The Queer Body of Christ
Scripture: 1 Cor 12: 12-26
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. 14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many members, yet one body. 21 The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ 22 On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; 24 whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, 25 that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.
This is a photo of my grandmother before she was baptized in the Mennonite Church.
This is a photo of my grandmother after she was baptized in the Mennonite Church.
For Mennonites in many branches of the tradition, now as in the past, joining the Church entailed a full-body makeover. Conformity to the teachings of Christ was expected, rather than the norms of the world. And it showed. Such a body-change, as well as other community practices like forsaking certain technologies, pacifism, and a highly communitarian value system led some to refer to Mennonites as “the peculiar people”. Being the Body of Christ constituted what and who the assembled community was, and that community was most definitely peculiar, outside the box, one might even say “Queer” in the eyes of the mainstream world.
Let me briefly explain my use of the term 'queer'. Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', queer came to be used pejoratively against those with non-conforming gender expressions and sexual practices in the late 19th , early 20th century. Beginning in the 1980's the term began to be reclaimed by LGBTQ+ activists, and in more current usage it is often an umbrella term used to describe a wide variety of gender and sexual identities and politics.
I'm using it as part of that reclamation, but not primarily as a fixed identity or general description, but rather as a posture, a challenge made to the 'normal' – similar to its original dictionary definition of peculiar, unusual.
Now the Apostle Paul was no queer activist, nor would I want to make him out to be an unambiguous champion of the oppressed – certainly not when it came to women. But when it comes to some profound insights as to what God was up to in the person of Jesus, Paul does have a voice worth listening to.
To hear HIS voice better, rather than intonations of our own, it is also important to understand a little about the way bodies – both individual and collective – were understood in the ancient world of Paul's day. I'm grateful to historian and theologian Dale Martin for his book “The Corinthian Body” which presents ground-breaking work in this area.
First, Greco-Roman society was hyper-hierarchical, male-dominated and deeply status conscious. There were carefully defined gradations of status and honour, and an insistence on the natural, unchallengable place each person was to occupy in the hierarchy in order to keep the body of society functioning in harmony.
Secondly, there was no hard and fast boundary between the social body and an individual body. Individuals existed, but 'individualism' in its modern 'autonomy of the self' construction simply did not. And so the human body, like the social body, was also ordered hierarchically. The head was considered the most divine part, ruling the rest. In dreams a foot was said to represent a slave, the right hand a male relative, and the left hand a female. Even internal organs were positioned as superior and inferior innards.
The human body was but a microcosm of what was essentially the ruling class ideology. Every individual body belonged not to itself, but to a larger Body – the social body – this was one's primary and most critical identity. So when Paul talked about belonging to the Body of Christ, this was a real, cell-infusing, blood and guts transforming alternative to the Empire’s Body Politic. Paul's Good News was that in raising Jesus' body from the dead, God made of him a new cosmic collective Body which people could now be part of, a bold move towards God's all-encompassing renewal of all things, a renewal only just begun with Jesus’ resurrection.
So, here we have the Body of Christ in the world – the community assembled at Corinth – truly the Body of Christ, not just a metaphorical one. Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church is largely concerned with divisions in the Corinthian community over a variety of issues – many of them rooted in socio-economic differences between those Paul calls “The Strong” – the higher-status group - and “the Weak” - a wide range of people from artisans & labourers, to the destitute poor.
In the first section of the letter we just heard read, Paul's strategy is to address the divisive issues by using Body rhetoric entirely familiar to his 1st century audience.
Paul writes: “Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. Etc. Etc.... ending with “As it is, there are many members, but one Body”.
It's easy to stop here, settling on at best a vision of equality and inter-dependence. But there is actually nothing radical here. Up to this point Paul's rhetoric of the body mimics the rhetoric of the Greco-Roman upper-class, who used precisely this sense of bodily “unity in diversity” to maintain its hierarchical status quo.
Diversity was never the problem if the proper 'place' of each was maintained. It was obvious that the slave and the under-class served critically important roles in the body such that a foot shouldn't say 'because I'm not a hand, I don't belong.' In fact, all the better to embrace being a foot – thus maintaining a needed labour force.
So the Corinthian’s here are all nodding their heads. But then comes the rub. Paul continues - “On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect.”
This is not a flattening of the hierarchy with equality – the weak and less honourable are not told they are just as important and honourable but that they are more so. Those with less respect are not given equal respect, but more. More than an equalizer, the Body of Christ is a destabilizer.
