The Roman historian repeats the apologue which he found attributed by tradition to Menenius Agrippa during the secession to Mount Aventine, with the remark that it bore traces of the rudeness of the age (Livy, l. 2, c. 32). He intimates that this was a comparison which men in the simplest times instinctively adopted—instinctively recognized. They could not do otherwise. It is worked into the very tissue of human language; you can scarcely invent phrases which shall not involve it. We must introduce a revolution into the speech and thought of all nations if we would rid ourselves of it. And it does not stamp our thought or conversation less, but more, as we become civilized. The polished Roman of the days of Livy might have concealed the argument of Agrippa in seemlier phrases—have wrapped it up in some historical illustration, or flavoured it with Greek philosophy. But whenever he spoke against Anarchy—whenever he pointed out the results of it, he inevitably fell back upon the same analogy. The more distinctly he brought it home to his countrymen, the more would their consciences respond to his discourse,—the more pointedly would they feel his application of it to their time, or to the time that was coming.

Well, then, St. Paul endorses this human language. He pronounces it to be sound and reasonable. He will not allow it to be figurative, in any sense of that adjective which is opposed to literal and true. It will endure, he says, the fullest unfolding. There are members or limbs of the body politic, as certainly as there are members or limbs of the body natural. Each man is such a member or limb. Each man has a function or office assigned him in the body politic, as the hand or foot has in the natural body. One man may as little do the work of another, as the hand can do the work of the foot. One man may as little say to another, I have no need of thee, as the hand may say to the foot, or the foot to the hand, I have no need of thee. And here, too, the many members can never make us forget the one body. For here, too, every part suffers with every other part; no limb can be honoured without every other sharing in the good.

III. Before I proceed further, I must again impress those two thoughts upon your mind with which I began. The first is, that this description of St. Paul does not presuppose perfection, but rather presupposes imperfection. There is an allusion to suffering in the natural body. The foot is said to feel pain, and therefore the hand to feel pain. The Prophet, no doubt, looks forward to a time when the inhabitant of God’s universe shall no more say, “I am sick.” The hearts of us all confirm the anticipation. We must believe that health is the law of the world; sickness, the anomaly. Reason says so. We must suppose the anomaly will some day be removed. Our Lord’s miracles of healing bear that testimony. But St. Paul does not speak of this renovated condition. He speaks of the condition of men’s bodies as he saw it, and as we see it. And so in the corresponding case. He speaks of suffering in the body politic. He takes it for granted that it is subject to confusions and derangements; that the hand and the foot were liable each to its own peculiar kind of torture. No one knew it better than he did. No one had more to endure from others and for others. He was writing to a society which was full of tumults and parties, to the Church of which the different members seemed least in harmony—least to acknowledge any relation to each other. Because he was writing to such a Church,—because he saw to what its strifes might lead,—because he saw how each school was trying to make itself or its leader the centre of the body, and to consider all other members only as they affected itself;—therefore it was that he set out more distinctly than he had ever done what the order was which God had established for them, and to which, willingly or reluctantly, they must submit.

The other point on which I have insisted already, and which I would enforce, is that St. Paul was not teaching a new doctrine, but an old one, when he declared this strict analogy to exist between the physical and moral constitution of man. It was not new to his own countrymen. All their patriarchal records, which we are reading at this time in the book of Genesis, contained it and witnessed of it. The sons of Jacob, in their passionate and lawless assertion of family bonds,—as well as by the recklessness with which they broke loose from those bonds,—by their wild revenge for their sister’s disgrace, by casting their brother into the pit,—showed that they were in a society which they had not created for themselves, but which God had created for them. When they emerged from a pastoral into a national state—when they felt the sternness and the certainty of law, every step in their history showed that they were members of a body; that they had the greatest inclination to deny that they were; that by the denial they brought themselves into necessary wretchedness and bondage; that He who had made them a nation was determined to keep them one,—was able to teach the most rebellious of them the blessing of His order, the curse of violating it. When the sanctions of Law had proved their inadequacy to control the wills of men, 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 manifested as mightier than all the enemies that were drawing away His subjects from their allegiance.

Nor was it a new doctrine to the Greeks. All the stories of family life, in their earliest legends,—of the way in which the relations of husband to wife, of brother to brother, had been violated,—all the teaching in their dramas of the awful punishments which the Powers above had ordained for the transgression of domestic order,—all the actual experiences in their commonwealths, their struggles to make stern Law supreme over the inclinations of men, the struggles to discover some ground on which they might work together in freedom, their united achievements, their rivalries, hatred, dissolution,—all had been repeating in different ways the lesson of the one body and the many members, all had been bringing out in terrible facts that analogy which St. Paul set forth, so far as it could be set forth, in words.

IV. And 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 not been satisfactory, though they had been very clear, very decisive so far as they went. They had proved the existence of a law of fellowship between human beings. They had proved that that law was liable to constant violation. They had proved that its violation brought misery upon him who was guilty of it, as well as upon those whose claim upon him he had refused to acknowledge. They had proved that the tyrant suffered with the slave for his acts of tyranny; that the spirit of the slave was in the tyrant, and the spirit of the tyrant in the slave. They had not shown how that witness of Prophets respecting a divine Word and Ruler over their nation, could be actually 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 whence could come a power strong enough to make their cohesion to each other real and practical, strong enough to overcome the tendency in each member to rend itself from the rest.

