Robert Kolb (PhD, University of Wisconsin) is mission professor of systematic theology emeritus at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles.
It is not easy to be a hip. The feet make a mistake, take a false step, and the hip suffers. The hip suffers not only from being twisted the wrong way but also from the complaints of other parts of the body that depend on a healthy hip and feel its twist at a distance. Hips like to do things their own way, and the feet or the back do not always agree. North Americans want to stand on their own two feet, saying “Don’t tread on me!” and “Keep your distance.” They think that self-sufficiency is a virtue, not recognizing that self-sufficiency is an impossibility. And they do not know that for most people (individuals), in the world, the word “people” refers to a group, a tribe, a nation, as well as to a bunch of individuals.
God said that it was not good for Adam to be alone (Gen. 2:18), but Adam got into the habit of blaming Eve and God, wanting to go it alone. When the Garden turned to jungle, the sense of people belonging to a people dimmed. Individuals finding their natural place in community with others seemed ever more difficult to achieve. The sense that the entire human race is one God-created family was lost in the shuffle. Only God, who created humanity before human beings ran it off the road, can repair the mess. The peace and order of the Garden arise anew, of all places, at the foot of the cross. Only when God came in human flesh and took all the blame into himself could the death of sinners take place, and a new community, the people of God, emerge.
Paul calls this new community “the body of Christ.” Jesus took our sins into his body, shedding his blood to free us from all blame and pain, darkness and doubting. His shedding his blood gives us the promise that we become blood sisters and brothers, brought into the body of his death. But that body arose. His resurrection belongs to his own earthly body. In it, as John Updike wrote in his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” the cells’ dissolution reversed, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindled. Our own bodies will also experience the rekindling that he experienced in his physical body. And, indeed, his coming back to life also creates the body of his church, his people, who are knit together like molecules. The new-birth certificate we receive at baptism as individuals serves at the same time as a membership card reserving our place in community and communion with other believers around the world.
His call to encounter the darkness, doubts, and pains of others make it difficult sometimes to be a member of Christ’s body, but the promise of new life that the Holy Spirit gives carries us through.
We experience being the feet or hips, elbows or appendices of Christ’s body, the church, in the midst of a world that is still plagued by doubt and darkness, by the pain of physical illness and the pain of alienation and isolation. The Holy Spirit comes and cuts through the darkness, addresses our doubts, and stands by us in the midst of pains of all sorts. His presence becomes real as his people proclaim his promise of restoration and renewal to each other as individuals and also to the world as a community. His call to encounter the darkness, doubts, and pains of others make it difficult sometimes to be a member of Christ’s body, but the promise of new life that the Holy Spirit gives carries us through.
The body of Christ, his church, came alive on Pentecost. On that day nations from Parthia and Media in the East to Rome in the West, from Arabia and Asia Minor, received the gift of being drawn into the body of Christ. The early church included the poor in particular but also the rich. It attracted young and old alike, drawn together as people who acknowledged that their lives were broken in various ways. They gathered to contemplate the broken body on the cross, broken for them, as Peter announced on Pentecost. His broken body on the cross and the broken body of his people, separated by their individual doubts and pains, are both brought together into new life through this body that came to life on the third day so that the Holy Spirit might deliver the promise that Peter proclaimed to the crowd gathered in Jerusalem fifty days after Jesus’s resurrection. It is a promise sealed with his blood, the blood that blots out the bill of indictment against us that he nailed to his cross (Col. 2:15).
It is not easy to be a member of the body of Christ, given the kind of people he gathers to himself—given the kind of people, with our own doubts and pains, that we are. We live in this era in which fears of losing our heritage give opportunities to deceivers sent by the Deceiver to break the body of humanity, a body in which every person finds herself or himself. The body of Christ gathers people from every tongue and nation, uniting them with this Lord who has banished our fears through his perfect love. He opens our lives to neighbors in need, whether we understand their language or share their skin color.
We live in an era in which darkness and doubt about many of our presuppositions and principles have been called into question. Yet as members of Christ’s body we are not only willing and eager to share the burden of so many kinds of darkness with those on the run from the darkness, whether it be the doubt that descends on the suburban home in North America or on the streets of South America or Africa or Asia. They come to us as strangers and sometimes just plain strange. They pit us against each other in the isolation and alienation imposed on us by our individualistic creed to which we fanatically hold. The Holy Spirit gives us the gift of seeing others with empty hands, and we realize that our hands are also empty until filled by the promises that the Holy Spirit brings from the broken body on the cross. That body delivers restoration and wholeness to us as the body of his people. And so we sing together, “no darkness, nor doubting nor pain in this life could keep us from being united in Christ.”