'For we have many members in one body, and all members have
not the same office: 5. So we, being many, are one body in
Christ, and every one members one of another.'--ROMANS xii. 4, 5.
To Paul there was the closest and most vital connection between the
profoundest experiences of the Christian life and its plainest and
most superficial duties. Here he lays one of his most mystical
conceptions as the very foundation on which to rear the great
structure of Christian conduct, and links on to one of his
profoundest thoughts, the unity of all Christians in Christ, a
comprehensive series of practical exhortations. We are accustomed to
hear from many lips: 'I have no use for these dogmas that Paul
delights in. Give me his practical teaching. You may keep the Epistle
to the Romans, I hold by the thirteenth of First Corinthians.' But
such an unnatural severance between the doctrine and the ethics of
the Epistle cannot be effected without the destruction of both. The
very principle of this Epistle to the Romans is that the difference
between the law and the Gospel is, that the one preaches conduct
without a basis for it, and that the other says, First believe in
Christ, and in the strength of that belief, do the right and be like
Him. Here, then, in the very laying of the foundation for conduct in
these verses we have in concrete example the secret of the Christian
way of making good men.
I. The first point to notice here is, the unity of the derived life.
Many are one, because they are each in Christ, and the individual
relationship and derivation of life from Him makes them one whilst
continuing to be many. That great metaphor, and nowadays much
forgotten and neglected truth, is to Paul's mind the fact which ought
to mould the whole life and conduct of individual Christians and to
be manifested therein. There are three most significant and
instructive symbols by which the unity of believers in Christ Jesus
is set forth in the New Testament. Our Lord Himself gives us the one
of the vine and its branches, and that symbol suggests the silent,
effortless process by which the life-giving sap rises and finds its
way from the deep root to the furthest tendril and the far-extended
growth. The same symbol loses indeed in one respect its value if we
transfer it to growths more congenial to our northern climate, and
instead of the vine with its rich clusters, think of some great elm,
deeply rooted, and with its firm bole and massive branches, through
all of which the mystery of a common life penetrates and makes every
leaf in the cloud of foliage through which we look up participant of
itself. But, profound and beautiful as our Lord's metaphor is, the
vegetative uniformity of parts and the absence of individual
characteristics make it, if taken alone, insufficient. In the tree
one leaf is like another; it 'grows green and broad and takes no
care.' Hence, to express the whole truth of the union between Christ
and us we must bring in other figures. Thus we find the Apostle
adducing the marriage tie, the highest earthly example of union,
founded on choice and affection. But even that sacred bond leaves a
gap between those who are knit together by it; and so we have the
conception of our text, the unity of the body as representing for us
the unity of believers with Jesus. This is a unity of life. He is not
only head as chief and sovereign, but He is soul or life, which has
its seat, not in this or that organ as old physics teach, but
pervades the whole and 'filleth all in all.' The mystery which
concerns the union of soul and body, and enshrouds the nature of
physical life, is part of the felicity of this symbol in its
Christian application. That commonest of all things, the mysterious
force which makes matter live and glow under spiritual emotion, and
changes the vibrations of a nerve, or the undulations of the grey
brain, into hope and love and faith, eludes the scalpel and the
microscope. Of man in his complex nature it is true that 'clouds and
darkness are round about him,' and we may expect an equally solemn
mystery to rest upon that which makes out of separate individuals one
living body, animated with the life and moved by the Spirit of the
indwelling Christ. We can get no further back, and dig no deeper
down, than His own words, 'I am ... the life.'
But, though this unity is mysterious, it is most real. Every
Christian soul receives from Christ the life of Christ. There is a
real implantation of a higher nature which has nothing to do with sin
and is alien from death. There is a true regeneration which is
supernatural, and which makes all who possess it one, in the measure
of their possession, as truly as all the leaves on a tree are one
because fed by the same sap, or all the members in the natural body
are one, because nourished by the same blood. So the true bond of
Christian unity lies in the common participation of the one Lord, and
the real Christian unity is a unity of derived life.
The misery and sin of the Christian Church have been, and are, that
it has sought to substitute other bonds of unity. The whole weary
history of the divisions and alienations between Christians has
surely sufficiently, and more than sufficiently, shown the failure of
the attempts to base Christian oneness upon uniformity of opinion, or
of ritual, or of purpose. The difference between the real unity, and
these spurious attempts after it, is the difference between bundles
of faggots, dead and held together by a cord, and a living tree
lifting its multitudinous foliage towards the heavens. The bundle of
faggots may be held together in some sort of imperfect union, but is
no exhibition of unity. If visible churches must be based on some
kind of agreement, they can never cover the same ground as that of
'the body of Christ.'
That oneness is independent of our organisations, and even of our
will, since it comes from the common possession of a common life. Its
enemies are not divergent opinions or forms, but the evil tempers and
dispositions which impede, or prevent, the flow into each Christian
soul of the uniting 'Spirit of life in Christ Jesus' which makes the
many who may be gathered into separate folds one flock clustered
around the one Shepherd. And if that unity be thus a fundamental fact
in the Christian life and entirely apart from external organisation,
the true way to increase it in each individual is, plainly, the
drawing nearer to Him, and the opening of our spirits so as to
receive fuller, deeper, and more continuous inflows from His own
inexhaustible fullness. In the old Temple stood the seven-branched
candlestick, an emblem of a formal unity; in the new the seven
candlesticks are one, because Christ stands in the midst. He makes
the body one; without Him it is a carcase.