“ so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” - Romans 12:5
I am sure at some point in your life you have heard something along the lines of “You are your own person” or “You are an individual”. This is true. We are all separate human beings. As Christians, we are not just individuals. We are the body of Christ. We are one. Sometimes we don’t think about, or we forget, what this means for us. It means that when one of our brothers or sisters is suffering we should be there suffering with them. By suffering with someone, I mean just what Paul says in Galatians 6:2 which is “Bear one another’s burdens”. But even that does not fully help us understand what it means to suffer with others, or explain why we are one. Think about how twins connect to each other. When something is wrong with one the other can sense it. The other twin can sense when something is wrong because they feel it too. They share the other twin’s pain and hurt. That is how we should be when someone else is suffering. And not just fellow Christians, but everyone.
To think of the body of Christ as “ a loosely bound association of functional Lone Rangers” (Joseph Scheumann) is saying that we are not all one body. If one person is suffering and you say to yourself “They are suffering, but I’m not”, then you are excluding either yourself or that other person from the body of Christ. Instead, when you see someone suffering then you should go and suffer with them. That is what the church is suppose to do. If someone is hurt they help bandage the wounds, if someone is down they help them back up. It is not for us to say that we are separate from them therefore we should not feel the way they do. It is the complete opposite. No one person can be the body of Christ. We all make one body and we belong to and need each other. Take 1 Corinthians 12:21 for example:
“ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
We can not say that we do not need a part of our body because we do. One Christian can not say to another Christian that they do not need them because they are separate from you. They are not separate from each other totally because they are both parts of the body of Christ. The Christians who are struggling the most and might not have such a good relationship with the Lord are like the weaker body parts Paul talks about. They are indispensable. So if everyone forms one body of Christ then no one is separate from someone else. When one part is hurt we are hurt too. Just like if you hurt your ankle then your foot hurts too. When you have pain that pain may feel centered on one part, but other parts are hurting as well. We should treat others like we are one with them. If they are the arm of the body of Christ and they are hurting then you should be that arm as well. We are told that our hearts should break for what breaks God’s heart and it breaks God’s heart when one of the members of the body of Christ is struggling and suffering without another member of the body being there to suffer with them and help to bring them out of that as well.
“so that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.”
- 1 Corinthians 12:25-26
