The Body Bleeds

Today's Scripture

1 Corinthians 1:10-13 — "I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment... each one of you says, 'I follow Paul,' or 'I follow Apollos,' or 'I follow Cephas,' or 'I follow Christ.' Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you?"

Ephesians 4:4-6 — "There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."

John 17:20-21 — "I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me."

The Big Idea

When Christians fight, our first question is usually "Who is right?" Paul's first question is different: "Is Christ divided?" The church is not a club we signed up for. It is a body we were joined to. And a body bleeds when it is torn — even when the tearing feels justified.

Reflection

Team jerseys in God's house

Picture a church that gets a letter read out loud on Sunday morning — and the letter is about them. That actually happened, in the Greek city of Corinth, around the year 55. Word had reached the apostle Paul, hundreds of miles away. "It has been reported to me by Chloe's people," he writes, "that there is quarreling among you."

The church Paul had planted was breaking into fan clubs. A faction is a group inside a group that starts cheering against the rest, and Corinth had four of them. "Each one of you says, 'I follow Paul,' or 'I follow Apollos,' or 'I follow Cephas,' or 'I follow Christ'" (1 Corinthians 1:12). Paul was the founder. Apollos was the brilliant speaker. Cephas — that is Peter's Aramaic name — was the famous original disciple. And one group claimed to be above teachers entirely: we just follow Christ.

You know this dynamic, because you have watched it in a school cafeteria. Tables form. Jerseys go on. Someone starts a second group chat so the wrong people will not see the messages. Now imagine that happening at church, with everyone quoting Bible verses while they do it.

Notice what Paul does not do. He does not hold a hearing to decide which team is right. He does not propose separate services — Apollos people at nine, Paul people at eleven. He asks questions that are really one question: "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?" (1 Corinthians 1:13).

In other words: you are treating Christ like a prize that can be cut up and passed out to rival teams. He cannot be. Two chapters later, Paul says the quarreling itself gives them away. "For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, 'I follow Paul,' and another, 'I follow Apollos,' are you not being merely human?" (1 Corinthians 3:3-4). Forming tribes around personalities is what the world does everywhere, every day. The Corinthians were just doing it with religious labels on. The fact that the personalities were apostles did not make the game holy.

A unity we did not build

Here is the surprise at the center of the New Testament's teaching about the church. Paul never says, "Work hard to become one." He says we already are one — and then tells us to act like it. "There is one body and one Spirit... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all" (Ephesians 4:4-6). Count the word "one." It appears seven times in three verses.

That is why the command just before it is worded so carefully: be "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3). Maintain — not manufacture. You can only maintain something that already exists. The unity of the church is not a project we are building. It is a fact Christ created, which our quarrels can hide but cannot destroy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who watched his nation's church split apart in the 1930s, put it in one sentence:

"Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Not an ideal to chase. A reality to step into. Romans 12:4-5 uses the body picture the same way: "as in one body we have many members... so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another." You did not choose your liver. You never voted for your hands. You were simply born with them, and now you belong to each other. That is how the Bible talks about the people in your church.

So how does this oneness actually grow in practice? A.W. Tozer, a plainspoken American pastor of the last century, found a picture for it:

"Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow." — A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Unity does not come from members staring at each other and negotiating a truce. It comes from each of us tuning our lives to Christ. Get near him, and you will find you have gotten near each other. Psalm 133:1 sings about the result: "Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!" Good, pleasant — and rare enough that Israel wrote a song about it.

The people in your pew

But let us be honest about why this is hard. The people in an actual church are not the people you would have picked.

C.S. Lewis understood this perfectly. In The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon coaches a junior demon on how to ruin a brand-new Christian — and the church itself becomes part of the strategy. Send the new believer to church, Screwtape advises, and let him get a good look around:

"When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided." — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The squeaky shoes. The off-key singer. The man whose politics make you wince. The demon's whole plan is to make the new Christian judge the church by its awkward Sunday-morning surface, until quiet contempt does the rest. But in the same letter, Screwtape admits what he is desperately hiding:

"I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy." — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Both things are true at once. The church is the embarrassing neighbor in the next pew, and the church is an army that frightens hell. The question is which view you let set your heart.

The early Christians knew which one to trust. Cyprian was a bishop in North Africa in the 250s, in years when joining the church could cost you your life. He compressed his whole doctrine of the church into one famous line:

"He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother." — Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church

A mother — not a store. You can switch stores whenever the service disappoints you. You cannot switch mothers. Centuries later, John Stott, a London pastor, said the same thing from the other direction:

"The church lies at the very centre of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history." — John Stott, The Message of Ephesians

If the church were a human invention, walking away lightly would cost nothing. But if the church sits at the center of God's eternal plan, then 1 Corinthians 12:26 is describing a real nervous system, not a poster slogan: "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together." Splits hurt everyone, because the wiring is real.

The prayer Jesus is still praying

Now climb to the highest point this theme reaches. On the night before the cross, Jesus prayed out loud for his disciples — and then his prayer reached forward in time. "I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word" (John 17:20). If you believe in Jesus through the apostles' message, you are inside that sentence. He was praying for you.

And what did he ask? "That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you... so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:21). Look at the stakes. The unity of Christians is the evidence Jesus chose to leave in front of a watching world. He had said the same thing at supper an hour earlier: "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35). The world cannot see our doctrine. It can see whether we love each other.

So why stay in the room with Christians who frustrate you? Because of what it cost Christ to put you in the room. "For just as the body is one and has many members... so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body" (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). We did not join the body the way you join a gym. We were joined to it — by the Spirit, at the price of the cross.

And the gospel — the announcement of what Jesus has done for us — quietly removes the fuel every faction runs on. Tim Keller liked to state it as a double truth:

"We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

Hold both halves and watch tribal pride die. I cannot look down on the other group, because I am more flawed than I dared believe. And I do not need my group's approval to feel secure, because I am more loved than I dared hope. A heart resting in that love has nothing left to prove — which is exactly what makes peace possible.

This plan will spend the coming days on the hard cases. There were moments when Athanasius, Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Spurgeon concluded, with grief, that faithfulness required them to stand apart. We will take those moments seriously. But Paul makes us start here, feeling the weight: the body bleeds when it is torn. Even when the tear is necessary, it is never small.

Going Deeper

Privately name the group of Christians you most quietly look down on — the other church across town, the other faction in your own, the people whose worship style or politics make you roll your eyes. Name it without softening it. Then ask Paul's question over that group: "Is Christ divided?" Finally, thank God for one specific person in that group, out loud if you can. You are not deciding anything today about staying or leaving. You are only letting the truth of one body get into your bloodstream first.