It is this great Hiatus in all the lore of past ages which St. Paul fills up when he says, “Now are ye the body of Christ, and members in particular.” He had said before in this 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.” Language very unintelligible to many, which they would fain explain into a figure or into a mystical rapture, though all that has gone before is so very strict and practical. So probably should we all, if there were not two potent hindrances.

V. One lies in the other writings of St. Paul, and in the whole Gospel which he preached to the Nations. If this is figure and mysticism,—everything that he has taught elsewhere is figure and mysticism. It sounded so to Jews and Gentiles. He talked of one who died on a Cross at Calvary being the Head of every man. He spoke of His proving Himself to be the Head of every man by taking upon Him the form of a servant, by submitting to death, by rising from the dead, by ascending on high. He could use no other language than this to describe His identification of Himself with men—“He was made Sin for us. He became a curse for us.” Language surely awfully profane, if it does not mean what it says. It is nothing less than trifling with the necessities and anguish of men, with the Name and promises of God. If we give it its direct and mighty meaning, the Incarnation and Sacrifice and 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 are created. If St. Paul is deceiving us in this part of his teaching, he is deceiving us also in that. What he considered the most glorious of all facts, must be given up as the wildest fictions that ever entered into the imagination of a man.

VI. This is one reason for not treating those words which crown the description of the body and the members, as if they were only flighty words, belonging to the region of fancy and not of reality. There is another, which for us must be of equal weight, which may be of some weight even to those who have not hitherto confessed St. Paul to be a veritable interpreter of human life. We cannot reduce all the past lessons of the world, the lessons derived from its tears and its joys, its conflicts and its hopes, into nothing. We cannot purge our own speech of the associations which have gathered about it. A body we must still confess, a body with many members. “Oh yes,” you say, “if you will needs talk about a Universal Church, a Church of Christ,—no doubt this sort of analogy is inevitable. But we who are not theologians have no call to use that dialect. For us it has very little force.” I do not ask you to use it. I would beseech you, so long as it has no force for you, to abstain from using it. But I know that if you resolutely banish that kind of discourse, yes, every kind of discourse that has a twang of theology in it, you will not the less be obliged to recognize yourselves as members of a body, to ask what is implied in that recognition, to ask how you may fulfil your own functions in the body. If you are English citizens, you must do that, though a Church be a mere phantasy. And then that other question arises, What binds me to the other members of this nation? What holds the limbs of this nation 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 upon others, or only submit to them yourselves; you will be tempted to deny your relationship to your fellow-citizens, you will be tempted to act unfaithfully by them, and therefore to lower and degrade yourselves, 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, who makes you understand and fulfil your obligations to them. If you do not think so, if it does not occur to you that you have ever yielded to the temptation of sacrificing your fellow-men to the interests of party or of self—if 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 upon you for going into the strife, which will be coming upon us soon, in the certainty that you will never deceive any class with hopes that you do not mean to realize, that you will never speak an insincere or flattering word for the sake of winning any supporter or overthrowing any opponent. But if you have not this perfect clearness about the past, or this perfect confidence in the future, then we may say to you, “You failed in your trust to the members of the body, because you were not depending upon the Head of the body, because you were not seeking grace and light from Him. And that evil you may confess. And that grace you may receive; the grace of forgiveness, the grace of purification, the grace of remembering in the time to come that no one member can suffer without all the members suffering too; that you cannot wrong one class without wronging all classes; that you cannot deceive one class without diffusing the habit of deception through all classes, without becoming the victim of that habit yourselves.”

VII. Brethren, it is easy to say words such as these about men who are in different positions from ourselves, who have temptations to which we are not exposed. I know it too well. The remembrance often closes one’s lips when one ought to speak, when we are failing in our duty to you by not speaking. Criticism of other men’s evils, looking down upon them as from a secure height and platform of our own, is a horrible temptation and disease of our time. We are all disposed to fall into it. We preachers sometimes feel as if we had a sort of divine right to indulge ourselves in it. But we have no right,—less right than any people have. Lent tells us so, for that is a time not of criticism but of confession, of common united confession, of special individual confession. I said that 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, as members of a nation. The meaning of the other word will 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 there is no artificial, technical signification in that name. All artificial, technical significations that have been given to it, shall perish. This signification which connects it with the natural body, this signification which identifies it with that universal body politic of which Christ is the Head, because He is the Head of every man, shall remain. Of your relation to this Church you cannot rid yourselves, any more than you can change the law under which your natural bodies and the members of them exist. It is one which you must confess along with us, because you are human beings as well as we are. It is one which 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, therefore that His Son is our Lord, therefore that His Spirit of Love is working in us to bind us to all the members of the body of His Son. It must 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, notwithstanding all our efforts to tear ourselves apart and to become separate creatures,—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,—that if one is honoured, all must rejoice with it.