Welcome to the new school year!

I want to take issue with Jesus.  Again.  OK, so here he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  NOT!  The heck it is!  A yoke is something you put around the neck of an ox to make it pull stuff.  I bet the ox doesn’t like it one bit.  Even a light one.  And though a Christian, unlike an ox, gets to choose what yoke to take up, there is plenty of evidence that Jesus’ yoke is not all that easy. It is not easy to be a Christian, a good one at least. 

Even Jesus says so all sorts of other places:  how narrow the gate is, how he brings not peace but a sword, that business with the camel and the eye of the needle…..And ask all those martyrs if it was easy to be a Christian.  Or ask all the missionaries who died of diseases or attacks or whatever. 

Well, let’s ask the greatest missionary of all time, Paul.   Here he is in today’s lesson, doing his favorite thing, talking about how hard his life is.  He hardly ever seems to think it’s easy to be a Christian.  Of course, it’s tough being a missionary, especially when transportation and communication are difficult and costly and time-consuming (unlike today).  And it’s tough, really it is, to be a genius, which Paul absolutely is, creating a whole religion pretty much by himself. 

Here he is, at war with himself—his biggest adversary--fighting every minute to be a good Christian.  Elsewhere he tells us he has a mysterious “thorn in his side” with which he must contend, and who knows what it is?  Is he sick?  Unable to control himself around women, or maybe men?  Dyslexic?  Violent? In love with a sheep?  We’ll never know.  But to hear Paul tell it, it’s rough, and it makes being a good Christian anything but easy.

Of course, Paul’s problem results, in part, because he is a gnostic.  At least he is heavily influenced by Gnostic thought.  Gnostics were a very common kind of Christian thinker back then.  The author of the gospel of John was really  In fact, it’s a wonder that the bishops who decided in the third century what orthodox Christianity would be opted so clearly out of gnosticism, since it seems to be right at the source of Christianity and just won’t go away.  There are still lots of Christian Gnostics today. Gnostic.

Many elements of gnosticism are intriguing, but one—that the spirit is good and pure but the flesh is dirty and evil—is the source of a whole lot of trouble.  His wicked body, Paul says, keeps forcing him to do stuff that his clear, spiritual soul tells him not to do, and the whole thing makes him miserable.  Paul hammers away at this idea and hammers and hammers.  Of course, as long as he keeps beating himself about the head and shoulders, he’s never going to feel any better.

Contrary to what he seems to think, his problem is not that he has a body—his problem is that he thinks his body is somehow opposed to his soul.  Now this is a manly philosophical error.  Right on up to the Enlightenment, practically, the notion persisted that men were a higher and more spiritual form of life than women.  Women were menstrual and earthy and birthy and generally fleshy, while men were thinkers and aesthetes and focused on higher thoughts.  Men were tempted away from these lofty pursuits by women’s continual siren call to exercise the body in amusing ways that, ipso facto, were sinful.  (Why anyone would think that women are more focused than men on affairs of the flesh is beyond me; this does not match with my experience at all.  Maybe times have changed, along with the medications.  But I digress.)

In any case, Paul longs to be a pure theological specimen, focused only on the light of truth and spirit, but something keeps dragging him down.  This he attributes to being a human person, in a human body.  And to this I say, rubbish.  If Paul is finding his yoke is not easy, it is not because he has a body.

Perhaps Paul, who has after all had a mystical experience in which Jesus has talked directly to him, hopes that all his contact with divinity will be an out-of-body experience.  But for most of us, our access to the divine is only and solely through our bodies.  Even Job, whose flesh must surely be more burdensome than Paul’s, afflicted as it is by disease, poverty, and all the punishment God can deal out in his contest with Satan, still cries out, “in my flesh shall I see God!” 

No.  The body and the spirit are one.  If for some reason you have occasion to, say, sacrifice someone and cut him open end to end, his soul is not going to float out and up, winged and sort of the color Charles painted St. Stephen’s statue, uniting with its heavenly source while the body rots away.  The soul, whatever it is, is part and parcel of that tangle of nerves and synapses and memories and ideas and emotions that is produced in our brains, very much a bodily part.  We are embodied creatures, through and through.

Tom Talley, who used to teach liturgics at General Seminary, would become outraged at the idea of clergy telling people that their deceased loved one had gone to God, while the body in the box was an insignificant lump of trash.  “She has held that body in her arms every night for forty years,” he would say, “loved it, tended it, watched it, taken comfort in it.  How dare we dismiss it as “just” a body?”

Jesus himself, assuring us he will always be with us, does not tell us this will occur via walks on the beach, ESP, or charismatic phenomena.  No.  “This is my body,” he says at the last supper. And it is through this most physical of representations that we do not just dwell in his presence, but consume him, digest him, take him into us as part of our own bodies.  It is in the body that Jesus meets us, makes himself known to us, becomes present in the world.

And it is through the bodies of others that we experience Jesus and his life in the world.  He is present in those random acts of kindness, he looks out at us through tired and blackened eyes, he gives strength to the arms of our lovers, he comes to us in the sacrament of the altar.  It may be difficult to meet Jesus, to greet Jesus, to commune with Jesus, in the bodies of some of the others we encounter—but then again, it’s not so easy to be a Christian.

We learn how to do this by participating in making God’s Kingdom present here and now.  The eucharist teaches us of offering, ourselves, our souls and bodies; of being broken open as Christ was; of letting God’s love enter that broken space; and of rising again as Christ did into a new life, a new relationship with god and his creation.  Christ took on our flesh, and in our flesh we suffer along with him.  And in our flesh, we rejoice in the relationships we share with others who, in millions of different ways, also suffer and rejoice, because that is what it is to be human.

There is no division here, no body-soul argument, no sin of the flesh against the purity of the soul.   There is only each of us, a unified, embodied human person as was Christ, joined with him in the eucharist and the human condition, and joined with the uncountable Others in whom we see and know him.  That’s no yoke.

The yoke, the burden, of being a Christian comes not in fighting off the sins inherent to having a body, but in living up to the challenge of embodying the Kingdom.  It’s all about what we should be doing, not what we should not be doing.  It’s not easy.  But it’s a lot better than beating ourselves about the head and shoulders.