Paul's vision of diversity is not the unity in diversity hailed by contemporary mainstream society, including many churches. The Good News of the Body of Christ is not simply “all are welcome here”. We may get diversity that way, but most likely it will be a diversity which doesn't truly disrupt the power structures that order our lives. As such, the Body of Christ offers nothing but the same old, same old. But as Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, in Christ there is a NEW CREATION!! Diversity in the Body of Christ MUST disrupt power, or it isn't the Body of Christ.
When someone walks through the door, we say to them “Where you have known dishonour, here you will be honoured. Where you have known strength, here you will taste weakness. Where you have been silenced, here you will find a voice. Where you have been used to talking, here you will learn how to listen.” And furthermore, Paul concludes, “if one member suffers, all suffer together”.
Or one might say, as Paul does earlier in the same letter, when we don’t overturn the norms of power-over, the Body of Christ actually become poisonous.
Paul is talking about the Lord’s Supper, writing that if we eat the bread and drink the cup without discerning the body we actually weaken members of the body to the point of disease and even death. This is a confusing reference at best to modern listeners, but to Paul's audience it would have made total sense.
In the ancient world, it was not uncommon that the same substance was believed to be both elixir – that which heals and saves from death – as well as poison – that which makes ill and causes death. Whether the same substance is curative or poison depends upon rightly understanding the Body of the patient.
Paul is saying that without clear-sighted honesty about what is happening in the Body of believers, partaking in the Lord's supper is not necessarily the stuff of salvation. It can be poison which kills. When the abuse of power is not recognized and stopped, the Body of Christ actually (not metaphorically) becomes deadly.
Church history has proven Paul's warning all too true. Think of LGBTQ+ persons – enduring condemnation, conversion therapy, exclusion – leading to disproportionate levels of suicide; millions of Jews massacred in a Holocaust funded by Christian Biblical and theological language; Church-run residential schools which tried to “kill the Indian in the child” and in so-doing engaged in cultural genocide; and today’s Christian Zionism which uncritically supports the State of Israel and it’s military occupation, brutal oppression and slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
For these communities and others, the Body of Christ has been no place of wholeness and salvation, but a force of trauma and destruction.
From the humiliating division of status in the Corinthian community, to the degradation of human life and pogroms ever since, Paul’s teaching suggests that the Body of Christ should always inject Holy disruption into each and every configuration of power over others, throughout all of God's creation.
So why is Paul so convinced that the Church embodies a disruption of business as usual rather than a divine stamp-of-approval upon it?
It is because we are truly, not just metaphorically, the Body of Christ, and his is a Body which is always crucified. It is always foolishness; always confounding the Strong and the Wise; always dying alongside the scorned and rejected, never wielding power over them. It is always a queer body in the eyes of the world.
Yet not only a crucified body, but the assembly of Jesus-followers is also a resurrected body – a Body already, now, made alive by God for the flourishing of the world. A Body held in this world by the one gift without which we would be nothing – Love.
In God's Love, the Strong give up their power-over others and the despised are given a place at the table – and not only a place at the table, but the most respected one. Because God's Love hopes all things, believes all things and bears all things, the hurting and scorned are given new life. The love that is the greatest gift of all is the love that God over-abundantly and eternally infuses into every last corner of creation, especially those edges normally overlooked.
As my Mennonite grandmother knew and tried however imperfectly to embody, the Body of Christ is more than a metaphor for the church. It constitutes what and who the assembled community is and becomes.
Now I'm not advocating a return to head coverings and plain dress. But I do believe that participation in Christ's Body should refashion us – Queer us – make us peculiar and non-confirmed to the ways of the world. At the very LEAST it involves us in God's Holy disruption of social categories which prioritize, authorize, and stabilize our communities and our world.
Furthermore, we must always be careful not to settle back down, after such holy disruption, and think that NOW we’ve got the right way of living, or understanding of theology or construction of the church – but rather stay attentive to the continually disruptive event of the coming of God.
What we have here is not simply a replacement of one normal with a new normal, albeit one that aligns better with our own worldview. We are, after all, Christ's Body – queer – odd – outside the box, forever cruciform and unsettling; and ALWAYS held in Love. This is not so much a revolution as it is a revelation – the revelation that what is real, revealed, about our lives, our communities and our world is that all of it, down to the most insignificant creature, the most despised and rejected child, the most undistinguished or contemptible moment, is held forever in Love, only Love.
No one is lost. No Thing is lost. Not now. Not ever.