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   In today’s epistle (Galatians 6:11-18) the bodily mark of circumcision is contrasted with the marks of the Lord Jesus, which the apostle Paul claims to bear in his own body. It has been said that we become what we love. Couples who have been married for many years are sometimes thought to come to resemble each other.

The mark of circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17:1-14), expresses the male Jew’s identification with the chosen people, whom Paul calls “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16).

“The marks of Jesus” which Paul bears in his body may refer to what he has suffered from illness (Galatians 4:13), floggings (2 Corinthians 11:25), “beasts” (1 Corinthians 15:32), or that mysterious “thorn in the flesh” given him by Satan (2 Corinthians 12:7). Such sufferings are brands which mark Paul forever as the “slave of Christ Jesus” (Galatians 1:10). Of them Paul gladly boasts to those who would glory in the mark of circumcision.

The Greek word for “marks” is stigmata. St. Francis of Assisi is said to have received from a vision of the crucifix the stigmata, or bloody wounds inflicted on Jesus on Calvary. In our own day the Carthusian friar Padre Pio received this same agonizing grace.

Such physical assimilation to the crucified Lord expresses in a drastic way the Christian’s identification with the one whose death, in Christian belief, brought life to the world. By him Paul says, “the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6:14). By incorporation into Christ’s death through baptism, the Christian becomes “a new creation” (v. 15).

Our gospel (Matthew 6:24-34) tells us that “no one can serve two masters.” No one can serve God and mammon (v. 24). There was a sensational case in the States not long ago where a woman had become so attached to the life style which she and her husband enjoyed that, when she discovered that he had taken up with his secretary, she ran him over with her Mercedes and killed him.

But what does the service of Christ entail? The General Thanksgiving, which we recite at Morning Prayer, asks that we may show forth God’s praise not only with our lips but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to God’s service and by walking before the Lord in holiness and righteousness all our days (Book of Common Prayer, page 15).

True religious commitment cannot be limited to “lip service” in the recitation of the Creed. Jesus said, “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). The “fulness” of which the later New Testament epistles speak (Colossians 1:19; 2:9; Ephesians 1:23; 3:19; 4:13) is always concrete, and its concreteness connects with the body.

Religious faith resides in the deep physical carnality which finds sense for soul’s meaning in just those moments of life when what seemed straight becomes crooked and what seemed plain becomes rough.

September 4, 2005

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