Commentary on Sunday Readings – Pentecost

Q. This is Pentecost Sunday, which commemorates the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. I was looking at one of the optional Mass readings for this Sunday, and I had a question about it. It’s from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and here’s the section I’m having trouble understanding:

Brothers and sisters:
Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh;
on the contrary, you are in the spirit,
if only the Spirit of God dwells in you.
Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
But if Christ is in you,
although the body is dead because of sin,
the spirit is alive because of righteousness.
If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also,
through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Consequently, brothers and sisters,
we are not debtors to the flesh,
to live according to the flesh.
For if you live according to the flesh, you will die,
but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body,
you will live.

(Romans 8:8-13)

What does St Paul mean when he says, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God”, and “if you live according to the flesh you will die”? Is Paul saying that the body is bad, and only the spirit is good?

A. I’m glad you asked this question, because it’s crucial for our understanding of the Catholic faith. When Paul talks about “the flesh” (“those who are in the flesh cannot please God”), he is NOT (I can’t emphasize this enough) saying that the human body is bad. Nor is he saying that it is impossible to please God in this life. When Paul speaks of “the flesh”, he is talking about something else entirely.

The Greek term Paul uses (remember that the New Testament was originally written in Greek) that is translated here as “the flesh”, is translated in some English versions of the New Testament as “the sinful nature”. This reading is much to be preferred. What is “the sinful nature”, then? It is the part of our humanity that has been corrupted by original sin. The guilt of original sin is washed away at baptism, but the “after-effects”, so to speak, remain. This is the tendency towards sin that we will always have to fight against in this life – the technical term for this is called concupiscence. Obviously, if we give in to these tendencies, this is not pleasing to God. This is why we have to rely upon the gift of the Holy Spirit that God has given to us to live our lives the way God intended. And this is indeed possible (read the rest of the passage above).

The body is not evil, or an obstacle to living the Catholic life. On the contrary, the body is the locus of that struggle; it is where it is put into practice. God created the body, and said it was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). He never desired us to be disembodied souls for all eternity. God thought so much of the human body that his Son took on a body at the Incarnation. That Body of Christ was then Resurrected and glorified. We, too, will be reunited with our human bodies and will live for all eternity in a resurrected body after the final judgment, whatever our destiny: “I believe in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting” (Apostles’ Creed).