In our passage in 2 Corinthians, St. Paul insists that we should move beyond viewing things “according to the flesh”—or “from a human perspective,” as some translations have it—and instead be “impelled” by “the love of Christ.”
It’s an appealing turn of phrase, but what does it mean?
Paul’s general message to the Corinthians is one of encouragement. Again and again, he tells them that they should not lose hope, that they should be of good courage, that they should be confident in the work that God is doing among them. But Paul is also conscious in this letter of how hard it can be to feel encouraged and to persevere in the face of difficulties. We live with corruptible bodies in a world enslaved to death. We try to persuade people of the good, but they still turn to evil. I get that feeling a lot with my children—you can give a five-year-old a brilliant argument for why he should pick up his toys or stop kicking his sister, and it may have no effect at all. Many of us probably feel the same way in politics these days. No one can be persuaded to anything, and it often just feels like a yelling match after which the various parties retreat to their corners to pout.
This is all “from a human point of view.” But Paul writes, “Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” You might notice that he does not say, “Regard everything instead from a divine point of view.” This isn’t a question of abandoning our humanity, but rather of recognizing its limitations. Regarding things “according to the flesh” for Paul means regarding things from only a human point of view—that is, with an eye only to worldly concerns rather than eternal concerns. We must focus not just on what is seen, but also on what is unseen. From a merely human point of view, Jesus was a charismatic first-century teacher who made some weird claims about himself and then got killed. But from an eternal point of view, this Jesus was not just a man, but the Son of God; his death and resurrection were not just arbitrary incidents in history, but the lynchpin of God’s plan to reconcile the world to himself.
So it’s not that the “human point of view” has to disappear. It’s that it needs to be put in its place. Paul’s comments about being in the body—just a few verses back in our selection from last Sunday—are a good example of this. The body is something of a burden now, not because bodies are bad or because human beings need to escape from them, but because our current bodies are bodies of corruption, weighted down by the scars of sin and oriented toward death. We are “dying” in one way or another from the moment we are born. From a “human point of view,” bodies are irrelevant precisely because they are dying. It’s no wonder, then, that our moral thinking about the body is so fuzzy—it is hard to imagine absolute moral categories that constrain something so deeply temporary.
But from a broader point of view, the scriptures tell us that we will be judged, at the resurrection, even for what we have done in our dying bodies. And this is not because, as we might think, God is judgmental, but because God wants to include everything in his plan to reconcile the world to himself. Everything matters. The fact that everything can be judged means that everything can be saved; everything, however hopeless it may seem, can be turned to the good.
This brings us back to Paul’s message of encouragement in the face of difficulty: we can try all kinds of substitutes. We can look for financial success. We can look for physical health. We can try to live exemplary moral lives. We can look for pleasure. But we can never be happy in body until we are happy in soul. And we can never be happy in soul until the soul rests in God.
This truth has a social extension: no society, no institution, no people can be truly good and just—which is to say, at real peace and harmony—if it is not ordered to the good of the soul. This is not to say that bodies, or temporal things like food and shelter and money, should be somehow shunned. If anything, many of these things need to be taken care of precisely so that people may more freely order their lives to the love of God. We should never think that material things are somehow “unspiritual.” But we live in a materialistic age, even in some quarters of the Church. Among some Catholics, you will hear a great deal about justice and equality but very little, if anything, about the salvation of souls. And that is because, however much we might invoke Jesus, we tend to look at things only “from a human point of view,” judging everything in terms of worldly success. Are we keeping our doors open? Are we balancing our budgets? Are we serving our various interest groups? Then there’s this big one: Are we making the world a better place?
Nice ideas, but we have to remember and hold fast to what it’s all for. We’re not here to make the world a better place. We’re not here to keep an institution alive or make it look more important or relevant. We’re here as “ambassadors of Christ,” as Paul puts it a few verses down, witnesses to his death and resurrection, and our job is to put aside our own personal interests for the sake of his love, for the sake of the way that Christ, not we, can reconcile the world to God. “For our sake,” Paul writes, “he made himself to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
That is good news. Back when I was in school ministry, my headmaster used to say to students: the good news is that if God is God, we’re not. This is the spiritual reality at the heart of the Christian life—that on the deepest level of everything, we are not in control. And so living life means starting from the most basic things and building up from there—God is the center of things, and so the way to freedom and purpose means giving up the illusion that we are in charge. And then, when we come from that spiritual insight into the mission of the Church in the world, what inspires us is less a desire to be important than a desire to share, as St. Peter writes, the “hope that is within us.” That hope endures because it has nothing to do with what we can accomplish “from a human point of view,” but on what God can accomplish in us when we least expect or deserve it.
Do you have that hope? Let it be renewed today in the breaking of the bread. Let this sacramental meal, this spiritual meal, bring us back to that basic relationship with God.