Does Jesus Really Care Who Wins The Game?

These are the "plays" in Jesus' playbook, and they represent a radical departure from the conventional approach to the game. I like a positive approach to problems. So often we look only to the problem and we want to play the blame game. But defense is only half of the game.

Paul's admonitions, advice and arguments before the Corinthian church serve not only to reveal what was wrong in that community, but also to celebrate what was right. By straightforwardly dealing with the contentious claims and competing camps, Paul can give us the impression that he was frantically involved in just keeping this church from self-destructing. We forget what the Corinthians were doing right ... especially as detailed by today's text. This community was experiencing vital manifestations of God's love through the living gifts of the Spirit in a stunning variety of powerful and purposeful ways. Instead of focusing on how Paul deals with believers who have been too inclined to celebrate one spiritual gift over another, consider the remarkable number and variety of these spiritually empowered expressions of God's presence that the apostle could easily identify and list for his readers. Not only is this list of spiritual gifts itemized in 1 Corinthians 12 impressive, but match this list against that provided by Paul beginning in Romans 12:6. Only the gift of prophecy is noted as being in common between these two. Despite the theological missteps, the mutually destructive squabbling and the egoistic arguments that fractured the peace of the Corinthian church, it is evident that this was a vibrant community, rich with experiences of divine love.

Paul begins with a well-known analogy between the human body and the body of Christ. Paul, of course, was not the first to make this comparison. It can be found in the works of many different ancient writers.

But it is a uniquely remarkable and powerful comparison in Paul's hands. Paul uses body imagery to affirm both the diversity and the unity inherent in Christ, without ever wholly leading us to believe that one carries more weight than the other. Unlike some other pagan political writers who compared the parts with the whole in order to repress individual expression and personal freedoms for the sake of an overall community good, Paul celebrates the diverse gifts present in the body of Christ in general and in this Corinthian church in particular. Paul is not interested in transforming the wildly, richly diverse Corinthians into some bland homogenized conglomerate.

The underlying common root out of which all of these gifts and graces grow is from verse 13: "For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body ..." This common experience overrides all else. Even the most basic social separations such as race (Jew or Greek) and status (slave or free) wash away in the waters of this baptism. The "water" image is stressed yet again in verse 13. Instead of using the images of spirit more common in either Greek or Hebrew ("wind" or "breath"), Paul emphasizes that "...we were all made to drink of one Spirit."