Wednesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their flesh
with its passions and desires.
If we live in the Spirit, let us also follow the Spirit.

When I was in school our teachers often asked us to “compare and contrast.” We should compare and contrast the Aeneid and the Odyssey, White Fang and The Call of the Wild, or Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Always, in the dyad, there were similarities and differences and the exercise taught us to read with a critical eye. We should read not only the story; we should read behind the story to discover the artist and the readership. Why do the authors tell their stories in this way or that?

In Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he doesn’t find much to compare between the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit. It’s all contrast.  But in other passages of the scripture we learn that the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So we have to go back to compare and contrast. What does Saint Paul mean when he speaks of the flesh, and what flesh was Saint John speaking of?

Both men were certainly familiar with the evil in the world. Saint Paul, though raised and trained in a strict Pharisaic tradition, seems to know what goes on in the darker places of the Roman Empire, whether the brothels of Corinth or the bathhouses of Rome. Saint John is privy to the influential councils of Jerusalem, their compromises, fears and betrayals.

Saint Paul uses the Greek word soma which we translate as flesh. The root survives in English as somnolent, meaning sleepy. The tireless Saint Paul disciplined himself like an athlete as he went from city to city announcing the gospel. When he met resistance it was often physical, as when he was beaten or imprisoned. I’m sure on those occasions a part of him said, “Lie down and give up!” But the Holy Spirit kept picking him up and driving him on. He could not suppress either his enthusiasm for Jesus or his affection for those who welcomed his message.

But there must have been occasions when his body warred against the spirit, and the spirit against the body and he felt the distress within himself. At times he could not go on, as when he lay unconscious after the beating in Lystra (Acts 14:18). But his disciples formed a prayer circle around him and within a few minutes he was going again.

That body/flesh required discipline, for its tendencies were “obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness….

Saint John, on the other hand, used the Greek word sarx to speak of the body. The Greek root survives in our word sarcasm which literally means flesh-cutting. John’s reverence for the body would reveal the Eucharist, the bread made flesh which is the body of Christ.

In my own spiritual journey, rounding into the mid-sixties, I discover the changing needs and demands of the body. It still wants to lie in bed in the morning and stay up half the night reading. It wants to eat like a teenager though it cannot process calories as teenagers do. If it cannot give a high school coach ten laps or a drill sergeant one hundred pushups, it must still be flexed, stretched, walked, and pumped into a lather frequently; and be satisfied with less intake than the average teen.

Today’s Christian spirit might not require all-night vigils or 40 day fasts; and it’s become downright suspicious of hair shirts and flagellation, but it still requires that one’s body be trained to honor the presence of God. As Saint Paul taught, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, a holy place indeed.