Glorify God in Your Body

Gospel Reflection for January 13, 2024 - John 1:35-42

The next day after this, John was standing there again, with two of his disciples; and, watching Jesus as he walked by, he said, Look, this is the Lamb of God. The two disciples heard him say it, and they followed Jesus. Turning, and seeing them follow him, Jesus asked, What would you have of me? Rabbi, they said (a word which means Master), where dost thou live? He said to them, Come and see; so they went and saw where he lived, and they stayed with him all the rest of the day, from about the tenth hour onwards. One of the two who had heard what John said, and followed him, was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. He, first of all, found his own brother Simon, and told him, We have discovered the Messias (which means, the Christ), and brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him closely, and said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona; thou shalt be called Cephas (which means the same as Peter). (John 1:35-42 Knox Translation)

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ? This has always been a popular question in homilies, spiritual books and discussions among Christians of all kinds. But it is popular for a reason. To be a Christian means to be a disciple, or student, of Jesus, the Divine Teacher. Like the disciples of ancient Jewish rabbis, Christians are called to sit at the feet of our rabbi, God Incarnate, to learn His wisdom and imitate His life, in the hopes of becoming holy and growing closer to Him. Although Christ left us a Church, gifted with His authority through the Holy Ghost to uphold apostolic Tradition for all time and to apply those teachings to every period and culture, and gave us the witness of Scripture and the lives of the saints to support this ministry, the true meaning of discipleship has always been open to distortion. From heretics within the Church to those outside who seek to appropriate Him for their own purposes, discipleship has taken on many forms, both true and false, over the centuries, and this is truer today than ever before, when each individual seems to have his own idea of who Jesus is and what it means to follow Him.

The true distinction between authentic discipleship of Christ and a human corruption of it is humility. Like these first disciples of Our Lord, and like Samuel in the first reading, we must be willing to lay aside all of our preconceived notions, our preferences and convenience, our biases and vices, to discover only what Jesus Himself desired for us and what He has revealed to us about Himself through the Church in the integrity of the Faith. All heresies and schisms throughout history have resulted from people pridefully putting their own opinions and presumptions above the truth as Christ has revealed it, from the disciples who, after the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, refused to submit their intellects to such a strange and wondrous image as God becoming our food and drink and “went back to their old ways, and walked no more in his company”, (Jn 6:67) to those in Church history who claimed to be true Christians but denied doctrines they found difficult to accept, such as the Eucharist, veneration of the Blessed Virgin, iconography and the papacy, to those today who see Christ’s moral teachings as “unmerciful” or “bigoted” and so try to ignore or reinterpret them to accommodate the vices of modern culture. All of these errors result from pride, from preferring one’s own private interpretation and taste to the truth of Christ.

In the Epistle, St. Paul focuses on a particular point of the Gospel, inherited from the Law of the Old Covenant but fulfilled in Christ, which is perhaps more popular today than ever before, namely sexual morality. Beginning with the proponents of eugenics in the 19^th century, with its falsehoods of “overpopulation” and genetic purity, through the rise of psychology and its obsession with sex as exemplified by Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Margaret Sanger and many others, and coming to fruition in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the true meaning of the human body, of human relationships and of marriage has been lost. The spousal meaning of the body, with human nature being incarnated by God into the dual sexes of male and female, as an image of the Blessed Trinity, a sharing of oneself as a gift to the other in love personified in the procreation of children, is no longer understood, even by most Christians. It depends upon an awareness of God as Creator, a remembrance of the primordial state of original innocence when humans were in a right relationship with God, one another and all of Creation, and a sensitivity to sin, all of which have been replaced by a purely animalistic, selfish and hedonistic view of sex and the human body, with marriage becoming a temporary social contract for the sole purpose of mutual use and dissolvable at the slightest displeasure.

By Zkoty1953 - Cropped from File:Jan Paweł II portret Z. Kotyłło.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31549308

At the instigation of Sanger and her ilk, this distortion of the theology of the body has been caused and supported, through their deliberate planning, by contraception, abortion, pornography, divorce, premarital sex, etc., all of which detach sex from love, marriage and children, debasing it into an irresponsible game of abuse which enslaves people to their passions and inhibits the authentic freedom that can only come from love. Modernists are much more aware of the power of the arts to change culture than are most Christians and conservatives. For decades, they have used music, literature, television, movies and many other media, as well as the vulnerability of children in public schools and young adults in universities, to instill their falsehoods and create a society that for generations has not known what true happiness is, how to be free or how to love one another.

Sadly, many of these problems today affect Christians as well, and many in the Catholic Church have come to not only accept them but promote them as the true message of the Gospel. The attempt to bless those in relationships that betray the theology of the body as designed by God and that cannot express authentic human love, and even to give them the Sacraments, in the misguided belief that blessings and Sacraments can infuse sanctifying grace where there is no repentance or openness to it, is a concession to the hardness of men’s hearts which treats the truth of the Gospel as a heavenly ideal unattainable by real people in this life. It also acts as though most adults are completely irresponsible and irrational, incapable of examining their consciences and recognizing when they need God’s forgiveness. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught,

Hence, for God to bless is to produce something good, and to infuse something good, and so to be a cause: ‘I will indeed bless you and multiply your descendants’ (Gen. 22:17). But our speech does not cause things, but acknowledges or expresses them; hence, our blessing is the same as recognizing good.

This is not mercy or charity. It only creates a spiritual complacency that prevents people from turning to God and begging for His mercy and the grace to reform their lives in imitation of Christ. As St. Paul reminds us, the body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, united to the Body of Christ in Baptism – it is not given for our hedonistic use or to abuse others through immorality. May the witness of Christian couples today who live out the truth of the Gospel in their marriages, as well as the voices of those who condemn sexual immorality and lead others back to the truth of conjugal love in the Gospel, convict the world of sin and inspire a return to Christ who alone is true happiness.