Corinth was a hard church. Paul had founded it in the late forties, stayed eighteen months, then moved on. By the time he wrote 1 Corinthians a few years later, the reports coming back were not good. Lawsuits between believers. Confusion about marriage. A man sleeping with his stepmother and the church proud of its tolerance. Wealthy members eating their fill while poorer members went hungry in the same room. And, beneath all of it, the deeper problem: the body had stopped seeing itself as a body. It had become a roomful of individuals jockeying for status.
Walter Kaiser Jr. notes that Paul’s letter is built around the concern for the body and its unity. When Paul finally turns to the gifts of the Spirit in chapters 12 through 14, he keeps insisting that every gift was given for the common good — not for raising up one member at the expense of another. If the foot should say, because I am not the hand, I do not belong to the body — Paul is not making a debating point. He is naming what is happening in the room.
“You Are Christ’s Body”
The concern for the body and its unity dominated Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. All these gifts were given for the common good, not for raising up one member at the expense of the other.¹¹³
Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 12 has two halves. The first half is for the people who feel small in the room: if the foot should say, because I am not the hand, I do not belong to the body. The second half is for the people who feel big: the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. The body is not a competition between parts. The body is a coordinated set of differences working in the same direction. Comparison is the disease that breaks the body apart, because it forces every part to evaluate itself against another part instead of growing into the function it was given.¹¹⁴
Look at how God designed people. He distributed intelligence across every imaginable category — words, numbers, pictures, music, bodies, the natural world, other people, the inner self.¹¹⁵ The eight slices of human capacity. Most of us were affirmed in one or two of those slices growing up, and we have spent the rest of our lives believing the other six do not count. The church carries the wound forward. The verbal people get the platform. The empathic people stay in the kitchen and assume their work is invisible. The body-smart kids who fix the boilers and run the sound boards never imagine they are doing kingdom work. They are. Paul says they are. The body is the body because every part is working — and every part counts as work.
What you have been calling small is not small. It is the part Paul is writing about. The body of Christ does not need more eyes. It needs feet that have stopped apologizing for not being eyes.
There is a person in the body of Christ whose life you have quietly been trying to live. They preach better than you. They host better than you. They have a marriage that looks easier than yours. They have a calling that seems clearer. And the comparison runs underground — you do not name it as a sin, you call it admiration, but it has been slowly eroding the work you were actually given to do. Paul says you cannot become more competent by becoming a copy of someone else. Comparison kills the very thing it is trying to imitate.
The harder, slower, more honest work is to name your part. Not what would so-and-so do — but what did the Spirit gift me to do, here, with these people, in this moment. The body does not need another version of someone else. The body is missing your version of you. There is real work that is yours, and the only person who can do it is the person who stops looking sideways long enough to do it.
Whose role in the body of Christ have you been quietly imitating — and what is the work the Spirit actually gave you that has been waiting?
Someone close to you has been comparing themselves into smallness for years. You can hear it in the way they talk about themselves. I’m not really good at anything. I just do the meals when someone is sick. I’m just the one who organizes the carpool. I’m the behind-the-scenes person. The word just is doing the damage. They are using a word that means only as if their gift were something to apologize for. Paul would not let them say it. Neither should you.
Find them this week and dismantle the just. Tell them, specifically, what you have watched their gift do — the family that received the meal at exactly the right hour, the kid whose week was held together by their carpool, the silent service that other people’s loud service depends on. The body needs them in the part they are in, and they have been talking themselves out of it. A few specific words from someone they trust can put them back where they belong.
Whose “just” have you been listening to without challenging — and what gift of theirs needs to be named back to them this week?
A family raises three children. The first one reads early and gets praised in every room she enters; she becomes the smart one. The second one struggles with reading but can take any broken thing apart and put it back together; he becomes the difficult one. The third one notices when anyone in the house is upset and asks the question no one else has the courage to ask; she becomes the sensitive one, said in the tone that means too much. Three children, three different parts of the body, one home that has accidentally taught two of them that their kind of intelligence is not really intelligence at all.
The repair is to name all three. Out loud, in front of each other, with specifics. You are word-smart. You are body-smart and hands-smart, and what you can do with a broken thing is a gift God put in you. You are people-smart, and the way you read a room is a kind of seeing the rest of us depend on without saying so. The home that learns to do this raises children who do not have to be the eye to feel useful, and do not have to be the hand to feel chosen. They become a body. That is what Paul is asking the church to be. It starts in the room you sleep in.
Whose particular kind of smart in your circle has been treated as the lesser kind — and how could you name it as a gift this week?
Whose part in the body of Christ have you been trying to play instead of your own?
List five people in your life. Beside each name, write the specific gift the Spirit has given them — not a generic compliment, the actual function they perform in the body. Pick one and tell that person this week. Notice what changes in how they walk through the next room they enter.
¹¹³ Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Promise-Plan of God: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), Chapter 13: “The Promise-Plan and the Mission of the Church.”
¹¹⁴ Koch, Five to Thrive, “Comparison Kills Competence.”
¹¹⁵ Koch, 8 Great Smarts, “The Eight Smarts: Introduction.”