The Body of Christ is Heavy

Embracing the pain that comes with loving the church

This last week, a predictable liturgy played itself out. As has become all-too-common, a pastor called, trembling with anger and bitterness at how, once again, they’d been hurt by parishioners who’d left because he hadn’t proven to be as “Spirit-filled” as they’d wanted him to be. Within hours, another friend needed to talk through a recent experience of being hurt by a pastoral leader in their community. The dizzying concoction of both conversations—seemingly arising within hours of each other—underscored once again the difficulty that comes with willingly being a part of God’s church. 

The body of Christ is heavy. 

Church hurt brings a different level of pain. Also, church hurt has a unique level of impact. I’ve never met anyone whose life was derailed because a bowling league, book club, or yoga class left them wounded. Church hurt is so excruciating because church hurt entails not only the pain but the double wounding of ideals and longings one has had for God and for the people who love God. The pain we incur from God’s people differs from other pains because they are tied to the people, organizations, and spaces where we were likely most touched and transformed. The more profound that transformation, the deeper the pain that it causes. That we have been so hurt by them is tied to how meaningful they were to us. I’ve never met someone who had to go into therapy because they lost a ping pong game. But I have known plenty who needed professional help to walk through spiritual wounds that came at the hands of Christians. 

For any Christian leader who seeks to serve the church, we must undertake our sacred work with great sensitivity and care for those who have had to bear these spiritual injuries. I may want everyone to find a nurturing and caring environment in the church. This is good. I should seek to restore sheep to the care of the church. But I must do so knowing that the very people I’m seeking to serve come with scars on their souls. Scars should never be dismissed. And scars have their own stories that must be welcomed to speak.

An epiphany came that same week. Backstory: two months ago, during a routine appointment, my dentist discovered a curious lump inside the left cheek of my mouth. For the first time in my 43 years, I felt the panic one experiences from seeing a medical professional exhibit even slight concern with something regarding my body. She assured me all was likely just fine. There was little to worry about. But I’d never experienced that feeling before. She wisely scheduled an appointment for me to have the lump looked at by a specialist. Which led to this past week. In the same week that my two friends had called me to talk about church wounds, I sat in a chair to have that lump in my mouth investigated. The nurse came in. And she took my blood pressure. Almost immediately after seeing my state of anxiety, she stopped, looked at me, gently placed her hand on my shoulder, and asked: “are you okay?” 

I wasn’t. 

The very act of going to a dentist has always caused great anxiety to me. And I’m not alone. To say nothing of the fact that I sitting in a dentist’s chair with the distinct possibility that I was about to be told I may have cancer. I asked the nurse what my blood pressure was. It was very high. Then she assured me how common this was. What is called “white coat syndrome”—the anxiety and fear beset with coming to the doctor—has dramatically disrupted the peace of many patients she had seen before. She told me that even the phrase “the dentist’s office” can cause one’s blood pressure to spike. I had no idea. 

As I drove away, that “white coat syndrome” idea sat with me. The irony of it all. How often can it be that the very place where we can be most healed is the place where we face our greatest fear and anxiety? To simply tell someone who has been hurt by the church that they need to ‘just go back’ entirely fails to capture the stories and narratives that made them leave. There is a reason people have white coat syndrome. And there is a reason people are afraid to go back to church. 

More than ever—at least in my life—the body of Christ feels heavy. What does it mean that the church is called “the body of Christ” in the New Testament? Two times, it turns out, Paul calls the church the “body of Christ.” (see 1 Cor 12.27; Eph 4.12) Uniquely, Paul uses this metaphor with two different churches where there seems to be some division. He describes the church as Christ’s ‘body’ (singular). There are not two bodies of Christ. There is only one body of Christ. Paul’s metaphor of the church (as the people of God) is not unique to Paul. Rome, it turns out, would utilize similar imagery when they would refer to the empire as the ‘body.’ Paul is seeking to re-purpose this language for a new reality.

Paul would employ this metaphor often such as when he would speak of the body of Christ with all its parts—eyes, legs, feet, hands. And Christ is the head. It is an intriguing metaphor to speak of the church as a human body. Bodies are heavy. Cumbersome. Awkward. Only once in my life have I had to learn this experientially. When my father-in-law passed away, I was presented with the unenviable task of gently placing his worn body in a body bag. It took nearly thirty minutes to move him a few feet. Anyone who has ever carried a human body knows it to be something they’d never want to do again. Bodies are heavy. And the experience of carrying them is not quickly forgotten.

The gospel stories speak very little of the disciples’ immediate response to Jesus's death on Good Friday. But before the sunset on that fateful day, a man named Joseph of Arimathea came to Pontius Pilate to request Jesus’s cold, dead body, so that it might be properly buried. The text reads, “Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus...He came and took the body away.” (Jn 19.38)

It’s a subtle verse one could easily move past, but acres of meaning await within it. According to John—after the crowds fled and the slowly muffled screams of the executed ceased—Joseph made the sorrowful journey to receive Jesus’s body as Friday drew to a close. Slowly, carefully, Joseph lowered the cross, pulled the large Roman nails from Jesus’s fragile hands and feet, and carried him in his arms. 

Allow, for a moment, your imagination to paint the devastation of pulling those nails and along with them uprooting your greatest dreams and hopes. Imagine how awkward it would have been then and there. The darkness was never thicker. Hopes and dreams were dashed. Years earlier, most likely, Joseph had left behind his life of predictability and safety to follow an unknown Savior, only to have his vision crushed the night before. Now Joseph held his dead dream in his arms. 

He hadn’t signed up for this. This wasn’t in the fine print. What a failure. What a waste. 

But Joseph still showed up.¹

Joseph had no clue when he woke up that Friday that part of his journey of following Christ would entail carrying his heavy body. The body of Christ—it is a heavy body. From time to time, though, we have to carry it. We do it for with a particular reason. We do it because we are a people who believe in the resurrection; who hold firmly to the fact that the body in our arms that feels so dead will not be dead forever. We carry that heavy body of Christ because we dare to believe that Friday isn’t the end of any story. 

The lump in my mouth, thank God, was nothing other than a fibrous growth that formed as a result of years of repeatedly biting the skin in my inner cheek year-after-year. I’ve been told I always eaten too fast. But the anxiety that comes with going to the place where I can experience healing is a real one for us—not just with the dentist. More often, this can be true with the people of God. This little reflection isn’t in any way intended to convince someone whose been in a spiritually abusive religious environment to go back to that environment. Nor is an invitation to sweep all the pain under the rug and go back to the place where we were harmed. Anything but. 

Rather, it is an attempt at awakening for all of us the simple gift of knowing that we aren’t the only ones in history who have learned the hard way how heavy the church can be in our lives. Yes, the body of Christ may be heavy. 

But it is still worth carrying.

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Thanks for reading my work. As always, you can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can listen to my podcast, Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore what the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing with me about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.

1. I first explored the intimate story of Joseph Arimathea from John’s gospel in my 2015 book on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Holy Week, A Glorious Dark: Finding Hope in the Tension Between Belief and Experience (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker). Some of my language from that book is borrowed here.