Wednesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 475

Sin must not reign over your mortal bodies

so that you obey their desires.

And do not present the parts of your bodies to sin

as weapons for wickedness, but present yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life

and the parts of your bodies to God as weapons for righteousness.

For sin is not to have any power over you, since you are not under the law but under grace.

The Greeks were familiar with antinomianism, the idea that we should have no moral restraints, boundaries, or laws; and it still appears frequently amid discussions about freedom. As the philosopher John Macmurray wrote,

"When we profess our faith in freedom we often mean only that we want to be free. What honor is there in such a miserable faith? Which of us would not like to do as he pleases – if only he could escape the consequences?"

Saint Paul apparently discovered this free-spirited philosophy when he announced the Gospel, especially when he opposed Christian grace and freedom against Pharisaic righteousness. To some his doctrine sounded like untrammeled licence to do anything they felt like doing. "If it feels good, do it!" Of that group, some would have delighted in the message; others would violently oppose it. Neither would understand Life in the Spirit as the Apostle announced it.

As often happened, the misunderstanding led him to explore deeper dimensions of the gospel,and to elucidate a better understanding of the Christian's relation to the body.

Your body has been raised from the dead to life! Beginning with your baptism and renewed continually by the Eucharist, your body is the Body of Christ. He explains this remarkable doctrine more clearly in Galatians 2:20-23:

For through the law I died to the law, that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me. 

His explanation seems to fall on both sides of a paradox. As a Christian I am possessed by the spirit of Jesus, a slave to whatever God would have me do. In some ways his explanation sounds like slavery or diabolical possession.

But I am also free!

From his day until our own there have been people who insist their hunger, lust, avarice, or greed were "God's will for me." They justify their readiness to abandon parents, spouse, and children as God's will because, "I live no longer but Christ lives in me." Doesn't Saint Augustine say, "Love God and do what you want?" I met one fellow who was determined to be a minister despite his wife's opposition. So he divorced her. Perhaps because his denomination does not regard marriage as a sacrament, he could not suppose that his wife's commitment, love, fears and sensibilities should direct his life.

Saint Paul urged his readers to regard their bodies, and even "parts of" their bodies, as "weapons for righteousness." The body, like the soul and the spirit, is saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore it belongs to Christ and cannot be exempt from obedience to him. With our bodies we bring glory to the Body of Christ; or shame if we sin in the body.  

Saint Paul would not be compelled by bodily desires for pleasure. Rather, he was impelled by the cross of Christ. He knew the exquisite pleasure and rare privilege of suffering with Jesus. Like James and John, he rejoiced that he was found worthy to suffer for the sake of the name. If he felt like boasting, as his Greek culture was given to bombast, he boasted of his frequent humiliations. (But he also tempered his boasting in 1 Corinthians 13: "...if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.")

This vocation is nothing like antinomianism. It bears no resemblance to Do Your Own Thing.

But neither does it invite a stoic determination to control one's appetites and desires with shame, contempt, guilt or fear. Many alcoholics, facing certain death if they continue their drinking, having tried and failed and tried again, time after time, see no hope. They suffer an affliction of the will, and seem to have no "will power." The twelve step program of Alcoholics Anonymous urges the afflicted to abandon their life and will to the care of God, a practice that requires moment-by-moment awareness. They must "seek a knowledge of God's will and the power to carry it out." Possessed by neither alcohol nor willfulness, they willingly live with grateful sobriety.

Saint Paul would have been delighted to see his teaching reinterpreted in these last two centuries by the "Program." Where he spoke within the Jewish-Christian tradition of the guiding Spirit of God, AA announces the same mystery with a less religious expression, "the will of God." 

In any case, sin can have no power over those who take up their allotted crosses and follow Jesus to Calvary.