If we ask God to speak to us in Christ, if we wish to abide with
him, he simply tells us to follow, to look, and to hear.
Should we do so, however, all things will look different.
Paul does not let us escape this fact. In the transforming mission
of Jesus, even our bodies will look different. If God can inhabit
human flesh, it cannot be made for immorality. If our bodies are
temples of God, we must not desecrate them. They are, Paul says, the
very glory of God.
This is difficult for us today. How dare someone tell us “You
are not your own”? We pride ourselves on autonomy. Our bodies
are our property, there for our use or abuse, our pleasure or
management, ours to begin or end at will.
And yet the body is a big problem for us, whether we want to admit it or not. Even the late, great psychologist Abraham Maslow, no churchy or Pauline preacher to say the least, warned us of the body’s degradation in our time. In his essay “Self-actualization and Beyond,” what he said of youth could be said of all of us:
[They] have learned to reduce the person to the concrete object and to refuse to see what he might be or to refuse to see him in his symbolic values or to refuse to see him or her eternally. [They] have desacralized sex, for example. Sex is nothing; it is a natural thing, and they have made it so natural that it has lost its poetic qualities in many instances, which means that it has lost practically everything. Self-actualization means giving up this defense mechanism and learning or being taught to resacralize.
Say what we may about the differing meanings for
“fornication” in the first century and our own, try as
we might to deflate Paul’s challenge as a form of Manichaeism
and rejection of the body, the practice of human sexuality in
contemporary culture is in no way worthy of a temple.
Familiar statistics reveal that more than one-half of our youth have
had intercourse by the age of seventeen, and half of their
pregnancies end in abortion. Births to unmarried teens rose 200
percent between 1960 and 1980. Chlamydia, genital warts, herpes,
gonorrhea, and syphilis have increased, despite the doubling of
condom use among teenagers in the last ten years. Stories of sexual
violence against women and the abuse of children fill our network
news and our newspapers. One estimate is that a woman is raped every
six minutes in the United States. One of the most frequently used
words for women in low rap music on MTV was the same that once
rarely was heard applied to a female dog. And the September
1992 Vogue magazine featured a sleazy article called
“Chain Reactions” about sadism-photographer Helmut
Newton with a gaudy photograph of a topless, bound woman, nipples
pierced, pointing a gun to her head. A caption read, “Making a
virtue out of vice.”
Maslow would wince.
St. Paul, for his part, has already advised us: We are called to a
different way. We heed a different voice. And we look at the human
body as a temple, transformed by the eyes of faith.