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sowingseedsandshootinghoops · 7 years

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Taking Care of Your Body, The Holy Temple of God: Saint Paul

Saint Paul has a reputation of being fairly body-negative. Meaning that he has a reputation of seeing the body as something that is either bad or, at the very least, corrupted. And such judgment is not entirely unwarranted given how he speaks about things like sex and how various sects of Christianity have used his teachings to promote certain dualistic, Manichean doctrines.

However to say that he was simply a Manichean in pre-Manichean times is not true. He does, overall, have a very positive view of what the body is and all the good it can accomplish. In fact he would probably say, overall, that people should love their bodies and take good care of them. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 he tells the Corinthians: “Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?. . . Therefore honor God with your body.” Now obviously this passage has become something of a catchphrase over the past two thousand years, and that may have blinded some Christians in regards to what Paul is actually saying here. So in order to unpack this passage for those who may need it, we need to answer two questions: 1) what is a temple and 2) what, or more accurately who, is the Holy Spirit?

First lets talk about the temple. Saint Paul is living during what is called the Second Temple period, during which the Second Temple was built. It replaced the original Jewish Temple of King Solomon which had been destroyed by the Babylonians (see 2 Chronicles 36: 18-19 for more information on that). Construction of the Second Jewish Temple was started after the Jews return from exile and finally completed under the reign of Herod the Great in the early part of the first century AD. This is the temple that is around in Paul’s lifetime. So the first thing to ask is what is a temple. More specifically, what does Paul mean by temple. Many people simply see the Temple of Jerusalem as a precursor to a church, but that’s not entirely true. The status and function of the Temple puts in a slightly separate space. It is true that the Temple was seen as the House of God, as the place where God was actually present in a completely real and unique way because of the presence of the Holy of Holies, and in that sense is similar to what a lot of Christians would call a church because of the presence of the Eucharist, the real body and blood of Jesus, in a church. But that is where the similarities end. In Christianity, all churches have the same function: everything that is done in Saint Peter’s Basilica can be done at your local church. Now there is a difference between the Pope and your local parish priest, but there is not a difference between the “venues” in which they work. That is NOT the case with the Jews and their Temple at the time in which Paul is writing. During the era of the First Jewish Temple. the Temple was the absolute center of religious life for the Jews. Sacrifices were done there, the scriptures were read there, the Ark of the Covenant was there, everything religious centered around the Temple. Now when the first Temple gets destroyed and the Jews are sent into exile, the Jewish religion gets a bit of a makeover. It is during that time period, the period of the Babylonian exile, that the Jewish scriptures begin to be written down. See in the beginning because the Scriptures were only being read at the Temple, there was no need to have many copies of those Scriptures. But when the disaspora happened (that is when the Israelites were exiled and “dispersed” all over the world), they needed a way to keep a hold of their traditions and their Scripture. So they start to do things like write down the Scriptures, have them translated into different languages, and set up local synagogues or Jewish communities where they can practice certain parts of their faith.

Then Cyrus the Great issues his proclamation allowing all the Jews to return to the Holy Land (see Ezra 1:1-3) and it is at this point that the Jews start to reestablish the Temple in Jerusalem although it won’t be completed for the next several hundred years. By the time of Jesus, we can see that the Temple has gained back some of its former glory. The big difference is, at least as far as I can tell, is that the Temple became the only place where sacrifices could be offered legitimately. Although Jews could celebrate certain religious festivals, such as the festival of Purim, in their local communities, they had to come to the Temple if they wanted to do any type of sacrifice. That’s why Jews had to risk walking hundreds of miles from all over the world to be in Jerusalem for festivals like the Passover or Yom Kippur. That is also why there are money changers, like those mentioned Mark’s gospel, because only the Jewish currency was valid inside the temple:

And they came to Jerusalem. And He entered the Temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the Temple, and He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons; and He would not allow any one to carry anything through the Temple. And He taught, and said to them, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers (Mk 11: 15-17).

