3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

In our hyper-individualistic society, we can sometimes fall into the trap of approaching our religious faith in individualistic terms. We each have our own faith and practice this faith in many different ways. Many of us have various devotional practices, which, for a large number of us, will include a devotion to saying the rosary with some degree of frequency. Some of us will also have a habit of saying novenas for various intentions. Others perhaps receive some sort of daily devotional email or whatsapp that helps them to reflect on the Scriptures or on some Christian virtues. For most of us, coming to church on a Sunday for mass is also a part of our faith. I would be willing to bet that for many Christians, belonging to a believing community is just one aspect of this total constellation of devotional practices that make up the practice of the faith. To use a metaphor, if the practice of the faith were to be a fruit salad, going to church on Sunday would be the apples in the fruit salad. Some Christians even regard going to church on a Sunday as an optional extra. To extend the metaphor, they believe that it is possible to have a fruit salad without apples.

This is the view that Paul is trying to combat in today’s second reading. Paul makes it very clear that “we were all baptized into one body in a single Spirit” (I Cor 12:13). Being part of a body is constitutive of how we live our faith. It is not an optional extra. Paul goes on to add that “if the foot should say ‘because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body,’ it does not for this reason belong any less to the body” (v.15). In other words, if a Christian thinks that they can make the communal aspect of their faith an optional extra they are kidding themselves. There is just no way that you can be configured to Christ by the Spirit through baptism and not be attached to Christ’s body. Your brothers and sisters in Christ are your brothers and sisters whether you choose to acknowledge them as such or not. Furthermore, Paul adds that if “one part suffers, all suffer with it” (v.26). This is a very dense ecclesiological assertion that needs some unpacking. One of the things that I would contend it means is that if we do not take seriously our individual responsibility to prayer and nurturing a life of the Spirit within us, such that we are led into a state of serious sin, it is not just ourselves that we are hurting, we are hurting the whole body. This flips the individualistic approach to faith completely on its head. The individualistic approach to faith believes that a fruit salad with apples will make a more tasty fruit salad. In other words, being part of a church ensures a much better personal life of holiness. According to the individualistic approach, belonging to a church is at the service of personal holiness. Paul flips this logic on its head and says that personal holiness is actually at the service of belonging to a Church. Our personal prayer should make us better members of the body, and not the other way around.

Paul is inviting us to go further than simply seeing our belonging to the body of Christ as the single most important aspect of our life of faith. It is not simply that you cannot make a fruit salad without apples, what Paul is saying is that it is all about the apples. Indeed, the fruit salad approach is not an apt metaphor to describe how our Christian faith should be lived, even if it does aptly describe how some Christians choose to live their faith. If we continue the dessert theme, I would argue that a cake is a far better image for how we should live our faith. Regardless of the ingredients you put into the cake (flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking powder) – these ingredients are always going to be mixed together and put in an oven and then served to the body (and not to the individual, as is the case with a fruit salad). If you do not pay good attention to the ingredients that get put in (personal life of prayer, regular participation in a believing community, works of justice and charity), maybe the cake is not going to rise or taste very good, but it will still get eaten by the body. In other words, our personal vocations that Christ calls us to will always form part of the larger vocation of the body of Christ.

This is why actions that are taken at the communal level are by and large more likely to achieve a greater good. In his analysis of the human phenomenon of friendship, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, observes that a friendship is something that produces a surplus which is more than the sum of the two individuals who share a friendship. Something similar obtains when we are talking about the body of Christ. The body of Christ is more than just a group of Christians coming together to put their talents at the disposal of the Lord. There is a surplus that is obtained when we come together as a body in the name of Christ. This is why the Church is referred to as the “Mystical Body of Christ.” There is a mysterious power that is obtained when we unite to become the body of Christ. This mystery is something that we grasp only inchoately this side of heaven.

The power of this mystery is revealed particularly poignantly where Paul says that “it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the weakest which are the indispensable ones. It is the parts of the body which we consider least dignified that we surround with the greatest dignity” (v. 22-23). For me the truth of Paul’s words are most apparent in the Church’s relationship to those who society regards as useless and dispensable, such as the poor and those who live with mental handicaps. When the Church is at its best, it takes the prophetic decision to place such people at the very centre of its celebrations and liturgies, honouring those who are considered least in the eyes of the world. Whenever there is a celebration that puts the sick, the poor and those who live with handicaps at the centre, there is a mysterious power and joy that emerge. In the eyes of the world, a body that puts at its very core those living with handicaps should be weak and faltering. Instead, the opposite is true and such a body is a vibrant, joyful and resilient body precisely because it has chosen to honour those who are considered least dignified and make indispensable those whom the world considers dispensable.

Questions for reflection

1. What is my relationship to my local believing community? Is it the apple in my fruit salad, or am I the cake that it eats?
2. What place does my local believing community accord to the marginalized, the sick, the poor and those living with handicaps?