Saturday, January 13, 2018

Homily for 2d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
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).

8th-c. codex of 1 Corinthians
(Wikipedia)
This evening we begin 5 Sundays of readings from the middle of St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians.  Corinth in the 1st century was the biggest and most important city in Greece, a seaport and a crossroads, with about 100,000 inhabitants—2/3 of whom were slaves.  The little Christian community there were Paul’s own converts and dear friends among whom he’d lived for 18 months on his 2nd missionary journey in 51-52 A.D.

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).
St. Paul preaching amid ruins
(Giovanni Paolo Panini)
According to Paul, sexual purity is a most serious requirement of Christian life.  “The body is not for immorality but for the Lord” (6:13).  The word translated as “immorality”—porneia—literally means “fornication.”  He continues, “The Lord [i.e., Christ] is for the body; God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power” (6:13-14).  One commentary observes, “Paul is concerned that fornication, by polluting the physical body, would render believers ineligible for resurrection.”[2]  If we are joined to Christ, we will be raised up with him on the Last Day; but if we are joined to him, we can’t enter some sexual union that excludes him.  (Christian marriage explicitly includes him and testifies to the mutual and total love between him and the rest of his Body, the Church.)

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.



     [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/how-democracies-perish.html?ref=todayspaper
     [2] Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2d ed. (NY: OUP, 2017), p. 332.
     [3] Sermon the 17th Sunday after Pentecost, 2, cited in The Navarre Bible: The Letters of Saint Paul (NY: Scepter, 2015), p. 222, slightly adapted.

No comments: