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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman
When
A Finger Becomes An Eye 1
Corinthians 12:27 reads: "If
the whole body were an eye, where would
the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the
sense of smell be?" The
apostle Paul, a spiritual man having many visions and revelations was
also a man of intellectual brilliance and plain old common sense.
I see this balance in 1 Corinthians 12.
In verse 27 he called the church "Christ's body," and
thus, compared the church to a human body.
As with a human body, he noted that each member of Christ's body
has a distinct ministry calling. Not
all are eyes, something I am well familiar with. Those
with 20/20 vision may not realize this but those of us who are blind, or
legally blind as I am, use our fingers as eyes, as is the case with
Braille. In order for my
brain to picture what my eyes cannot properly see, my fingers attempt to
be my eyes. They feel what I
can't see in the hope of sending some kind of signal to my brain where
my brain tries to create a mental image.
This is helpful, but it does have its problems.
Such a
problem recently arose when I was trimming the grass where our lawn
meets our flower garden. A
sighted person might use a weed trimmer to trim the edge of his lawn,
but not me. If I stand with
trimmer in hand, I can't see where it contacts the grass.
If I proceed to trim, I will rip up the lawn.
To avoid that, I get down on my knees and trim the edge of the
lawn with a pair of scissors. I
do something similar when I prepare a meal.
I use the same old dull knife I've used for fifty years to slice food. If I use a sharp
knife, I'll lose a finger. Even
while on my knees, I can't see the blades of grass well enough to make a
clean cut with my scissors, and that is when my fingers become my eyes.
They grab the grass to be cut while the scissors are supposed,
emphasis on the word "supposed," to cut the grass in my
fingers.
It's called "cutting grass by faith and not by sight,"
an alternative rendering of Romans 1:17.
It usually works, except for last week when a few blades of grass
were immersed in a baptism of my blood.
Don't worry. I didn't
die. I still have my finger,
but it does hurt. In terms
of being Biblically balanced, living by faith does not mean you disregard
the realities of sight.
I say
all of the above to say this. My
body appreciates my fingers attempting to be my eyes, but that's not the
job of my fingers. Fingers,
no matter how hard they try, can never replace eyes, and in part, that
is Paul's point. Not
everyone in the Body of Christ has the same talents and ministry
calling. When someone fails
to exercise his ministry, that will inevitably force someone else to
fulfill that ministry, something to which he has not been called nor has
the ability to successfully accomplish.
That is problematic. It
can do more harm than good, which is sometimes seen when a messy baptism
of blood, so to speak, explodes in one corner of the church.
Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 12 are just as relevant for us as they were to the dysfunctional church in Corinth. Each believer has distinct God-given talents and a God-appointed ministry. None are excluded. Church works best when we all exercise our personalized ministry, whether that is a finger, an eye, an ear, or an armpit. One thing is sure. A finger will never effectively replace an eye, and I can attest to that.
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