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Jesus – the perfect whole

‘There are diverse gifts, but the same Spirit, and diverse ministries, but the same Lord, and diverse works, but the same God working all of them in every one. For just as the body has many parts, and all the parts make one body, so it is with Christ’ (1 Corinthians 12:4‑6,12).

Paul goes on to emphasize the way in which this diversity is essential to the functioning of the body. No part is any more or less important than any other. Every member has its part to play.

‘So it is with Christ’: it takes all of us to make up the body of Christ today, and none is any more or any less important than any other. The gifts of every type are essential to the life and work of the body of Christ on earth. Our diversity is vital, and so is our unity.

And just as the body of Christ today contains the whole variety of humankind, so also Jesus in the years of his earthly ministry embodied the whole variety of humankind. All nine strategies – all nine types – are found together, uniquely balanced and uniquely perfected, in Jesus of Nazareth.

Let us begin at EIGHT, with the Jesus many people least like to see, the Jesus they least like to quote: the Jesus who is energized, confrontational, and challenging. But we need this Jesus: the Jesus who recognizes where power lies, and fights for the powerless.

In Mark 3:1‑6, Jesus heals on the Sabbath – which is forbidden – right there in the synagogue, quite knowingly and deliberately in full sight of the disapproving religious authorities. There is nothing discrete about this healing. This is no hidden rule-breaking, where nobody will know. This is a deliberate challenge, right in the face of his enemies. Jesus does what he does, right there in front of them, and they do indeed go out immediately to plot against him. This is Jesus kicking the boundaries and breaking the rules and aggressively challenging the powerful – for the sake of the weak. This is Jesus at EIGHT.

There is an EIGHT proclamation in Jesus’ teaching, which we too often avoid. We like to hear Jesus calling the humble and the lowly to come up higher, and we love to proclaim that message – but Jesus also took time to condemn the haughty and the hypocritical. Jesus made an analysis of the power structures around him and daringly shouted down those who abused them. There is a whole chapter of this in Matthew 23: ‘woe to you, blind guides, hypocrites, whitewashed tombs, murderers – the blood of the prophets is upon you.’ There are thirty-six verses of this. Only for the final three verses of the chapter does EIGHT go to TWO, as it often will, and Jesus longs to mother Jerusalem like a mother-hen gathering her brood under her wings. These three verses are quoted far more often than the other thirty-six, but Jesus can be confrontational EIGHT just as much as wooing TWO.

The cleansing of the temple in John 2:13‑15 sounds like angry aggressive EIGHT, kicking hard against the boundaries of what is possible – or ONE, with a blaze of anger at the impurity being wrought upon the place – but there is one small phrase, only here in John’s account, which reveals the event to be far more carefully planned than any burst of anger. In verse 14, Jesus finds the temple full of traders – but before the driving out in the second half of verse 15, in the first half of the verse he makes a lash out of ropes. This must have taken some considerable time – so the event is far more carefully considered than we sometimes imagine. Jesus goes to see the temple. He leaves. He decides what to do. And then he does it. He makes a lash of ropes: a slow piece of handicraft – there is plenty of time here to ponder what is about to happen. And then he returns to the temple and drives his way through it – like an elephant about its task. This is not a burst of anger. This is NINE finding its calmly focused energy, and following through a plan, unstoppable once begun.

There is something very NINE about the parable of the sower (Luke 8:9‑15). We often take this as a model for the outreach work of the church, and worry about the success or otherwise of our efforts – whether they bear fruit in the proper abundance. The wonderful reassurance of this parable is that the sower is never criticized. The sower’s only task is to throw that seed – to get it out into the environment. The sower is not criticized for the fact that some falls on the rock and some falls in the shrubbery and some is carried away by the birds. The sower is just to keep on sowing regardless, and not to fret – for some will fall on good soil, and yield a hundredfold.

And the beautiful call of Jesus at NINE is this: ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28‑30). Into the wearying complexity of our lives comes this simple call to come to Jesus, there to find our rest and our perfect peace.

Elsewhere Jesus sleeps peacefully in the stern of the boat while a storm rages around – and then he calms the storm: this is also Jesus at NINE (Mark 4:35‑41).

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus at ONE – the idealist and the perfectionist. Time and again in Matthew 5 Jesus quotes the Old Testament law – ‘you have heard it said’ – and then he takes it further, takes it back to its ideals and toward the perfect: ‘you have heard it said … but I say to you.’ You have heard it said that murder is wrong, but I say to you that anger and insult are sinful as well. You have heard it said that adultery is wrong, but I say to you that to look with lust is a sin. You have heard it said that you must perform the oath you swear, but I say to you that you should fulfill what you say without the need for any oath. You have heard it said that your retaliation should be limited and proportionate – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – but I say to you, do not retaliate at all. You have heard it said that you should love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say to you that you should love your enemies as well. The entire sermon – there are two more chapters – is a celebration of the idealism and perfectionism of ONE, of the orderly complete comprehensive teaching skills of ONE – and of ONE’s link to FOUR, where clarity becomes poetry.

Whenever Jesus acts from compassion Jesus is at TWO – and the most supreme moment is the washing of the disciples’ feet in John 13:3‑9. In the chapters that follow, Jesus talks repeatedly about the love that flows between the Father, and himself, and the disciples. To the earlier commandments – love God, love your neighbor, and even love your enemies (Matthew 5:43‑48; 22:34‑40) – he adds the more intimate ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15:12). All of this is TWO. In the most practical TWO commandment, Jesus explicitly states that the one who wishes to be great should aim for the role of servant, and the one who wishes to be first should be like a slave, ‘even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve’ (Matthew 20:25‑28).

