The Church is the bride of Christ, protected by her bridegroom from the threat of those evil spirits who seek to destroy anything good and sacred. But the Church has distinct components within it that affect her health and well-being; the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church itself, is one body made up of many parts. Every individual who has been engrafted into Christ through baptism makes up this body when gathered together as the Church. When it comes to our own bodies, we may sometimes feel energetic, lively, and healthy, but there are also plenty of moments in our lives when our bodies suffer because of illness, injury, or just a lack in taking care of our physical well-being. The Church occasionally suffers through the same issues - individuals who make up the Mystical Body may either contribute to its health and well-being, or risk being a source of sickness for the entire body.

What are the sources of illness within the Church today? What is our antidote? Clearly, the virus that harms and seeks to destroy the Body is sin; anyone who contributes to the illnesses within the Church only does so through their own sinfulness. Still, there are different degrees to which our own sinfulness contributes to harming the Church. For example, there might be some within the Church who very clearly and actively seek to destroy the Church from within. Their intentions are truly nefarious, but they are also quite rare. For the most part, the largest group of contributors to the sickness of the Church are those who assume that their intentions are good but cause harm anyway, or especially those who are generally good-natured but occasionally allow their selfishness to get the better of them. All of us have been guilty of harming the health of the Church at one point or another; none of us are exempt from such a troubling reality. In fact, this passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians gives us an insight into the prevalence of sinful harm that is done to the Holy Church: Peter was the first head of the Church, the one through whom we are able to have a clear and present authority today in the person of the Pope. But one of the few things we know about Peter from the Gospels is that he had horrible judgment at times. He even denied Christ three times when Christ needed him most. But when Christ most needed someone to affirm his identity and authority, Peter was always there to affirm the most necessary truths about Christ; this is the main reason why Christ entrusted him with the most powerful and responsibility-laden position in the entire Church. But Peter did not remain perfect after Christ’s ascension to Heaven: we hear in this passage that it is necessary for Paul to travel to Antioch to officially correct the behavior of Peter when Peter reverts back to a mistake that had ramifications on the entire Body of the Church.

None of us are safe from causing harm to the Church; you can be a simple layperson, a priest, a bishop, the pope, or even the first pope who was given the keys to the kingdom - your sins will harm the Church. The antidote to harm being done to the Church is to reorient the individual parts that make up the Body to return to a behavior that serves Christ and his bride. It begins first and foremost with prayer, and when Christ was asked how to pray in the Gospel, his response was a prayer of thanksgiving, petition, and praise. Pray for the Church. Pray for the Pope. Pray for a deliverance from evil and temptation so that you may no longer cause harm to the Mystical Body of Christ. Pray the “Our Father” so that the Church may remain healthy and vibrant for those who may join her in the future.

Modern society seems to be hyper-aware of the necessity of equality for all people. Today, we at least try not to categorize individuals according to the qualities that they do not have control of for themselves; in the context of human history, this is a radically new concept. Humans have always categorized and assigned groups according to whomever or whatever they might be. It was actually not until Christianity that the very concept of equality could even be posited as a possible outlook on the world. If you consider yourself a champion or an advocate for equality among all people, consider the one thing that made such a radical notion possible - the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.

At the time of Jesus, groups were fundamental to the structure of societies. The most basic of such structures were the differences between men and women. It was absolutely forbidden for men and women to be close with one another outside of the context of marriage; there simply was no such thing as male and female friends. On a broader scale, the communities to which you belonged at the time were naturally going to be very insular and exclusive: Jews stuck with Jews and rarely conversed with others, Pagans stuck with Pagans and could not ever become friendly with others, and Gentiles stuck with Gentiles. In a world in which freedom is considered a fundamental human right, it is unthinkable for us to consider the prevalence of slavery. But at the time of Christ, slavery not only existed, but was the norm and almost expected among all societies. The very notion of a human being the legal property of another human is abhorrent to us, but was completely normal at that time in history. What was it that allowed humanity to overcome the boundaries set up between men and women, the boundaries set up between ethnicities and races, and the boundaries between human abuse and human dignity? Did we simply evolve in such a way or become intelligent and wise in such a way that allowed us to understand how humans should truly treat each other? Some might think that we miraculously became smarter, but the truth of the matter is that we were taught by Jesus Christ, in both word and deed, that equality was not something to be grasped, but was something taught to us by being poured out in the salvific and sacrificial act of his passion, death, and resurrection. 

