The Body of Christ: the Church is One

The Body of Christ: the Church is One

The Church: Right Here, Right Now! course explores the theme of oneness in its second week. It’s a highly appropriate theme for preaching and considering during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

The Scripture passages chosen for this session are familiar, especially from their regular appearances during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. If you would like to study them yourself, they are John 17: 20-23 and 1 Corinthians 12: 14-30. In this session the image of the body of Christ (taken from the writing of St Paul) illustrates the unity of the church. But do not limit the vision of unity to the hopes often expressed at ecumenical meetings for shared mission or worship or even structures. While Christian unity between Christians of different traditions is an extremely important area of work, the unity for which Christ prayed went much deeper, to the heart of the relationship between every follower of Jesus and his brothers and sisters wherever they may be in time or space.

In the Creed we profess a belief in one holy, catholic and apostolic church. It is easy to take the word ‘one’ in this sentence to mean that there is no alternative church, that only one church exists. And in one sense that is correct. But the oneness in which we believe tells us more than that. Not just that there is ultimately only one corporate body of believers standing around Jesus our Saviour, but also that the nature of that corporate body is to be one people united in worshipping and witnessing to our risen Lord. And it goes deeper.

Archbishop Rowan Williams, in his address on this theme[1], spoke of the unique nature of Jesus in his close relationship to the Father.

At the beginning of John's Gospel, we read 'No-one has seen God at any time, but the only God who is next to the Father's heart has made him known'. In the best manuscripts of John's Gospel, that is what is said; 'the only God', not 'the only Son' monogenis theos; the unique God who stands next to the Father, in the bosom of the Father. So from the very first chapter of John's Gospel, we have before us the image of the only one who is in eternal intimacy with God the Father; the only one who is next to the Father's heart. Making God the Father Known. So the oneness of the church is about how the church is the community of those who are led to the one place at the Father's heart where he can be known, where he can be seen. St John's Gospel is indeed about the unity of believers but I think we misunderstand it if we treat that just on a lateral level; unity between believers. It is about the unity of the community as it exists standing in that one place where the only God, the menogenis theos of chapter one of John's Gospel, stands. And so I believe that one of the external signs of the unity of the church in a sense more basic than the universal Episcopal order, more basic than the creed, more basic than the instruments of unity of the Anglican Communion, even, more basic than Holy Scripture, is that Christians are called and enabled by the Holy Spirit to say 'Our Father' because they stand in the one Christ and are brought next to the Father's heart, by Christ. 'When you pray say "Our Father"', and when we pray our Lord's prayer, we affirm we stand with the one Christ, the one eternal son, the one word in the Father's bosom.

The kind of unity that Archbishop Rowan describes goes beyond any understanding of fellowship that the world comprehends. The implications of it are immense for the church as an organisation. We can not behave like any other human organisation because the depth of our relationship goes far beyond the depth of relationship that would be considered reasonable in any other setting.

Jesus’ prayer for those of us who came after him was that we would have amongst ourselves the unity that he shares with his Father. This is a unity created out of the love of God the Father for God the Son, our co-creators.  Our unity is not, then, about structures – whether or not we all serve the same bishops or agree to the same set of instructions about what robes to wear or what kind of wine to use at a communion service. It is not about agreements, documents or canons. All those things will pass, as traditions and canons have come and gone before. Ultimately, our unity as Christ’s prayed for people is about love. As the Father and the Son are one in their loving and binding relationship with one another, so Jesus wants us to be one with each other.

As we consider the nature of the church at this time and in this place, we need to ask ourselves whether the church where we are enables us to live as a people in this kind of unity. It is not enough to share together in worship on a Sunday and all agree that we liked what happened. The unity we share needs to go much deeper than agreeing that in this church we all like to do things in a particular way. Our church family needs to be ordered in such a way that we can develop relationships with the people who are part of our immediate church community that reflect the commitment of love between the Father and the Son.

