Romans 12:3–5 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but think of yourself with sober judgment, according to the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and not all members have the same function, so in Christ we who are many are one body, and each member belongs to one another.
Several years ago, Sears tried to revitalize itself as a retailer by being more relevant to a younger demographic. The effort — and its results — were both questionable. If you didn’t see it, Sears developed a retail website aimed at, um, zombies. Yes, zombies. While neither Sears nor the original website are still around, you can find the videos that they published on YouTube (if you really want to.)
The thing you will always notice about the way zombies are portrayed in media is that they’re pretty uncoordinated, trying to get all that literal dead weight moving about. That’s like me playing any sport, actually. Imagine having a body that won’t do what you want it to do. The parts don’t move together, you’re always hitting yourself or tripping over your own feet, and some things just don’t work anymore. Sadly, some churches are like that.
Paul likens the church at Rome to a body with many members that don’t all carry out the same function. That’s how bodies work. Some parts grasp, other parts move the body about; some parts carry things, other parts take in information and process it. Eyes see, ears hear, hands touch, feet walk. Every toe, every finger serves a purpose so that a body can do the things that bodies are supposed to do. But when some parts stop working as they should, the whole body runs into trouble. Like zombies, we just can’t get everything going in the same direction at the same time.
In any gathering of people you’ll find folks with different goals and ideals, different agendas and purposes. Even in the church, where our desires ought to be aligned with God’s, we have differing opinions of how to get there, or what the end result should look like. In Rome, there were Jewish Christians who were accustomed to the church of Christ being an extension of Judaism, with the same moral principles and expectations. There were also gentile Christians who saw the church as something radical, so different from society that it would shock the people around them. Some may have been comfortable to the point of complacence, while others may have wanted to change things up and fly in the face of the status quo. Neither side would have been wrong, but they might not be entirely right, either.
What was needed among these culturally diverse believers was compromise, and the foundation of that was the realization that “each member belongs to one another.” Neither side could claim superiority as long as they understood that they weren’t really sides at all. The Jews belonged to the gentiles, and the gentiles belonged to the Jews. The older Christians belonged to the newer believers, and the young belonged to the old. Find any difference that people use to divide themselves, and substitute them for the “one another” in Romans 12:5. Paul needed to remind the Romans that they were all working to move the same body to the same goal — Jesus Christ. That’s something the modern church needs to be reminded of, too.
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