Your body is the temple of God

KCO Reporter - August 2019

You must know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is within-the Spirit you have received from God. You are not your own. You have been purchased, and at a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

All four Gospels recount the story of The Cleansing of the Temple (Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46; John 2:13–17) when Christ overturned the tables of the money changers and merchants, proclaiming, “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” When asked for a “sign” He could offer for doing this, Jesus replied, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). He was speaking of His own body.

The Body’s Role in Our Salvation

Thus, in demanding both spiritual and physical cleanliness in the temple, and in promising the resurrection of the body as justification for demanding that cleanliness, Christ shows us that our physical bodies play a key role in our salvation. Joined to Christ in the saving grace of Baptism we become part of Him, “members of Christ,” the true Temple itself. At Confirmation, when we receive the Holy Spirit, who dwells in our bodies to teach us prayer, we become “temples” of the Holy Spirit. And in the Eucharist we receive Christ’s real Body and Blood to feed our real bodies and strengthen our spirits.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul responds to reports of sexual immorality in the church at Corinth. He specifically uses the example of prostitution, which, in Corinth at the time, would have been both heterosexual and homosexual. Saint Paul’s preaching about sexual morality (1 Corinthians 6:12–20) points to the fact that, whereas most sins are “outside the body”—that is, they are offenses against charity to other persons—sexual sins not only defile love, they are also sins against one’s own body. Saint Paul reminds the Corinthians here that they are “members of Christ” and tells them the following: Sadly, most individuals today do not consider their bodies to be temples of the Holy Spirit; instead, they make their bodies into temples of lust. Our modern culture has glamorized the sin of lust, and even Christians have been duped into rejecting their baptismal promises to seek the empty approval of a world sinking ever deeper into self-deception.

Purity of Soul and Body

The theology of the body tells us that Christianity is not a matter of abstract spiritual knowledge or esoteric enlightenment; instead, Christian life fully involves purity of both soul and body. And it explains why genuine Christian mysticism is not about out-of-the-body experiences. After all, Christ was born in a body, He suffered and died in His body, and He was resurrected in His body. And He left us His Body and Blood—really, truly, and physically—to nourish us during the hard work of our salvation.

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