It simply is not possible on this side of heaven for humans to relate in that way to every single member of a Sunday community. We would exhaust ourselves trying to give the time and effort that would be needed to know so many people that well. Only God can love every person with that kind of depth. However, it is possible to live out deep unity with a small group of people. It takes time and commitment to get to know a group of people that well, but within a small group, whether it is a home group or the choir or the ringers or Knit and Natter or some other church group, relationships can be developed to a high degree.

And while we can not actually relate to every other Christian in depth, we need always to bear in mind the specialness of relationship that we have with every other person who is called to pray ‘Our Father’ with us. The nature of our oneness as church gives us a connection with Christians across the globe, no matter what tradition they belong to, and across time. As a church our oneness is best expressed in the baptism we all share and which is recognised almost universally. The pouring of water unites us with Jesus, baptised by St. John. Jesus later broke bread, telling the disciples ‘this is my body, broken for you’. The theological implications of considering ourselves as Christ’s body and yet holding in our hands bread which Jesus asked us also to see as his body are profound.

During the Common Worship communion service the president breaks the consecrated bread and says:

We break this bread

to share in the body of Christ.

We reply:

Though we are many, we are one body,

because we all share in one bread.

Our unity as the Body of Christ flows from Christ’s loving gift to us of his own life. He entered into our mortality and endured suffering and death, and then showed us the way to eternal life in which we are united in him, a body beyond death.

Archbishop Rowan in his address to the leaders of the Global South spoke of unity between Christians in relationship to the sacraments.

So our unity is, at its deepest, the unity which the spirit gives in enabling us to call God 'Father'; it is the unity given in baptism, in which the spirit is given to us so that we may pray like this; so that we may pray the prayer of Jesus. It is the unity expressed in Holy Communion, not as the result of what we share as human beings, but because in Holy Communion we are drawn into praying the prayer of Jesus, standing where he stands, by the Holy Spirit, alive with his life.

This is one reason why Christians are – or should be – quick to respond to emergencies in other parts of the world. Our connectedness to our brothers and sisters in Christ will make us share in their pain when times are hard, and it is part of our imperative to take action to support them.

As so many preachers at ecumenical services have said, ‘unity does not mean uniformity’. St. Paul gives us the image of the body which is used to illustrate this session. It is an image which has inspired ideas of human co-operation way beyond the Christian context. A group of people working together are a ‘corporation’. This is not a corruption of the word co-operation, but a word meaning body, from the Latin ‘corpus’. A body is a unity. There is only one BBC, for example, however many people work there, however many programmes, podcasts, books and websites they produce. There is only one Church, the Body of Christ.  A body is made up of ‘members’ – the collective phrase for body parts. Though we are familiar with the word member in its proper usage, for body parts, on a daily basis we use it more often to refer to people as a part of a corporate grouping of some sort, whether they are ‘members’ of a football team, a political party or indeed a church. The members are the different limbs of the corporation, and as such are likely to have different functions.

St. Paul writes at length in his epistles of the different gifts and talents to be found amongst the members of the body. Universally, as we consider the one body of Christ across time and space, we might see different members of the body in terms of particular church institutions – the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran or Baptist expressions of church, for example. Locally we apply the image to seeing ourselves as having our own particular role within a church community. Some of us are evangelists, some prophets, some preachers, some healers. Equally, you might say that some of us are church secretaries, some are organists, some bellringers, some toddler group helpers. While it is important to value such roles, we need to balance this with remembering that the roles are functions of the body as a whole. Whether we are considering the Anglican communion, or Mrs. Jones from no. 7, as a ‘member’ of the Body of Christ, each is both a gifted member and part of the one body. Each is unified with it, one with the church, one with Jesus and with our Father. And so each member must take his or her place within the body as a whole, and make an effort to relate in full love to the body. At the level of the Anglican communion that may be about ecumenical relationships between Anglicans or with other ecclesial communities. At the local level that will also be about how each of us is valued and enabled to express full membership of the body within a small group and within the Sunday worship.

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[1] Friday 28 October 2005 Archbishop's Address to the 3rd Global South to South Encounter Ain al Sukhna, Egypt to be found at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1464 (retrieved by the author 21^st December 2009)