The Church: Body of the Incarnate Son

Filipinos love taking pictures or have their pictures taken. At almost every wedding or birthday I have attended, there will always be a photo booth. In many of these booths, head gears and face masks are available. We can pick one or two of these gears and wear them and take our wacky shots. The problem is that our formal attires are also visible in the photos. This means that our heads or faces do not really match with our bodies. There is a disconnection between our wacky heads and our formal bodies. Our heads do not match our bodies, basically. This disconnection between the head and the body is a problem that the church experiences. The Bible is clear that the church is the body of Christ (Rom 12:4-5; 1 Cor 12:12-31; Eph 4:11-13; Col 1:24), we are members of the body (Eph 5:29-30), and that Jesus is the head of the body (Col 1:18; Eph 4:15-16; 5:23).

The church has many designations in the Bible, including “the house of God” (1 Tim 3:15), “household of God” (Eph 2:19), “household of faith” (Gal 6:10), but for me, the church must be understood primarily in relationship to Jesus Christ. This time, we will deal with the church as the body of the incarnate Christ.    

In our dealing with the world, we are challenged to represent Jesus Christ with who we are and what we have. The Filipino ventriloquist Ruther Urquia talks about how we can be a blessing with what we already have. We do not need to be someone else or desire to be someone else. We just need to look at what we have in our hands or bags, and use them to reach people to Christ. There is an absolute truth to this. This is a model exemplified by Moses with his staff, by David and his slingshot, and Paul with the perks of being an educated Roman citizen.

But Christ takes another and more extreme road: He becomes what He was not just to redeem us. The glorious mystery of the incarnation is that God became what He is not. And when He became human, He made Himself vulnerable to all our human experiences of pain, sorrow, even death. The word incarnate comes from two Latin words: in carne, which means “in the flesh.” John 1:14 writes: “The Word became flesh.” In order to save humanity, He became like one of us. He was human like us in every way (Heb 4:15). He went through all of human experience. He hungered and thirsted. He experienced pain. He ate our food. He sat in the grass. He slept on floors and boats. He walked with people. He came to people’s homes. He ate with people. He socialized with the outcast. Jesus did not build His ministry around the Temple or around a physical location. He came to the masses. He went to the lost to serve them.

The church is the body of Christ whose presence in the world must be modeled in the incarnation of the Son. The church is the body of Christ, whose members should imitate Jesus Christ in His willingness to be who they are not yet just to be able to reach others. The church is a spiritual reality incarnated within space and time, meeting the needs of the world. The church empathizes with its audience. The church goes where the people are in their situation.

This is called incarnational ministry. This can mean two things: (1) being better than who we are now, and (2) stooping down to the level of others. So if the former, the questions are: what are our self-conceived inefficiencies? How can we overcome them? How can you be equipped? If it is the latter, the questions are: What should I give up in order to serve? What hinders me from reaching people of lower positions?

When we are not able either to overcome our weaknesses or humble ourselves, then we become passive. If the church is the body of the One who made Himself in the flesh, then the body herself must be visible, tangible, and active. It cannot be that the head of the body is fighting and the body is hiding. It cannot be that the head of the body is incarnate and the body remains “spiritual.” That is a scary picture.

The church is the body of the incarnate Son, and in the same way that Jesus made himself available to the needy, the sick, and the unrighteous, the church must make herself present in the world for the sake of others. According to William Temple, “the church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.” The hand is not only there to feed our own mouths. Our arms are not there so we can embrace ourselves. Our tongues are not there so we can speak to ourselves. Our feet are not created just so we can walk only within the church. We exist not for our own sakes and for our mutual benefit. It is true that it is important for us to huddle up together, but at the end of the day, the church must also realize that it is the body of the One who makes Himself available to the world.