As Paul tells us, in Jesus Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, servant or free person, women or man. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and we should treat each other as such. We were taught the truth about the situations we were born into, human dignity, and equality among all people. But without Christ, it seems genuinely unlikely that human civilizations would ever have been able to overcome these artificial barriers that we set up for ourselves. Before Christianity spread, literally all civilizations imposed social rules that promoted inequality: men and women were never considered equal, slavery was common throughout the world and regardless of culture, and war between different groups was considered normal. Not with Christianity. When the message of the Gospel is truly spread in such a way that is free from personal interpretation or disordered implementation, equality will naturally arise. As a society, we should remind ourselves of our roots and the gifts passed onto us by those who came before us that allowed us to acknowledge equality as a true grace from God. Without Him, we will simply revert to the errors of man that persisted everywhere before Christ’s message was introduced.

In God’s infinite intelligence, all of the details of revelation are deeply linked with each other from beginning to end. From the creation story in Genesis to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in Revelation, you can find elements of Christ, the Church, the Sacraments, and the totality of our relationship with God at any point in Scripture. Particularly, the stories of the Old Testament are clear prefigurements of stories in the New Testament, which has been covered and studied extensively since the earliest days of Christianity. This link is referred to in Theology as typology - in the stories of ancient Judaism, we find “types” that correspond perfectly to Jesus and how he carried out his ministry. Typology continues to be built up as we read and investigate Scripture further, but its beginning can be found in the earliest days of the Church.

Christ himself seems to reference typological things in his own ministry. For example, the Gospel reveals that Christ saw a typological connection between the famous story of Jonah in the whale and his own coming death and resurrection. Through typology, we can discover ways in which Christ wished to communicate to us the truth of his own life, death, and resurrection. We are looking for signs as Christians in just the same way as an atheist is looking for signs of God’s existence; these signs cannot be found in persistent and explicit revelations that are divinely passed down through our senses. Instead, Christ tells us that the only signs we receive will be those that we can find in the past of our faith. The only signs we can find that tell us the truth about Christ will be found in proper and ordered typology. Even so, typology cannot exist on its own, which would only enable radical thinkers to connect dots that don’t exist. They need to be based on actual connections that Christ has to the Old Testament, which Paul clearly lays out, at least in his letter to the Romans that we hear from in this passage: Jesus is not just a literal descendant (“according to the flesh”) of David, but a perfect fulfillment of the royal identity first established by David. Jesus is not just another figure in Scripture, but the fulfillment of God in our world, who calls his Apostles, such as Paul, similarly to the way God called the “prophets in the holy Scriptures.” Jesus Christ permeates every line of scripture because all of scripture was written to prepare us for and inform us about him and him alone.

If we want to understand the truth of the Church and our relationship to Christ as the Church, we need to study typology. If typology is finding the prefigurements and the types of the New Covenant within the writings of the Old Covenant, we should be able to find the most fundamental of such examples both at the very beginning of the Old Testament and the very end of the New Testament. Scripture begins with a woman who brings slavery into the world and ends with a woman who brings freedom. Through Eve, humanity became enslaved by sin and death. Through the Church, the bride of Christ, humanity is brought into a new level of freedom from sin and death. Our salvation came from Christ, and Christ came into this world through the same way that sin and death entered - a human woman. Typology allows us to understand who Christ truly is and why he did what he did. It reveals to us the truth of the Church and how it is embodied in the person of Mary. We want signs. God has given them to us; we just need to go discover them in the writings of our past.

The Greek philosopher Plato is well-known for his famous allegory of the cave. In this allegory, certain individuals within a cave are chained up in front of a wall, unable to look around at their surroundings. However, in front of them, they are able to see shadows of puppets dancing around, and the puppets themselves are being carried around by figures behind the wall to which the people are chained. For those chained up, the image of the shadow on the wall is their reality, though we understand that their reality is quite limited and not indicative of true reality. Even the figures who parade the puppets behind the wall are not holding true reality for themselves; the puppets they are using are models or shapes of things that actually live in the world outside of the cave, such as animals or plants. However, if one so desires, it is possible to escape from their chains, see behind the wall, and to even walk out of the cave and into the sunlight; there, they will initially be blinded by the intensity of the sun, but they will also have the opportunity to recognize true reality once their sight is acclimated to the brightness.

