2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (18.01.15)
“The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord… ” (St.Paul)
1. On what did you focus when you heard/read St. Paul’s words? They are from his first letter to the Christian community he founded in Corinth (6:13-15,17-20). We hear them in our second Scripture Reading for this Sunday, 18th January. ‘Immorality’ triggers, for many, thoughts about sex. But Paul is not proscribing sex. He is proscribing immorality, a word that encompasses so much more.
2. If you look up ‘immorality’ you find a long list of words associated with immorality including – wickedness, badness, evil, vileness, iniquity, corruption, dishonesty, sinfulness, impurity, unchastely behaviour, depravity, vice, turpitude, degeneracy, debauchery, perversion, indecency, lewdness, licentiousness, lustfulness, wantonness, promiscuity, shamefulness, crookedness etc. Some words will be familiar, others less so – ‘turpitude’ for example, meaning ‘disgraceful behaviour’, is not so common.
3. Listing words associated with immorality is not an attempt at blanket condemnation of human nature. Rather, it’s a prompt for an examination of conscience. For example, the word ‘flooding’ is used to describe either a trickle of escaping water across a domestic floor or acres of flood damage. So the word ‘lewd’, meaning crude and offensive sexual innuendo, has multiple applications. Has our personal vocabulary been infected, to a little extent, by the undeniable lewdness that has crept into un-censured public performances?
4. As Christians we acknowledge the body as being physical, intellectual and spiritual. This triform composite is complex. So complex indeed that, though we know much more about the body than our ancestors, many layers of mystery remain. Non-believers hold that it’s only a matter of time before we discover all the secrets of the body and of life itself. Christians, and others who believe in God, disagree. For us God, the source of all life, will retain his mystery.
5. The word immorality is less in fashion today because, in this more liberal age, a moral life is less valued. People dislike words that imply a curtailment of behaviour. The word itself originates with humanity’s first ‘sin’. Our forebears, too, grappled with an appetite to be uninhibited when faced with God’s directive –
“From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it
you will surely die.” (Genesis 2: 16-17)
6. The Book of Baruch – part of the Old Testament’s prophetical literature attributed to Jeremiah’s secretary – has, as its central theme, Israel’s disobedience to God resulting in the exile of the nation to Babylon. In Baruch 4:28, the author addresses the culpability of his fellow Jews and the necessary remedy:
“As your hearts have been disposed to stray from God,
turn now ten times the more to seek him.”
They, then, like us, now, failed to implementation Baruch’s advice.
7. In his letter to the Philippians (3:17-21) St. Paul has a similar theme:
“Dear brothers and sisters, .. I have told you often before, and I say it again with tears in my eyes, that there are many whose conduct shows they are really enemies of the cross of Christ. They are headed for destruction. Their god is their appetite, they brag about shameful things, and they think only about this life here on earth.
But we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives. ….. He will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same power with which he will bring everything under his control.”
8. The single word ‘immorality’ is a catchall for the ever-expanding way the Evil One skillfully employs to tempt us into leaving aside, initially pro tem, our Baptismal promises. It could be argued that Satan has successfully replaced the ‘evils’ that we need to fear, because they actually threaten our eternal life, with socially more superficial fears. Among these latter would be, a reduction in my living standards, curbs on my freedom of movement, choice and behaviour. The word that needs highlighting is ‘my’ because unrestricted selfishness is a core component of immorality in the 21st century.
9. Asked to identify today’s key areas of conflict how many Brits would put themselves at the top of the list? How many would identify the primary battleground as being within them between body and soul?
St. James, in chapter 4 of his letter clearly lays it on the line that all wars originate within the human person:
“Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep.”
10. The author of the Letter to the Romans (Ch.7) spells out our inner conflict that will last while there is breath in the body.
“For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks are to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
11. It’s of limited effect if I campaign for peace and an end to bloodshed in the Middle East and other far distant places, if I resist identifying and tackling the fundamental battleground that is within me! I can all too easily dismiss St. Paul’s words, this 2nd Sunday of the Year, as more applicable to others than to myself. If we credit ourselves with not being immoral, to some extent, then look up Jesus’ teaching in Luke 18:11. Which character fits us, the Pharisee or the Tax Collector? Only one went home at peace with God and that’s my goal.