Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator
Throughout the history of religious thought and faith, there has been a tendency to blame sin and the evils of the world on the human body and other created matter. This thinking has appeared in almost every faith. Christianity has also had its share of this kind of thinking. In today's Gospel passage, Jesus speaks to this issue and reaffirms the argument made in the very first chapter of Genesis that what God created was good. Genesis emphasizes this point when it speaks of the creation of the human being by affirming it as "very good."
The tendency to blame the body and created or material things for the evil of the world is flawed because it seeks to find an excuse for bad human behavior. Rather than accepting that sin and evil are the result of poor choices on our part, this heretical way of thinking blames our faults on our bodies. All of the so-called capital or deadly sins come down to a choice on our part, the choice to place our needs and our wants before our obedience to God's laws.
The Gospel uses the issue of dietary laws to illustrate this point. Such laws claim that certain foods are unclean and cause the defilement of the body. Jesus identifies the "heart" or our intentions as the seat of evil rather than the stomach and the alimentary canal. While such dietary laws may have originally been well-intentioned, their enforcement led people to the incorrect conclusion that they were the cause of sin.
Those of us who suffer from chronic illness and/or disability know that the human body is not perfect. It is limited, flawed and frail, susceptible to disease and illness. These limitations identify it as part of the created world which is not perfect. Only the Creator is perfect. Scholastic philosophy teaches that the entire created order needed to be redeemed by Jesus and that only when he returns will the created order be perfect. Until that time, we continue to carry the cross that has been given to us as we journey to the day when there will be no more pain and suffering.