However, not everyone who is freed from the cave in this allegory steps into the brightness of the sun and is instantly transformed into someone who recognizes true reality. In all honesty, something so incredibly new, foreign, and frightening will make you very uncomfortable. If you place yourself in the position of someone walking out into the sunlight for the first time, you can understand just how painful the sunlight would be. You would not be able to appreciate those things which the puppets and the shadows are merely symbols of in the real world. Naturally, many people would simply choose to return to the cave, return to their chains, and return to the comfort of the puppets’ shadows. This allegory also teaches us how freedom works. What is freedom and who are the ones who are truly free? In our society, there is a misunderstood notion that true freedom is having the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. But this usually entails seeking out certain forms of pleasure for ourselves, which is simply a chemical reaction in our brains that is only produced by a select few things. Media, companies, and even individuals use these things to get us addicted and placated by pleasure. Ironically, what we consider to be true freedom is actually just us being chained to the wall, pacified by the shadows of the puppets carried around by the people behind us.

True freedom is being out in the sunlight, experiencing those things that are being touched by the sun and which are the basis of those puppets and shadows. True freedom hurts and is very uncomfortable for those who are new to it, just as sunlight hurts us when we walk into it for the first time. In this passage, Paul tells us, “For freedom Christ sets us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” As a Christian, you will be tempted to slink back into the cave to be comforted by the darkness and the shadows. But you were not made to be in the cave of sin, placated by the shadows of death. You were made to walk in the light, to acclimate your vision to that which is touched by the sunlight. This is Truth. This is true reality. Past the pain and discomfort of being a disciple of Christ, you will find true and everlasting freedom, free from the chains and the limitations of mere symbols. You will find the fullness of truth and freedom in Christ alone.

One of the most careful lines that early Christians had to walk was to maintain a proper understanding of the relationship between the body and the soul. Heresies were common in the earliest days of the Church because there was very little room for error. Who exactly was Jesus Christ? What was his relationship to specific human beings? How human was he? Could an immaterial God really place Himself within the confines of a material universe? Quite clearly, it was very easy for some Christians to erroneously assume that the things of the material world were automatically bad while the things of the spirit were the only things that were good. But it was the person of Jesus Christ who allowed us to realize the goodness of the physical world because it is a part of God’s creation that He Himself chose to enter into through the Incarnation.

How could the physical world be sanctified by God when our own flesh is the source of so many of the sins we commit? St. Paul calls the “works of the flesh” obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. Our flesh can be the gateway to our most common sins because it was through the flesh that sin entered into the world. But there is a deep connection between our bodies and our souls; if our souls are properly oriented, we can use our bodies for the works for which they were meant, namely the glorification of our creator. If we separate our bodies and souls, calling our bodies bad and sinful and our souls good and spiritual, we do not allow the body to learn from and be guided by the spirit. This is exactly why Paul says if you are guided by the Spirit, you are not under the law. If you are guided by the spirit, you will not worry about the pitfalls of our bodies; rather, you will use your body as it was meant to be used - to unify the created world with the immaterial world. We have to understand that the physical world is not evil, nor is it so corrupted with sin that it is beyond saving. God entered into the physical world because the physical world was beginning to corrupt our spiritual existence; He came into this world to sanctify our bodies, and He did so by undergoing torture and death to His own physical body. By doing so, all of the sins, passions, and desires that have developed from our bodies were able to be overcome by a single act of selfless love and mortification of the flesh. We are called to perform acts of love for others and mortification of the flesh as Christians, though to still appreciate the gift of the body as a crucial part of our created beings.

Our bodies and the physical world are not the only things that exist; therefore, we cannot live as if our passions and appetites are the only things that should be satisfied. Likewise, it is just as important for us to never forget about the existence of a physical world; God created the heavens and the earth, the plants and the animals, and gave life to our bodies because He deemed it to be good. Our own creation was very good. The body and the soul, or the flesh and the spirit, have a necessary relationship because they make up who we are. Use your flesh as an extension of your spirit, not an enemy of your spirit that leads you to sin. Practice selfless acts of charity through your body and mortification of the flesh to emulate Christ and to reorient your physical self in such a way that you return to how God created you. The works of the flesh can be sanctified as long as you harmonize the things of this world with the Spirit.