"My yoke is easy, my burden light."
Paul is famous for his suspicions about the body. His own words make
him suspect. “If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if
by the spirit you put to death the evil deeds of the body, you will live.” Such
texts have opened Paul to the charge that he is anti-body, even Manichaean,
in his theology.
We know, however, that Paul’s view is far more nuanced than might first be suspected.
The word sarx, “flesh,” does not indicate the same reality
as soma, “body,” the latter word being far more integrative
and unifying than the former. But the human body or soma can be jailed
in the prison of mere flesh if it is without the liberty of spirit and soul.
Mere flesh, sarx, the debased, sin-ruled body, is earth-bound human
existence left to itself. Flesh, in this sense, is dominated by the organic drives
for self-maintenance and enhancement, even at the expense of others, until the
force of death holds sway.
The rigid rule of these drives makes any thought of
spirit, freedom, or love impossible. That is why, in the Letter to the Galatians,
chapter 5, Paul describes the law of the flesh as wild sexual irresponsibility,
slavery, and violent jealousy.
How Freudian this sounds. Freud, considered passé in some psychiatric
circles but the rage in cultural studies, articulated most fully the logic of
flesh, or sarx. In The Future of an Illusion, a critique of
religious faith, he deemed that our primordial organic desires are incest, cannibalism,
and killing.
Even those who, under civilization’s hard constraint, shrink from
incest or murder, “do not deny themselves the satisfaction of avarice, their
aggressive urges or sexual lusts, and do not hesitate to injure others by lies,
fraud, and calumny, so long as they can remain unpunished for it.”
This sounds like the world of sarx in Romans and Galatians.
Freud has
nothing on Paul when it comes to unmasking the raw and deadly face of flesh closed
in
upon itself. Without civic prohibitions, we would “take any one as a sexual
object, kill any rival or anyone else who stands in the way, and carry off any
of the other’s belongings.”
Freud proposed that science, rather than religion,
might save us from ourselves. The voice of intellect, he said, would he heard
and, he hoped, obeyed.
Both in his own thought and in subsequent years, however, it would prove to be
the other way around.
The tiresome labor of flesh-bound mind is powerless to
escape the yoke of blind lust, violence, and avarice. Science, like the flesh
that makes it, merely delays the heavy burdensome end of life’s labor. “For
the aim of all life is death.”
Paul the psychologist understood this. The life he knew, however, transcended
the world of mere flesh. The body inspirited could become a temple of eternal
promise. It could sing of love, play in joy, console with gentle compassion,
touch with kindness—all those gifts of the Spirit that make the human body
revelatory of God.
Unlike Freud’s flesh, in turmoil, condemned to labor and death,
Paul’s is transcended by the spirit of Jesus, who invites us:
Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome,
and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders
and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your
souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is
light.
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