And so the apostle Paul assumed that “building up the body” had something to do with growing up together, Christian and Christian, growing up into Jesus, the body’s head, and that sometimes each part isn’t “working properly.”  Why does that happen?  Why does a body not work well, work rightly?  There are probably as many reasons for that as there are days in a year, but I’d like to focus on one that has to do with something Augustine said well.  Something about ordering love.

Early on in his book On Christian Teaching, Augustine writes concerning “rightly ordered love” and asserts that proper way of relating to others means loving God for His own sake and then loving others and self for God’s own sake (for we and they are His creations).  Consider [italics mine]:

The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things.  He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally.  No sinner, qua sinner, should be loved; every human being, qua human being, should be loved on God’s account; and God should be loved for himself.  And if God is to be loved more than any human being, each person should love God more than he loves himself.  Likewise, another human being should be loved more than our own bodies, because all these things are to be loved on account of God whereas another person can enjoy God together with us in a way in which the body cannot . . .

Of all those who are capable of enjoying God together with us, we love some whom we are helping, and some who are helping us; some whose help we need and some whose needs we are meeting; some to whom we give no benefit and some by whom we do not expect any benefit to be given to us.  But it should be our desire that they all love God together with us, and all the help that we give to or receive from them must be related to this end.

We see the original picture of this in the Old Testament command to love God with all of our heart, soul, and might and then also to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  Jesus also casts a sense of order and priority into our presuppositions when he tells those following him to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness first above other things.  The Gospel and letters of John are replete with commands and nudges about loving one another in response to the love of God.

When we (and I mean ‘I’ here, too) love rightly, God for his own sake and others for God’s sake, we (I) will strive to bring others in on it.  That probably makes the most sense in the context of the local church, but I think it’s true of all Christian relationships at their best.  When we (I) don’t love rightly, things get out of order and start to break down.  Or, as Paul might put it: being the body of Christ means making intentional effort “to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

Disordered loves results in a body where each part isn’t working properly, and I’ll call that malfunction.  More on that tomorrow.