And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:22-23)
St Paul tells us a few times that the Church is the Body of Christ. When we become a Christian, we become part of His Body, the Church. That is why from the earliest days of Christianity there was the idea that one Christian is no Christian. One is never alone as a Christian because one belongs to the Body of Christ and to all the members which compose Christ’s Body. And because Christ’s Body is the Church composed of all Christians, there is no such thing as ‘Christ alone’ for Christ is always present in His Body.
“… God has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22-23). Orthodox Theologian John McGuckin comments on this theology of the Church:
Although, Perhaps, not many have seen this, it is also an outline of what I will call his immediate and germinal principle of (what we today would call) a ‘theology of the Church’ (ecclesiology). The Church is that community bonded in spiritual communion with the Lord of History, and thereby with each other, which thus concurs in some real form of consensus in mind, and spirit, and purpose, resisting fragmentation, individualism and dissolution, as it is drawn together in a prophetic mission to name the origin and goal of the good and the true. It is not a bad definition of ‘Church,’ even today. (SEEING THE GLORY, p 115)
As those who compose Christ’s Body on earth, it is we Christians make Christ present to others as well as being the instruments of Christ’s ministry to the people He created.
Following the Apostle’s words about the body of Christ, St Symeon the New Theologian spoke of how he looked at his hand, his finger, and all his bodily members, and saw Christ himself (Hymn 15). We are the eyes and ears of God in this world, by which He sees the needs of those who suffer, and we also are his hands and feet, by which succor is given to those in need. (John Behr, THE CROSS STANDS WHILE THE WORLD TURNS, p 34)
For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. (Colossians 2:9-10)