I have some degree of sympathy with the argument because I once made it myself. I was in high school, and served faithfully as the poster child for the National Sophomoric Self-Important Blow-Hard Association. I dressed in black, listened to Pink Floyd albums. I wrote morbid poetry, wore my hair over my eyes. And I made this incredibly profound discovery- the church is full of hypocrites. I know it’s shocking, but I was the one who blew the lid on the whole hypocrisy in the church thing. That was me.That was my excuse for not embracing the gospel. Jesus was more than alright with me. But those friends of His, how déclassé. Jesus and I were just too cool for the rest of those geeks that claimed to be His friends, and so I couldn’t make the claim that I was with Him.
It is powerful evidence of the potency of His providence that God could use my pomposity to illustrate two important points. First, it highlights the importance of our collective image. I’m not suggesting that we play to the crowd, pander to the audience around us. We will do Jesus no favors if we try to out world the world so they’ll like us. But that doesn’t mean complete indifference. While our goal is to be pleasing in the sight of God, we can know something of how we are doing by our reputation among the heathen. We are called to love one another, for instance. Whatever the world might think of this, we are still to do it. But we are likewise told that by this, our love for each other, the world will know we are His. Our obedience, steeped in a happy indifference to the thinking of the world, leads in turn to a happy difference in the thinking of the world.
We need to understand that while the lost may have some foolish ideas of what we are supposed to be about, we are nevertheless the incarnation to them. We are the Jesus they can see. That we are His body not only means that we ought never to have a war between the toes and the nose, it also means that we are the image of Him to all the world. If they would see Jesus, they must look at us. We not only make visible the invisible kingdom of God, but we make visible God’s invisible King.
This also answers, however, my own previous dilemma. Or rather it exposes my former folly. In another context Paul admonishes us that no one ever hated his own body. But for me to look down my nose at the church, and try to marry that with a love for Jesus, that just shows that I don’t know Jesus. His identity with the church isn’t limited to double imputation of our sin to Him, His righteousness to us. Remember how He responded to Saul, “Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute Me?” Jesus so identifies Himself with the church that those who persecute the church, persecute Jesus. We tear asunder what God has brought together when we claim to love Jesus, but despise His bride, His body, the church.
The two of these points, that we must be lovely because we are the body of Christ, and that we must love the body of Christ, come together when we consider our call to be prophetic. We all ought to be like Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. Or perhaps better still, we ought to be like Hosea. When we take the church to task, whether it be for worldliness, for faulty thinking or doing, we are not speaking to them out there. We are instead speaking to ourselves, to the body of Christ. It is because we are the body of Christ that we must bring the Word of God to bear in our common life. Our love isn’t a permissive love that allows us to continue, without challenge to besmirch the image of our husband. But neither is it a mean-spirited love that denies that we are the body of Christ. When the church succumbs to the wiles of the world, we chasten her/us, but never disown her/us.
Do you ever read the gospels, and long to be there? Do you ever think, “If only I could have been there to see this or that, then I would love Jesus better.”? To paraphrase Jesus with respect to His Father, “Has He not been with us this long, and still we do not know? He who has seen the church has seen the Son, for the Son and the church are one.” We haven’t learned the lesson enough if our response is merely to be less cynical about the church. We are called to love the church, to be filled with a holy passion.
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