Closer Than CloseSample

“Where Do I Belong? The Body of Christ”

If you have spent any time around church (or church people, for that matter), you have probably heard the church described as “the body of Christ.” But what does this phrase actually mean? Why is it important to understand yourself as belonging (literally) to Christ’s physical body?

Throughout Paul’s thirteen letters, the apostle consistently refers to the church as being the body of Christ. Writing to the church in Corinth, Paul says, “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. … Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1CO.12.12–13; 1CO.12.27).

According to Paul, the church has been united to the actual flesh-and-blood person of Jesus Christ; we are joined to his “body” and are now “individual members of it.” Instead of the church being some kind of ethereal or spiritual body, Paul describes the union between Christ and the church, in the words of theologian Pierre Benoit, “as a kind of physical union of the body of the Christian with the individual body of Christ.” Benoit’s words echo those of Cyril of Alexandria, who, writing in the fifth century, declared, “Since we are all united with the one Christ through his sacred body, and since we all receive Him who is one and indivisible into our own bodies, we ought to look upon our members as belonging to Him rather than to ourselves.” Likewise, Martin Luther affirms that “ [believers] are members of the body of Christ, of His flesh and His bones, in such a way that faith couples Christ and [the church] more intimately than a husband is coupled to his wife.”

Our one-flesh union with the person of Jesus Christ is afforded to us by the Holy Spirit. Through the work (and person) of the Holy Spirit, the church is so cemented to Christ that she is as one person with Christ, even though he is presently “at the right hand of God” (ROM.8.34). In this way, according to Martin Luther, Christ and the church are “coupled.” “Such is the nature of union with Christ,” affirms Baptist theologian Augustus Strong. “It is this and this only which constitutes him [or her] as a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church.”

So, church isn’t something you “go” to, or something you “do,” but, rather, an actual person (who has a body) in which you are joined—the body of Jesus Christ. And when all those united to Christ’s body come together to celebrate Christ’s presence in, with, and among them, there you have the church.

Have you ever thought of yourself as joined to the actual body of Christ? How does this change the way you understand the church as the “body of Christ?”

How does being joined to Christ and a part of his body change the way you understand and relate to other believers?