1 Corinthians 6:12-20.
Lady Bennerley, one of the minor characters in D. H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, declares:
“So long as you can forget your body you are happy…And the moment you begin
to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has
to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing
it.” 1
Lawrence was, of course, using Lady Bennerley as a foil in his attempt to restore belief
in the basic goodness and importance of human embodiment.
This is a vital task for Christian people, as well. It seems we’ve sometimes forgotten
something rather basic.
First: in the beginning. God fashioned a creature from the dust of the earth. Cradling
that clay creature, God breathed into it God’s own breath or spirit and, the story tells us,
the clay creature became a living soul – nephesh in Hebrew.
What’s important about that term is that it refers to a single, unitive being. Sometimes,
because of the influence of the Greeks, we are apt to think of ourselves, that is, of the
most important, vital, or essential part of ourselves, as a kind of divine spark, trapped in
a vessel. It enters the body at birth and leaves it at death. It alone is real and the body,
just a passing resting place.
Genesis affirms that we are not so much an incarnate spirit as we are an animated
body.
The dignity and importance of that body receives its most stupendous affirmation with
the incarnation of the Word of God.
The season we’ve just left – Christmas – reminds us, as Archbishop William Temple
was once disposed to say, that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions,
because it alone claims that God took on human flesh. And not as a disguise or mask.
God took on our whole nature. Our embodied nature.
1 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Pocket Books, 1959), 83.
Why is this at all important? Because the way we think and feel about ourselves as
bodies will always find expression in the way we think and feel about the world and
about God.
We experience the world; we experience God only through our body-selves.
In the Old Testament there is no proper word for the body, at least the body as some
kind of abstraction. The only word you can find there is the word for corpse, that is
something which is empty and hollow. It is what is left when the life is gone.
In the New Testament, there is more developed thinking and sometimes this presents
great difficulties to translators and to us who read. How many of you can think, for
example, of times when you’ve heard warnings, perhaps from St. Paul, about “the flesh”
as something bad or dangerous. When Paul lists “sins of the flesh” he includes such
things as idolatry, jealousy, and strife. He is not talking about flesh as such, this stuff of
which you and I are made. St. Paul’s “flesh” is not something physical that you can cut
with a knife. He is talking about what we would call a state of mind.
Paul, and the rest of the New Testament, leave our attention focused on the human
being as a vital whole, in whom body and spirit interpenetrate. This is why an early
father of the Church, (and first-class curmudgeon) Tertullian in the third century could
write:
The flesh is the hinge on which salvation depends. As a result, when the soul is
dedicated to God, it is the flesh that actually makes it capable of such dedication.
For surely the flesh is washed, that the soul may be cleansed; the flesh is
anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is sealed, that the soul too
may be fortified; the flesh is shadowed by the imposition of hands, that the soul,
too, may be illumined by the Spirit; the flesh feeds on the body and blood of
Christ, that the soul as well may fatten on God. What is united in service [i.e.,
flesh and spirit] cannot be separated in destiny. 2
In 1 Corinthians 6 Paul conjures up the image of a slave market. A new master has
walked into the market and bought us, the slaves. That master is Jesus. “You are not
your own. For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor.
6: 19 b -20)
He reminds us, with another image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.
He uses the plural “you”. All of us who have been baptized have been made to drink of
the one Spirit, he says later in this letter. The Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. The vitality
and energy of God that sustains and pervades the creation, dwells in us as in a temple.
Just as we would try to maintain our church buildings, the closest thing we know to a
temple, clean and fair and in good repair, so too, part of the life of discipleship is to
maintain these dwellings of the Spirit in a fitting and reverent way.
The 12 th century spiritual writer, St. Bernard of Clarivaux says,
2 De Resurrectione Mortuorum , VIII. 2-3. Trans. Paul Palmer, “Sacraments and Worship”.
When the truth shines out in the soul, and the soul sees itself in the truth, there is
nothing brighter than that light or more impressive than that testimony. And when
the splendour of this beauty fills the entire heart, it naturally becomes
visible…Shining out like rays upon the body, it makes a mirror of itself so that its
beauty appears in a man’s very action, his speech, his looks, his movements and
his smile. 3
St. Bernard is not talking about the fleeting beauty of youth. This is mature beauty which
comes of a life in the Spirit of God, the life of those who have climbed St. Benedict’s
ladder of humility, a ladder which, Benedict says, has two sides into which the rungs are
fitted, our soul and our body.
Our care for the sick, our reverence for the bodies of the departed – former temples of
the Spirit – our concern and work for the preservation of the environment, our sexual
love, our enjoyment and moderation in food and drink, all these things and more come
under the heading of the care for the temples of the Spirit, our own and others’.
The Lord who calls this day, calls us as whole people to give ourselves wholly and to
live thankfully in the Spirit who makes us holy.
Kevin+
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