The Body of Christ
We Christians often talk about Jesus in our hearts, or God in our lives, or the Holy Spirit in us. After all, this is a basic tenet of real tried-n-true historic faith. Well, my accountability group and I are reading Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. He was so smart. I recently gleaned new implications of what it means for the Church to be the Body of Christ, that which we all know but feel inept to explain. I’ve been chewing on Lewis’ insight ever since. So I share it here for your chewing, and re-chewing, and discovering, and savoring. At the end of Book Two he writes, When [we Christians] speak of being ‘in Christ’ or of Christ being ‘in us’, this is not simply a way of saying that we are thinking about Christ or copying Him. We mean that Christ is actually operating through us; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts—that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains… why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like Baptism and Holy Communion [the sacraments]. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like an evolutionary super-biological fact… That is why [God also] uses crude things like water and bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He likes matter. He invented it.
From My Heart,
Jeff