God word to us comes in the language of flesh and blood. God became one of us so as to connect with us humans, people of flesh and blood. The story of Jesus healing and forgiving the sins of the paralytic in this Sunday's gospel is a little classic. As you listen to it on Sunday, pay attention to what Jesus did: he forgave the man his sins and healed him of paralysis. There was bodily healing and spiritual healing. We saw last Sunday how Jesus physically touched the leprous flesh of a man.
I am not sure when Christianity lost confidence in the body. Although Jesus was a Jew, many of his earliest interpreters were Greeks who divided body and soul in ways that he did not. By the time of St. Augustine in the fourth century, the unfortunate idea was taking off that anything to do with the body was ugly and evil, and the spirit alone was good. The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century was deeply suspicious of physical pleasure, and Freud's dark insights into human sexuality only added to the suspicion. Modern scientific reduction of the body to biological matter, overlaid by Victoria Secret's ads, has made many of us uncomfortable in our flesh.
.The irony of this situation is that our sacraments deal primarily with our bodies - our senses, our flesh, our bodies. Some wonder about Catholicism's emphasis on pouring water, anointing with oil, having to tell your sins to a priest....
Jesus went straight for the paralyzed man's body in offering forgiveness for sin. The man's body was Jesus' best way of getting to him. Our bodies are God's best way of getting to us. The seven sacraments are administered to our bodies; we're washed by water and anointed with oil in baptism; in confirmation we are again anointed with oil; we receive the Eucharist in our hands or on our tongues; we go to confession and physically talk to another human being; our hands and head are anointed in the sacrament of the sick; clergy are ordained by being anointed with oil, and marriage takes place between two people who speak to one another with the intention of physically consummating their relationship.
We live in a culture that's so confused about the body that many people cannot separate the physical from the sexual. I was rudely reminded while watching the recent Superbowl game, especially many of the commercials and much of the half-time show, that the human body has been reduced to a sex symbol. Unlike some of the old Greek philosophers who saw the body as a cesspool of evil, the current demeaning of the human body into a sex symbol is seen by many as a good thing, as perhaps the whole meaning and purpose of our bodies. It is not.
'Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?' says St. Paul to the Corinthians - 1 Cor 6:19. And writing to the Romans he says, 'Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship' - Rom 12: 1-2. Paul is not talking about vowed chastity. He is talking about accepting God's grace which comes to us through our bodies.
When our bodies are at risk we think of God. Deep suffering makes theologians of us all. The questions people ask about God in religion class rarely compare with the questions we ask while we are in hospital. This goes for those stuck in the waiting room as well as those in actual beds. Why me? Why this? Why now?
Mark has a lot about Jesus actually touching people's bodies while he heals them. Scripture commentators say little about his touching human flesh, sometimes ignoring it altogether. I think it is important. There are some people even today who believe that Jesus didn't really have a human body; it was only an appearance! In their minds, body is bad, ugly. Check the early Christian heresy called Gnosticism. The healing of the paralytic is a timely reminder of the place and power of our sacraments as the media through which God gets to touch us.
PASTOR EMERITUS
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