The Spirit of the Lord, §9: Corpus Christi

The ekklesia is the corporate body of Christ, the communal fellowship of those who participate in the historical being of God in Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:23). As the “body of Christ,” we are then called to “bear fruit for God” (Rom. 7:4). The church, according to Paul, is the “body of Christ” not because the distinction between Christ’s body and our body has been eclipsed—in fact, just the opposite. The particular body of Christ and the universal body of Christ are as strictly differentiated as the particular mission of Christ and the universal mission of the church: Jesus the Messiah completed in his particular body the unique and exclusive event of reconciliation, which then frees humanity to become the universal body of those reconciled to God. The ekklesia is in no way an extension of the incarnation; rather, the ekklesia depends wholly upon the unassimilable event of divine grace made manifest in the incarnate Son of God. The church is the corpus Christi only as those who receive their embodied identity as the communio sanctorum from the risen Lord.

We are the “body of Christ” only because Christ alone gave up his body “for us and for our salvation.” We are new creatures, because in Christ, God bore our old identity and bore it away on the cross. We pray with confidence, because Christ is the gracious mediator between us and the Father (Heb. 7:25). We “go on toward perfection” (Heb. 6:1), because Christ has already gone ahead of us and been perfected as the source of our salvation (Heb. 5:9). Only because Jesus Christ is the salvator mundi—the savior of the world—can the world rest in the assurance of its salvation. Only because Jesus was raised from the dead can we now have hope for our own resurrection. Only because Jesus Christ is the “one who sanctifies” are we able to be “those who are sanctified” in the power of the Spirit (Heb. 2:11). Only because the Crucified One “is our peace” (Eph. 2:14) can we become the cruciform community of peace. Only because God elected in Jesus Christ to be rejected in our place are we free from God’s rejection of us. Only because God elected in Jesus Christ to be accepted in our place are we free for God’s acceptance of us and for our response of faithful obedience. Out of this divine event of election—in which the Son elects the cross for himself and the covenant for humanity—the church arises as the covenantal community. Out of the crucified and resurrected body of Christ, the church emerges as the cruciform body of believers, the pilgrim people seeking the resurrectional renewal of all things, the ekklesia of those awakened to “the new life of the Spirit” (Rom. 7:6). The eschatological communion of saints is thus set apart by God to embody the messianic mission through word and sacrament, to take on the sanctified shape of God’s elect in the covenant of grace.