It is easy to grow too comfortable with Paul’s body metaphor of the Christian community.
We are all unique. Each has his own gift, every one her individual perspective. Let each go his own way without fussing about or—more conveniently—being messed with for the individual slant of the ego one adds to the mob.
If these are Paul’s words, they are not his meaning. Only an intoxication with four centuries of individualism in the West allows us to slouch to the conclusion that this is the apostle’s teaching.
A body is a more demanding thing than that. The demands placed by a functioning eye, the nourishment that an arm requires, these are the realia of a body image that is true to nature and true to healthy community. Paul’s body image may release and liberate at some point. Long before that it subjects Christian people to an uncommon submission. It sets our faces towards a self-denial that in our self-obsessed historical moment borders on the heroic.
Atlas can bear a world, perhaps, with less groaning than it takes for me to subsume my life within the story of God’s redemption and the community that plays its leading role.
The body image of Christ’s community does not require tolerance. That interpretation is escapist and therefore vile. The picture is more demanding than that. It requires that I, as a pastor-teacher, genuinely subject my movements within the body politic to the insight of the prophet, the orderly template of the administrator, the irritating focus on the needy invidual that is gratingly common in the compassionate.
The body politic does not exist to create a platform for my skill. It is a bad substitute for a realistic self-image. It is not there for me at all.
I am there for the body politic. I know too little to serve it well, unless—as Paul has understood—I fearlessly honor all its parts. Then, if one lowers himself down into the vantage point from which real things can be seen, it is a mosaic most breathtaking in its colors.
Like the human body, its ability to survive, to procreate, to replenish, and to heal takes one’s breath away.
Canter Bridge 
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