The point of all of this is that during Paul’s time the Temple had a very elevated status. It was the place where God still lived in a very unique way. It was a totally unique place where God lived in such a unique way that it elevated that place above all the other synagogues and religious sites any where else in the world, and the level of honor given to the Temple was something way above anything else in the Jewish religion. So when he says that the body is a temple is that God is “actually” and uniquely present in the human body in such a way that have to give your body an elevated level of respect. That you have to treasure and take of your body, just like the Jews had to do with the Jewish temple. He is comparing the body to what is, in his mind, probably the holiest thing on the planet.

So now we can say that he’s comparing the body of a human being to holiest place on the planet, a place where God is uniquely present. But wait, he did not actually say God did he? He said that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, not that the body is the temple of Yahweh. Well let’s dive a little bit into who the Holy Spirit is.

Now before going to far into this conversation, I’m offering a disclaimer. In order to get at the essence of what Saint Paul means by Holy Spirit, I’m going to try my best to avoid the last 1900 years of scholarship and stick to only what the Bible itself says about the Holy Spirit. Sorry Saint Basil, I love you but you’re out.

The short answer is that even when you look at just the Bible itself, you can see that the Holy Spirit is God. In John 14:6 Jesus says that he is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, but in John 16:13 he calls the Holy Spirit the “Spirit of Truth” and says that “He will guide you into the Truth.” How can both the Spirit and Jesus be “the Way” unless they are both the same? Saint Paul himself in the Romans 15:16 says that it is the Holy Spirit who sanctifies, but who can sanctify other than the Lord who is the Source of Holiness? At various points in the gospels Jesus says that the only sin that can not be forgiven is a sin against the Holy Spirit (Luke 12:10, Mark 3:29, Matthew 12:32). This only make sense if the Holy Spirit is God because sinning against any lesser being surely would not incur such a big punishment. Now what exactly does it mean to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is for another time, all I want to do is point out that the Holy Spirit has to be on the same level as God in order for this “warning” to make sense. Another example comes from the Gospel of Mark when the Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic:

Some people came bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. When they were not able to bring him in because of the crowd, they removed the roof above Jesus. Then, after tearing it out, they lowered the stretcher the paralytic was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the experts in the law were sitting there, turning these things over in their minds: “Why does this man speak this way? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Now immediately, when Jesus realized in his spirit that they were contemplating such thoughts, he said to them, “Why are you thinking such things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up, take your stretcher, and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” – he said to the paralytic – “I tell you, stand up, take your stretcher, and go home.” And immediately the man stood up, took his stretcher, and went out in front of them all. They were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:2-12).

Jesus does this to prove that he also has the power to forgive sins, a power given to God alone. The fact that he can do this is one of the ways that he proves that he “and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Then after he rises and appears to the disciples it says that he “breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit! If you forgive anyone’s sins, then they are forgiven” (John 20:22-23). Effectively what he says in that moment is that he, the Holy Spirit and God the Father are one. But perhaps the best example comes at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus commands his disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). So it obvious therefore that when Saint Paul talks about the Holy Spirit he is talking about God.

So lets bring this all back now to the passage that started it all: ”Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?. . . Therefore honor God with your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). So what is he saying about the body? He is saying that it is, in some sense, the holiest place on Earth where the Lord himself actually resides. It is the holiest of Temples, one that should therefore be treated with the utmost respect and deference. Your body is a place of high honor. He would not agree with those people who go around talking about the body as some inherently bad thing that needs to ignored or only minimally taken care of. On the contrary, your body is the Temple of the Most High! So take care of it, love it, cherish it for the wonderful thing that it is. In fact God loves your body so much, according to Saint Paul, that “if anyone destroys the temple, God will destroy that person! For the temple of God, which you are, is holy” (1 Corinthians 3:17). Now isn’t that an interesting statement: try and wrap your mind around that!

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