2d Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jan. 14, 2018
1 Cor 6: 13-15, 17-20
St. Bernardine of Siena, Suitland, Md.
“Do
you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” (1 Cor 6: 15).
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8th-c. codex of 1 Corinthians
(Wikipedia)
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Now,
from a distance, possibly from Ephesus, he’s writing to them in the spring of
57 to encourage them to persevere in the faith, to answer some doctrinal and
ethical questions they’d put to him, to chastise some wrongdoers, and to settle
some disputes. 1st-century Christians
were just as real as we are and had some of the same challenges we do.
Corinth
was a notoriously wicked city, well known for its vices. There’s a Greek word, korinthiazesthai, that means “to act like a Corinthian”; it’s a
euphemism for sexual depravity. In such
a context, the city’s few Christians were under constant moral assault, besides
the social pressure of being a tiny, unpopular minority and mostly from the
lower social classes.
With
constant temptations all around them, Paul reminds the Corinthian Church that
their entire persons, both soul and body, belong to Christ. When we’re baptized, Christ lays claim to
us. He seals us—brands us—as his own and
pours his Spirit upon us, turning us into temples of the Holy Spirit, as Paul
states (6:19). He also alludes to the
teaching of Genesis (2:24) that a man and a woman become one flesh, one body,
thru their marital union; by our Baptism, he says, and our reception of the
Eucharist, I add, we become one body with Christ: “Whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one
spirit with him” (6:17), shares the same Holy Spirit that filled Jesus of
Nazareth.
We’ve often heard people proclaim, “It’s my
body, and I can do what I want with it.”
It’s an argument used not only to defend so-called sexual liberation but
also to support abortion, drug use, and suicide. “It’s my body” is a useful statement in the age of “#MeToo”—keep your piggish
hands off my body. “It’s my body” has a
more established appeal, an obvious appeal, in a culture that worships
individualism—a form of idolatry that infects the American body politic with
the deadly disease of intellectual and moral relativism. On that, read David Brooks’s op-ed column in
yesterday’s NYT, ominously titled “How Democracies Perish.”[1]
So Paul, and Christian teaching generally,
takes exception to any such claim: “Do
you not know that your bodies are members of Christ … and that you are not your
own?” (6:15,19). No part of the
Christian—body, heart, mind, soul—is his or her own. We are all one body with Christ, one heart,
one mind, one spirit—if we are living out the commitment of our Baptism and
Confirmation, if we are receiving the Body and Blood of Christ worthily and not
sacrilegiously. (In this same letter to
the Corinthians, Paul warns the Church against sacrilegious participation in
the Eucharist: “Whoever eats the bread
or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and
blood of the Lord. A person should
examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without
discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself” (11:27-29).
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St. Paul preaching amid ruins
(Giovanni Paolo Panini)
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Then
Paul commands, in 2 words, “Avoid immorality”—literally, “Avoid fornication”
(6:18). Don’t use your very own body to
sin against the Holy Spirit, whose temple you are (6:19), consecrated in
Baptism; who binds you to the life of the Holy Trinity.
To
be sure, sexual sins aren’t the only sins that Paul deals with in this chapter
of the letter. Just 3 and 4 verses
before the start of this evening’s passage, he’d written: “Do you not know that the unjust will not
inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be
deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes
nor sodomites nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor
robbers will inherit the kingdom of God” (6:9-10). Then he reminds the Church that some of them
used to practice those vices but then they were washed clean and sanctified “in
the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (6:11).
Paul
clinches his argument against impurity by reminding us that Christ has
purchased us for God at the price of his own blood (6:20). We’ve been ransomed from the filth of
paganism, from slavery to the Devil, by the cross of Christ. Again, we are not our own because Christ has purchased us—signed, sealed, and
delivered in Baptism and by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
“Therefore
glorify God in your body” (6:20). Use
your body only for the glory of God and not as an instrument of sin. In your body praise God thru worship, as we’re
doing here; carry out works of mercy; live virtuously in your families, your
workplaces and schools, your social interactions; offer to God your physical
sufferings in union with Jesus crucified.
St. John Vianney offers us some solid advice for practicing
chastity: “1st, be very vigilant about
what we look at, and what we think and say and do; 2d, have recourse to prayer;
3d, frequent the sacraments worthily; 4th, fly from anything that might tempt
us to sin; 5th, have great devotion to the Blessed Virgin. If we do all that, then, no matter what our
enemies do, no matter how frail this virtue be, we can be quite sure of holding
on to it.”[3]
Then
we’ll stay with Christ, abide with Christ, like the disciples who followed him
in today’s gospel (John 1:35-42), not just for a few hours but forever.
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