Forty Readings And I Am Not In It

Eleven at night, one lamp, and a desk that would tell you everything about the man sitting at it if you were the kind of person who reads desks.

Three translations open at the same chapter. A concordance with a receipt in it holding a place from about four years ago. A notebook with the good pen on top of it. And through the doorway, warm and yellow, a kitchen where his family is still up and laughing about something that happened at a table an hour ago, and he can hear them, and he loves it.

Nine years he has been coming back to this chapter.

He can teach it. He has taught it, twice, well. He can tell you what the word for gifts is and how it sits next to the word for grace. He can walk you through the argument from verse four to verse thirty-one and show you where Paul turns. He knows what the Corinthians were doing and why it made Paul reach for a body.

And in nine years and forty readings he has never once been able to find himself on the page.

That is the thing he has never said to anybody, and he is a man who says most things. He has read the lists. He has read them in three languages. He has weighed himself honestly against every item and come away with the same result every time, which is not nothing, exactly, but is nothing he could stand up and name.

So he sits at eleven at night with the lamp on and his family laughing in the next room, and the sentence that has formed in him over nine years is this: everybody else seems to find themselves in here, and I have looked forty times.

What this page will not do

Let me say it before anything else, because you will be reading me the way you read everything, which is closely.

This is not going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you carefully enough that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the end you can weigh yourself against. There is no assessment coming, and there is no more rigorous assessment coming either, which for you is the version that would be tempting.

That is not evasion. It is the shape of the passage itself, and you have been close enough to see it for nine years.

You have not failed to find something that was there to be found, and forty readings did not miss it. I am not offering that as encouragement. It is a claim about what 1 Corinthians 12 does and does not undertake to do, and the Holy Spirit has never once bound Himself to name a man before He would use him.

The chapter answers a different question

Here is the thing you already half know, and have not let yourself finish.

The Corinthians asked a question about gifts. They wanted to know which ones counted and who had which. It was a question about ranking wearing the clothes of a question about theology, and every congregation since has asked it again in its own accent.

Paul does not answer it. Read the chapter as a piece of rhetoric rather than a reference work and you can watch him decline. He lists gifts twice and both times the list does its work in the argument and then is dropped. He never once tells an individual what theirs is. He never gives criteria. He never offers a means of identification. In a letter where he is perfectly willing to name names and settle disputes, he settles this one by changing the subject to a body.

He does that on purpose, and the purpose is stated.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.1 Corinthians 12:25

You have been searching a passage for an answer it deliberately withholds, and the withholding is the argument rather than a gap in it. That is not my clever reading. 1 Corinthians 12:25 states the goal Paul is writing toward, and the Spirit who inspired the omission did not leave the page unfinished.

The verb, and whose it is

Now go to the sentence in the middle, and read it the way you would read it if a student brought it to you.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

Look at the grammar rather than the vocabulary.

The subject is God. The verb is set. The object is the members. The adverbial phrase is as it hath pleased him.

Now ask what a reader is meant to come away holding. Not the identity of the member. The member is never described. Every load-bearing word in the sentence is about the one doing the placing and the fact that He was pleased to do it.

The chapter is not a mirror. It is a statement about an agent.

You are the object of that verb rather than the subject of a question, and the sentence has been telling you who placed you every one of those forty times. I am not straining the text. The grammar of 1 Corinthians 12:18 puts everything on God's side of the clause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line and makes it land on a man at a desk rather than merely be parsed by him.

Which means the nine years were not wasted

Do not let this become another way of failing.

You did not misread it. You read it beautifully and repeatedly, and what you were doing was bringing the right question to a text that answers a better one. Everybody does that with this chapter. You just did it forty times with a concordance, which is only the same error done thoroughly.

And what is on offer instead can be settled tonight, at that desk, in about ninety seconds. Not what am I. The chapter will not say. But whose body am I in, and who put me where I stand.

You know the second one. It is probably so ordinary you have never counted it. The people who end up telling you things. The thing you always end up doing when a room needs something. The chair you are sitting in at eleven at night with a family laughing in the next room.

You have a place, it was decided, and the deciding was done by God rather than discovered by you. The word is explicit that the setting was His and that it pleased Him, and the Spirit divides to every man severally as He wills, which is a sentence about His choosing rather than about your locating.