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Live
Letters Second Sunday in
Ordinary Time I Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20 |
The Catholic Telegraph
January 14, 2000This is the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time itself begins on the day after the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord, so that feast takes the place of the first Sunday.
With this Second Sunday of Ordinary Time the second readings, our live letters, come into their own. Up to now in the Church’s year these readings have been selected for their relationship to the season of the year or to the gospel. Now we launch into a series of more or less continuous readings of the various apostolic letters without any relationship to the gospel readings, which themselves constitute another series of semi-continuous readings. The two series are not connected.
For the next several weeks, therefore, we will be reading through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But we don’t begin at the beginning! Because this letter is quite long and deals with such diverse issues, it is spread over all three years of the cycle. The first part of it is read in year A, the last in year C. We read the middle of it this year B.
The first letter to the Corinthians is divided into two main parts. In the first part, Paul addresses some of the disorders in the Corinthian church that had come to his attention through people who had visited there. (The Christians of Corinth seem to have been a rather wild group!) In the second part, he answers some questions that had been addressed to him by the Corinthians themselves. Today’s reading comes at the end of the first part.
Paul seems to have been told that the Corinthians were taking his teaching about Jewish dietary laws - that every kind of food was lawful - as applying also to sexual behavior. They were engaging in fornication, perhaps with the cult prostitutes in the pagan temples. After all, isn’t sex just one more physical need like eating and drinking?
Paul answers in our text. Sexual activity is not just satisfying one more appetite, but a commitment of our whole person, our whole body. Thanks to our incorporation into Christ, our bodies are now one with His and will be raised up as Christ’s body was. Misusing our bodies is to misuse the body of Christ. Moreover, the Holy Spirit dwells in us, and so we are temples of the Spirit and are not free to do with ourselves as we please. Because we have been redeemed by Christ, we belong to God. Our bodies are to serve God’s purposes, not our own. Sexual promiscuity is not appropriate for the Christian believer.
Sexual promiscuity was not an ancient aberration confined to the misguided Christians of Corinth. It’s with us still. Our culture seems to regard sex pretty much as they did, as one more appetite to be satisfied. And our culture does not put a high value on delaying the satisfaction of appetites until their satisfaction is appropriate. In fact, the world around us seems to presume that everybody is sexually active all the time and that whatever kind of sexual activity is attractive to an individual is therefore acceptable. Similarly, much of the commercial world seems to believe that the best way to sell its products is by presenting them in the context of sexual activity. It won’t sell if it’s not somehow sexy.
This all makes a certain kind of sense if we presume that human beings are nothing more than bodies. The demands of the body need to be satisfied as quickly and as efficiently as possible and the only limit in the satisfaction of bodily needs is that we not hurt other people (although even this limit seems to have its limits).
For us Christians it’s different. We know that we are not just bodies, but human persons beloved by God and redeemed through the suffering and death of Christ. We know that we are members of the risen Christ, that His Spirit dwells in us, that we our final destiny is eternal life when we will be raised from the dead as Christ was. And all of this is not some sort of spiritual parenthesis deep inside us, but a complex of realities that exists and expresses itself here and now, on this earth, in the context of our earthly life and our earthly bodies. Our bodies can be demanding and troublesome, but they are the vehicles of God’s presence to us and to the world around us. They are the means through which the glory of God works and manifests itself. They demand respect.
There is a whole complex of Catholic Christian teaching about sexuality, about specific sexual behaviors, about the dignity and purpose of sex in marriage. Sometimes people look on these teachings as check lists of restraints or as unenlightened doctrines of a former age. But they all make sense if we remember who and what God has made us to be: not our own to do with as we please, but purchased by Christ to be members of His body and temples of the Holy Spirit. The real issue isn’t sex. It’s our Christian identity.
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Conversation Questions.
How does Christ’s life in me affect my behavior?
What sexually oriented TV commercials, billboards, and other ads have I seen recently? What was my reaction?
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