First Sunday after Epiphany

The Apostles’ Creed is the creed of our Baptism and is often recited at Mass during the Easter season. In the second to last line, we profess the belief in the “resurrection of the body”. For many, this is a puzzling concept and puts images of Christian zombies roaming the earth; nothing could be further from the truth.

The “resurrection of the body” is based on our belief that the body, as St. Paul puts it, “is a temple of the Holy Spirit”. This signifies that God dwells within us as a Holy Presence. The Jewish people in ancient days experienced God’s presence in the Arc of the Covenant, around which the Temple was built. St. Paul refers to each of the faithful being a temple; the Church, then, as the Body of Christ is the Temple, a living, dynamic presence of God at work in the world as the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was, for the Jews, the dwelling place of God on earth.

Our bodies, then, share the immortality of Christ. We believe upon death we dwell in God’s presence in the time and purpose of God’s choosing, to be reunited with our risen bodies as Christ was raised bodily after his crucifixion.

It is easy to get fixed on this future time and lose sight that our bodies are already resurrected from the death of an existence separated from the grace of Christ. Each day is the gift of a resurrected body, a chance to let the God dwelling in you, be a sign to the world of God’s presence.  

We glorify God in our body when our actions conform to the actions of Christ. Paul’s emphasis on sexual sin is historically tied to the sin of the Corinthians, which included incest, temple prostitution, adultery, and fornication. Rather than begin with a laundry list of sins to avoid, Paul was hoping to lay a foundation for a sexual ethic, a set of principles by which the community at Corinth could understand the need to pay attention to the body as something sacred. St. Paul was trying to counter the Gnostics of Corinth who held the body to be worthless and unimportant, and that it was only the spirit that was of any significance, a concept foreign to Christ and the early Church.

We worship God in our bodies, but we must remember that we also worship God through our bodies. It is easy to focus on sexual sins and forget that all sins are actions of the body because it is the body that puts all our intentions into action. Feelings are never sinful, but the sins of our lives only live through the actions we take in our bodies. Likewise, virtues intended but not put into action lie ineffectually within our bodies. It is only when we act on those virtues that the resurrection of Christ’s body, our body, the Church, becomes again God’s presence in the world.