The Word for a Tear
1 Corinthians 1:10 - "I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment."
In the late fifteenth century, according to the story the Japanese have long told, a shogun named Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl. It was a prized piece, imported from China, and he sent it back across the sea to be repaired. It came back to him stapled together with ugly metal clamps. Yoshimasa, dissatisfied, asked his own craftsmen to find a better way.
What they developed became known as kintsugi. Golden joinery. The craftsman fills the cracks of a broken bowl with lacquer and then dusts the seams with powdered gold, so the mended lines shine. The repair is left fully visible, and it becomes the most beautiful thing about the finished piece. The bowl that comes back from the kintsugi master has become something the unbroken bowl could never have been.
Hold that image while you read 1 Corinthians 1:10.
Paul writes to a fracturing church and reaches for two words we can easily skip past. The first is the word he uses for divisions. In Greek it is schismata, the root of our English word schism. But the meaning is more physical than that. A schisma is a tear. A rip. The word you would use for a torn garment or a split piece of cloth. Paul is describing fabric coming apart in someone's hands.
The second word is the one he uses for united. It is katartizō, and it’s a craftsman's word. In the Gospels it describes fishermen mending their nets (Matt 4:21). In the medical writing of the ancient world it described a physician setting a broken bone. It means to restore something to the condition it was made for, to make whole again what has come apart.
Put the two words side by side and Paul's sentence opens up. There is a tear among you, he says. Now submit to the mending.
Here is what most of us miss. We tend to read be united as a command to manufacture agreement, to grit our teeth and be nicer to the people who irritate us. The Greek says something gentler and deeper. Katartizō assumes a break we didn’t cause by ourselves and can’t fix by ourselves, and it assumes a skilled hand that can.
Such is unity in the church. It’s a healing we receive.
And the hand that does the mending isn’t ours. We don’t kintsugi ourselves; the bowl can’t repair the bowl. Paul grounds his whole appeal "by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ," because the One whose name owns the Church is the One whose hands do the restoring. He is the craftsman. The gold in the seams is His grace.
This is the gospel underneath the whole subject of unity. Christ didn’t come to a church that had its act together and merely needed maintenance. He came to people in pieces. He took the tear of the world into His own body on the cross, was Himself broken so that we could be made whole, and rose to become the mending of everything sin had ripped apart. The church is a collection of kintsugi pieces, and the gold in our seams preaches. When a congregation that has every natural reason to fracture instead holds together, the watching world sees something it can’t explain. It sees gold in the cracks. It sees a repair no human craftsman could have done.
So here’s the question to carry into your Monday: where in your life right now is there a tear you’ve been trying to will shut?
Maybe it’s a friendship in this church that has quietly gone cold. Maybe it’s a resentment you’be been managing instead of mending. Maybe it’sa conversation you keep deciding you’ll have later. You’ve been holding the torn edges together with your own fingers, hoping they will somehow knit on their own. Cloth does not mend itself.
Today: Bring the tear to the Physician who sets bones. Name it to Him honestly this morning. Ask Him to do the katartizō, the repair you cannot do, and then ask Him what your part in the mending looks like. The hands that were pierced are the hands that restore. Jesus has never yet been handed a broken thing He could not fill with gold!
Prayer: "Father, thank You that unity is Your gift to give and Your work to do. Where there is a tear in me this morning, in my friendships, in this church, in my own divided heart, do the mending only Your pierced hands can do, Jesus. In Your name, Amen."
-PK