2d Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jan. 18, 2015
1 Cor 6: 13-15, 17-20
St. Ursula, Mt. Vernon
“The body is not for immorality, but for
the Lord, and the Lord is for the body; God raised the Lord and will also raise
us by his power” (1 Cor 6: 13).
Between now and Ash Wednesday, which is
exactly one month from today, we’ll read selections from the middle section of
St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians.
These Corinthians were the little Christian church of Corinth in Greece. We read other parts of this important letter
in the Sundays of Years A and C. (This
year we’re following the B cycle of readings.)
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| The geography of St. Paul's journeys (Wikipedia) |
Corinth wasn’t a big city like Rome or
Antioch, but it was a big crossroads for both sea and land traffic between
Italy and Asia and between north and south Greece. Paul had stayed there for at least a year and
a half, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, converting both Jews and pagans
to Jesus Christ and instilling in them the teachings of Jesus: the doctrine about God, the spiritual values,
and the morality of the Gospel.
Those teachings and values and morality
were a hard sell in Corinth, as they are in the Western world today. And not only in the West, as witnessed by
Pope Francis’s remarks in Manila on Friday about the nature of marriage and the
evil of contraception.
In particular, today’s reading from St.
Paul addresses the issue of sexual immorality, for which Corinth was notorious
in the 1st century, comparable perhaps to Times Square in the ’70s, Rio at
Carnival time, or Amsterdam any time.
Unfortunately, even Christians were susceptible to these
temptations—which shouldn’t really surprise us because we know the same
temptations in ourselves, and some Christian denominations today have actually
bought into the morality of the sexual revolution rather than offend people by
calling sin what it is.
Paul could be writing in our time. In this letter to the Corinthians he deals
with issues of fornication and incest.
In Romans he deals with homosexuality.
In today’s passage he speaks about how we perceive and use our bodies,
and here too he’s timely.
We often hear people say that they can do
what they want with their own bodies. To
some extent that’s true: how we dress
our bodies, what hairstyle we adopt, how much make-up or perfume to use, even
whether to get piercings or tattoos.
Paul’s approach to the body is positive
rather than negative. He reminds his
disciples in Corinth—who are disciples of Jesus more than of Paul—that their
bodies are not their own but
God’s: “Do you not know that your bodies
are members of Christ?” (6:15). God has
ransomed us from the power of Satan:
“you have been purchased at a price” (6:20). Paul doesn’t remind his readers that we were
created in God’s image (cf. Gen 1:27), but he does remind them that by the
death and resurrection of Christ that relationship has been restored.
God doesn’t save only our souls. He saves us—our
whole selves, including our bodies. “God
raised the Lord [i.e., Jesus] and will also raise us by his power.” We believe in the resurrection of the dead—another
question that Paul will address in this letter—and in eternal life of our whole
selves. Without our bodies, we are not
truly ourselves!
Well, then, if Christ has ransomed our
whole selves and thru Baptism made us part of his own body—“whoever is joined
to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (6:17)—and destined us for eternal
life with him, then how we treat our bodies and what we do with our bodies does
matter very much. “The body is not for
immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” The Lord has given himself up for us—for our
bodies, our souls, our whole selves; and he continues to give himself to us
sacramentally in the Eucharist—and so he has a claim on us.
Those of you who are my age or older
remember that the Baltimore Catechism taught us the effects of Baptism, one of
which is that we become temples of the Holy Spirit. That’s straight out of St. Paul: “Do you not know that your body is a temple
of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not
your own?” (6:19). The Spirit of God the
Father and of God the Son, the Holy Spirit, dwells in us as his temple. He makes us holy like himself thru Baptism
and the other sacraments and thru our listening to and taking in the Word of
God and thru our prayer lives.
In the news now and then we hear stories of
attacks on churches—churches bombed, burned, or shot up in Nigeria, Iraq,
India, or elsewhere. Or we hear of some
act of violence committed in a church, such as an assault or a murder. We’re even outraged when someone assaults a
sacred image in a church or robs the poor box or steals the baby Jesus from a
Christmas crib. We consider such actions
as sacrileges, as abominations.
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| St. Paul by El Greco |
Paul’s making the same point about
ourselves as temples of the Holy Spirit, as people whose bodies belong to God
and are meant to “glorify God” (6:20), not be used just for our own pleasure,
for our selfishness thru sinful behavior, such as—in Paul’s world—premarital
relations, adultery, homosexual activity, and sexual trafficking; and in our
world, besides those actions, such an explosion of pornography that, dollar for
dollar, it’s one of the biggest businesses in the world (maybe bigger than arms
sales); also the use of contraceptives and artificial means of conception: “the immoral person sins against his own
body,” and Paul maintains, against the body of Christ, against the Holy Spirit
whose temples we are.
If we were to go beyond the immediate
context of this passage in Paul’s letter, we could speak of other matters that
concern our bodies and how we use them, how we treat them—for example, about
health issues like diet, exercise, drug, alcohol, and tobacco abuse; about euthanasia
and other end-of-life questions; or even about the environment, which has an
impact on our physical lives and which Pope Francis intends to address in an
encyclical this summer. But, as the
Italians say, “Basta!” That’s enuf for
one homily!
God bless you—your whole selves, body and
soul!
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