Body of Christ

St. Paul never met a lukewarm image. The Church, he writes, "is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all" (Ephesians 1:23); Christ "is the head of the body, the church" (Colossians 1:18); and to a fractious congregation in Corinth: "Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular" (1 Corinthians 12:27). Notice what he does not say — that the Church is like a body, a useful organizational analogy. He says the Church is Christ's Body: joined to Him as really as a hand to a head, alive with His life.

Paul learned this on the Damascus road. Breathing threats against the Church, he was stopped by a voice asking, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" (Acts 9:4) — not "my followers," but me. To touch the Church is to touch Christ. Everything Orthodoxy says about the Church unfolds from that identification: the Church is not an institution Christ founded and stepped away from, but the Incarnation continuing in time — Christ's own humanity, extended to embrace ours.

How does a scattered crowd of sinners become the Body of Christ? Paul's answer is Eucharistic: "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:16-17). The Church does not merely have a sacrament; she is constituted by it. Because the faithful eat one Bread, they become one Body — modern theologians, Orthodox and Catholic alike, can even say that the Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church.

This is why the Eucharist has never been, for Orthodoxy, a private devotion between the individual soul and God. St. Ignatius of Antioch, in the early second century, described Christians gathered as one, "breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality." One altar, one bishop, one loaf, one Body: Communion is simultaneously union with Christ and union with everyone else who receives Him. The two cannot be pried apart.

If the Church is a Body, then Christianity cannot be practiced alone, any more than a severed hand can flourish in a jar. "The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee" (1 Corinthians 12:21). Every member is needed precisely in its difference — Paul's whole argument in 1 Corinthians 12 is that variety of gifts is the Body's health, not its problem. And the members share one nervous system: "whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it" (1 Corinthians 12:26).

The Body also runs deeper than the visible congregation. Death does not amputate members from Christ; the saints and the faithful departed remain alive in Him, which is why Orthodoxy speaks of the communion of saints and asks their prayers as naturally as asking a friend in the next pew. One Body, on both sides of death.

Finally, the image carries an ethical edge the Fathers never let their people forget. St. John Chrysostom preached that those who honor Christ's Body on the altar must not despise Him naked and cold in the beggar at the church door. The Body of Christ received in the Chalice and the Body of Christ standing in line for bread are, in the end, one mystery — and the Church is only fully herself when she treats both accordingly.