The way in which Jesus deals gently with his small band of disciples shows Jesus very clearly at THREE, leading and inspiring and building up the team. After his baptism and the temptations in the wilderness, Jesus begins as an inspiring leader working alone – which THREE can be (Luke 4:14‑21) – but not long afterwards, he is able to commission a team of no fewer than seventy to continue in the same work. He remains very much alongside them, inspiring and enabling, following on where they have gone ahead (Luke 10:1): the instinct of team-leader THREE is to remain a member of the team.

In every life there are FOUR moments – moments of separation and pain – and on this basis we see Jesus at FOUR most especially in the temptations in the wilderness and in the garden of Gethsemane. On both occasions he is very much alone, doing battle with fear and temptation, and seeing it all in images, emotions, and dreams: the stones appear like bread; there are visions of Jerusalem and of all the nations of the world; there is the cup of suffering – ‘let this cup pass from me’ – and angels appear to comfort him (Luke 4:1‑13; 22:39‑46).

The calm way in which Jesus concludes his meeting with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3‑11) could suggest that he actually dealt with this situation more from FOUR than from TWO: he did not so much pity the woman – a TWO response – as empathize with her and all victims like her, as one who was about to be sacrificed himself under the hypocrisy of the supposed guardians of God’s law. Certainly throughout the scene Jesus creates a perfect work of art – full of dramatic tension, and with a perfect poetic line at its center: ‘he stood up tall and said, let the sinless one among you cast the first stone.’

FOUR has an eye for beauty as well as a gift for poetry – ‘consider the lilies of the field’ (Matthew 6:28‑29) – and FOUR has an eye for the meaningful, dramatic act – like riding into the city on a donkey (Matthew 21:6‑10).

The perfect gift of Jesus at FOUR is the institution of the Eucharist. It has everything. It is about pain, deeper than any of us can know, symbolized in broken bread and poured out wine. That pain is converted into the most profound, the most beautiful, the most simple symbolic act, with so many levels of meaning: the gathering, the breaking, the transforming, the sharing, and the uniting; bread for all of our ordinariness, wine for our sorrow and joy; a connection with the Last Supper and the cross in history; a connection with the heavenly banquet still to come; the life and nourishment of the risen Christ in symbols of both death and life, for the people of the resurrection on their journey today. In the Eucharist, pain and suffering, still remembered, are converted into life. It was a gift to the world, and the world has received it. Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘this is my body, given for you.’ He took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘do this in remembrance of me.’ And we do – a million times a million times over – and Christ is made present once again. It is the whole of time and eternity’s most perfect piece of FOUR.

The FIVE in Jesus seeks time alone to pray – and to think with objectivity. In the wilderness and in Gethsemane, Jesus fought a battle in logic and words as well as in emotions. In Mark 1:35‑39, Jesus goes out of the town alone to pray, and there in prayer resolves not to return to those who are seeking him, but to move on to the next town. Jesus commends the strategy of FIVE, to think it through first, for all of his followers, when he mocks those who – metaphorically – start a tower they cannot complete, or begin a battle they can never win (Luke 14:28‑33). In Luke 2:40‑52 we see Jesus being FIVE at the age of twelve in the temple in Jerusalem, already growing ‘in both wisdom and stature,’ taking it all in and thinking it through. The result is that later he teaches with authority, ‘and not as their scribes’ (Matthew 7:28‑29).

The loyalty of SIX is seen supremely as Jesus moves toward the cross: ‘not my will, but thine, be done’ (Luke 22:42). The whole story of Jesus’ faithfulness to God’s plan of salvation is told in Philippians 2:6‑11: ‘Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, did not grasp at equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness; and being in human form, humbled himself, becoming obedient even to death, to death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him, and gave him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth’ – all this through the faithfulness and the loyalty and the courage which is SIX: to cling fast to that which is surely of God, and not let go.

And Jesus even has the wonderful, joyful, humorous light touch of SEVEN. How many fish are caught when the risen Jesus appears at the lakeside? More than strictly necessary – at one hundred and fifty three (John 21:1‑14). How much wine at the wedding in Cana in Galilee? More than strictly decent, and good quality as well (John 2:1‑11). But how many loaves and fish are available to feed five thousand? The optimist and the generalist say, let’s break it up and share it out and see how far we get (John 6:9‑13). And there is something about redeemed SEVEN which – like Jesus of Nazareth – has seen all the pain and the sin of the world, and still believes that the kingdom of God is among us (Luke 17:21), still believes in resurrection: still believes that there is hope for us all.

And so it is that uniquely in Jesus we see all nine types, and all nine types perfected: the team leadership of THREE, the courageous loyalty of SIX, and the steadfastness and peacefulness of NINE; the idealism of ONE, the compassion of TWO, the creativity of FOUR, the quiet wisdom of FIVE, the playfulness of SEVEN, and the challenge of EIGHT.

Our calling as individuals is not to be the whole body of Christ complete in ourselves – but each to be one member of the body of Christ. Each brings different gifts and blessings, together making up the completeness of the body of Christ on earth. For each one of us, the perfection of our particular gift is seen in the earthly ministry of Jesus in the Gospels. Each one of us can aspire to Christ-likeness in the gifts we have received. And each one of us can take up a place reserved and ready for us within the living temple of God’s church on earth. Every gift is welcome – and every gift is needed to complete the whole.

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