For the feast of the Holy Name, click here.
We owe the flesh nothing.
Nihil, nada, zip, nothing.
St Paul is forthright about that.
We are not in debt to the flesh,
but what does he mean?
What is this "flesh"?
What claim might it have on us?
[PAUSE]
Be clear on this.
God created you.
You are a body and a soul,
together,
inseparable,
each incomplete
without the other.
You do not have a body.
You do not have a soul.
They are not possessions.
Without either,
you are not you.
You are body and soul together.
So your body is not evil.
But you are not meant to be
a thing of earth alone.
Indeed,
you were created
in the likeness of God,
to reflect His
face in the world around.
But we are all fallen,
and this means
that we cannot perceive
God with us
without His direct help.
It means that,
without God's grace
we cannot see the face of God
in our fellow human beings
or in ourselves.
It means that we can
forget that we are
body and soul,
and look after the things that we can see
at the expense of
the things that we can't.
[PAUSE]
With God invisible to us
we treat only the desires
that come from our earth.
If we get the urge to eat
then we eat and,
unable to see the face of God
in ourselves
nor in others,
we eat and eat and eat
until there is nothing left to eat
for anyone.
Unable to see
the face of God,
we make gods
out of the desires
that we call "natural"
and satisfy them.
The need for food
gets turned into
the god of gluttony.
If food is all we value
above all else,
we worship it.
The need to reproduce
gets turned into
the god of lust.
If sex becomes
the only way to express
our deepest love for another
then we value sex
above true love
and we worship lust
rather than
the God that is love.
In making gods
of our desires
we allow them to claim rights
over us.
By investing our worship
in the gods of lust
we rely on them
to fulfill our needs.
And then we fall into their debt.
[PAUSE]
But there is only one God.
So in worshipping
these gods of lust
we find that we owe
everything
to nothingness.
Our true worship
is for the God Who is Love.
True love bleeds and dies
to serve God
rather than
allow biological needs
to become gods.
So St Paul says,
discipline your body,
kill the desires
that seek to become idols
in your life.
Focus on
what will help you
recover the face of God
in the people around you
and in your mirror.
Then your imaginary debts
will evaporate.
[PAUSE]
God is a spirit
and we must worship Him
in spirit and in truth.
That does not mean
hating the body
- quite the reverse -
we must live in the Grace of God
to give the body
the greatest privilege of all.
We give our bodies
the privilege
of reflecting the face of God Himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment