The Eye Cannot Say That

The form is new because the system is new, and the system is new because somebody upstairs went to a conference. Fourteen years he has worked in that yard and this is the fourth time he has filled in the same nine boxes.

Through the window the whole place is moving. Somebody is shouting a number across the slipway and somebody else is shouting it back wrong on purpose. A hull came off the blocks this morning and went in clean and everybody made the noise you make. It is a good yard. He likes it there.

He gets to the box that says who should be contacted, and he writes his brother, four states away, whom he speaks to twice a year and likes perfectly well, and then he sits there with the pen not quite off the paper.

Because he has already done the sum. He does it about once a month and it always comes out the same, and it is not dramatic and it is not a cry for anything. It is arithmetic. If he were not here tomorrow, the yard would run. The shouting would go on. Somebody would learn the two things he does that nobody else does and would learn them in a week.

Nobody would be short of anything.

You have run that sum. You did not shout it, you did not tell anybody, and you did not think it was despair, because it does not feel like despair. It feels like being realistic, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to get at.

Paul does not encourage here. He legislates.

I want to take you to one line, and the whole of its force is in a single word, and almost every time it gets read out that word goes by unnoticed.

And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.1 Corinthians 12:21

Cannot.

Not should not. Not ought to be more grateful. Not let us all try to be kinder about the feet. Paul had the whole language of exhortation available to him and he did not use it. He wrote an impossibility.

Because what he is describing is not manners. It is anatomy. When an eye says to a hand I have no need of thee, the eye is not being rude. The eye is saying something factually false about its own body, and a body cannot be right about itself and say that at the same time. The sentence is void. It does not fail a test of politeness. It fails to be true.

You are held in your place by a fact and not by anybody's goodwill, and a fact does not soften on the days you are unimpressive. That is set down in 1 Corinthians 12:21 as an impossibility rather than as an appeal, and the Spirit who carried that line into the letter left no clause in it for a member to sign himself out.

Now here is the thing I want you to sit with, and take your time.

You have been saying it from the inside.

Everything about your sum is the eye's sentence, aimed inward. This body has no need of me. Same claim. Same speaker. And Paul's word covers it in exactly the same way, because he did not write a rule about how members should talk to each other, he wrote a fact about what a body is.

You are a member set into a body that cannot truthfully say it has no need of you, and that goes for the version of the sentence that comes out of your own mouth. 1 Corinthians 12:21 does not ask the eye to be nicer, it tells the eye what it is not able to say, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a prohibition exactly where a man like you was expecting a compliment.

The chapter defends the ones nobody can see

Read on a verse, because Paul knows what you are about to do. You are about to agree with the principle in general and apply the exception to yourself.

He says the members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary. Not tolerated. Not included for the sake of a warm feeling. Necessary, which is a word about the body's requirements, not about anybody's generosity.

And notice he says seem. He is not disputing that some parts look slight. He is disputing what that appearance is evidence of. The chapter goes out of its way to defend the parts that nobody can see working, which is not an accident and not a flourish: those were the members most at risk of being talked out of their own place, in that church and in yours.

You have a real part among God's people, and it was not issued according to strength or visibility and cannot be revoked by a shortage of either. Scripture calls the members that seem feeble necessary, one verse further on in the same chapter, and the Spirit did the setting in place without consulting your monthly estimate of yourself.

And hear what this article is not doing, because you have been braced for it since the second paragraph. Nobody here is giving you a job. There is no slot at the end of this, no thing you are being signed up for, no suggestion that you would count more if you took something on. That would just be the same audit run by somebody else. The chapter does not audit you. It forbids the sentence.