The Body of Christ

“The peace of Christ must control your hearts — a peace into which you were called in one body. And be thankful people.” (Colossians 3:15 CEB)

For a while now I have been struck by the shallowness that often exists in some faith communities. It’s as if people do not trust one another enough to tell the truth about themselves, their struggles and vulnerabilities. It may be that rugged individualist mentality, that “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” ideology, haunting so many of us that we are afraid of appearing weak or less than human if people knew about what we’re really going through. This fear is so destructive in Christian community.

The impact is that, too often, the church becomes the place where people pretend. Maybe we just had a fight with our spouse or our kid or someone else we love and we just want to shout or cry or both. But we show up to church or whatever group and we pretend to have it all together. Maybe because we don’t want to admit that we need help. We don’t want to admit that we can’t “fix” our problems, no matter how hard we try. That we don’t have the answers. That we need others.

I wonder what else contributes. Pride perhaps? Church folks often want to help others, which is good. But we often don’t realize that we are just as much “in need” as anyone else. We need healing, and we need someone to tell us the truth about our shortcomings, how we have hurt one another. We need the experience of real hard-won forgiveness. And all the pretending prevents church folks from truly growing in Christ as the body of Christ. We have bought the lie of individualism that tells us we have to figure everything out on our own, have to heal ourselves, in order to be accepted and find belonging in Christ.

Genesis 1:26 reminds us: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humanity in our own image to resemble us…’” And that’s what God did. God created humanity in the divine self-image, which is communal. The divine self is inherently a relationship. It’s why we gradually came up with the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s why, in the first letter of John he declares “God is love” and we are “to love one another” in the same way that exists in God’s very core.

This kind of love is a “suffering with” kind of love. It’s more than that, certainly, but it is at least that. Jesus says, “This is my body, broken for you.” To experience the peace of Christ in our hearts in such a way that this peace is what motivates us, controls us, etc., is to be fully vulnerable in the body of Christ, to allow our hearts to be openly broken together. My prayer for us, dear friends, is that we not suffer alone, but experience more fully the divine love and peace that manifests in the broken body of Christ.