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I heard of it again just recently. An unmarried person decided not to attend her local parish seminar on John Paul II’s theology of the body (TOB) because she thought it didn’t apply to her. I hear this often – “What does the TOB have to do with me, I’m not married?” The theology of the body applies, quite literally, to every-body. John Paul II’s TOB is most often cast as an extended catechesis on marriage and sexual love. It certainly is that, but it is also so much more. Through the biblical analogy of spousal love, John Paul II’s catechesis illumines the entirety of God’s plan for human life from origin to eschaton with a splendid supernatural light. In its course, the TOB plunges us head first, as John Paul said, into “the perspective of the whole gospel, of the whole teaching, even more, of the whole mission of Christ” (TOB 49:3). God has revealed his mystery of love through the Word made flesh – theology of the body. This phrase is not only the title of a series of talks by the late John Paul II. It represents the very “logic” of Christianity. The TOB, then, is nothing but an extended proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of the Incarnate Word – the “Gospel of the body.” From start to finish, John Paul’s TOB calls us to encounter the living, Incarnate Christ and to ponder how his body reveals the meaning of our bodies. “The chief purpose of theology,” as John Paul wrote in Fides et Ratio, “is to provide an understanding of revelation and the content of faith. The very heart of theological inquiry will thus be the contemplation of the mystery of the Triune God. The approach to this mystery begins with reflection upon the mystery of the Incarnation” (n. 93). This is precisely what the Holy Father’s TOB is. As I once heard it stated quite succinctly, if the language of Israel is Hebrew and the language of Islam is Arabic, the language of Christianity is the body. There is simply no other way to “do” theology in the Christian sense. It all begins with the Incarnation – with God’s human body. To ask questions about the meaning of the human body starts us on an exhilarating journey that—if we stay the course—leads us from the human body to the mystery of sexual difference; from the mystery of sexual difference to the mystery of a holy communion in “one flesh”; from the mystery of this holy communion to the mystery of the Holy Communion of Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32); and from the Holy Communion of Christ and the Church to the Eternal Holy Communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. In other words, because we are made in the image of God as male and female, maleness and femaleness provides the main clue in the visible creation to the mystery of God himself. This doesn’t mean God is sexual (he is not), but rather that God himself is an eternal exchange of life-giving love. This is what we learn when we “stay the course” in pondering the meaning of the body and human sexuality. The mystery of the human sexual-body launches us like a rocket into the mystery of God. It seems that relatively few Christians, however, have “stayed the course.” A great many obstacles, prejudices, taboos, and fears can easily derail us as we face the enigma of our own embodiment as male and female. The temptation to “spiritualize” Christ and Christianity is constant and fierce. The enemy incessantly denies Christ come in the flesh (see 1 Jn 4:2-3). But only by pondering Christ’s body can we understand our own. When we dis-incarnate Christ, we lose all sense of the meaning of our own humanity. |
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