Your Knees Are Blind

“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)

The Basket Case Chronicles #4

“Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you” (1 Cor. 1:10-11).

One of the central problems at Corinth was their fractiousness, and so Paul begins his letter to them by pleading with them, in the name of Jesus Christ, that they drop their contentions. Some from the household of Chloe had told Paul about those contentions, and he saw immediately how destructive they would be (v. 11). He beseeches them, and what he says is quite striking. He asks them to speak the same thing, to avoid divisions in their midst, to be perfectly joined together in the same mind, and to be perfectly joined together in the same judgment (v. 10).

This exhortation is greatly needed in the American church together, not because we invented fractiousness, but because we have sought to make it into a virtue. On the flip side, we have tried to represent obedience to

this as a vice. What would we say about a congregation that actually obeyed the apostle’s exhortations here. The first thing that would come to mind is that they “had all drunk the Kool-Aid.” We would charge the elder board with being a bunch of patsies and yes men.

Of course there is a sin associated with mindless conformity—a sin that Paul addresses later in this letter when he demands diversity in the body. The body needs to have different organs—knees, eyes, kidneys. The different organs all perform different functions, and it is not obedience to this passage to try to require the knees to see, or the kidneys to hear. But neither is it obedience to demand that every organ act in a spastic and contrarian way, for the sake of the free exchange of ideas. All the organs do different things, but in a body with hand/eye coordination, they do different things toward the same end. They should be perfectly joined, which is why Paul pleads for that here.