(Disclaimer: In the spirit of my last Note, these meditations are only intended for the marginalized and the misfits. From the standpoint of the establishment you’re damned anyway, so who cares? Being heretically interesting is the least of your problems.)
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And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Eph. 1:22-23).
The New Testament draws such a strong connection between Christ and his followers that the two are often virtually indistinguishable (Acts 9:4; Col. 1:24).
Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the whole “we are the body of Christ” metaphor, according to which “Christ” is to be seen not so much as a carpenter who cruised around Galilee a couple thousand years ago, but as a mystical person who does not truly exist without us.
How can I say that “Christ does not exist without us”?
Don’t blame me, blame St. Paul, who hinted at this very idea: “And [God] put all things under [Christ’s] feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Eph. 1:22-23).
See what’s happening here?
“Christ,” for Paul, is what you call it when the “head” and the “members” are united into one mystical “body.” And further, it is the members of the body (that’s us) who provide “Christ” with his “fullness.”
To put it another way, a severed head is of no use without a body, and neither is “Christ” anything without us.
Taking this a step further into more philosophical territory, what if (what we call) “God” or “Christ” only exist insofar as we embody them to the world in the form of self-giving, sacrificial love? What if the real question is not whether this or that set of theological tenets is objectively “true,” but the real issue is whether Christ is “made real” by our acts of mercy and compassionate for the least among us?
From where I sit, debates about theism versus atheism couldn’t be more outdated and, frankly, boring. The last thing the world needs is more theists. A remote and transcendent “Jesus” who observes our pain and does nothing about it isn’t much use, either.
But what the world does need is people dedicated to exhibiting a truly self-emptying love and service toward the downtrodden and disenfranchised among us. If you want to think of that as bringing Christ into existence by being his hands and feet to the world, knock yourself out (and credit Paul with the metaphor).
But if you’d rather just do this without invoking the religious language, that’s cool too. Because something tells me that practical actions speak louder than pious words anyway.
