The
human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God”. (Catechism
of the Catholic Church, #364)
Wow.
A simple sentence with profound and eternal implications. The
human body shares in the dignity of being nothing less than the
very image of God!
Wow!
Of course this shouldn’t
surprise us. When we open the Bible we only have to read as far as the twenty-seventh
verse of the entire book to encounter this amazing fact:
God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
The human body, and specifically
its masculinity and femininity, images God, and does so by deliberate design.
Before we contemplate this any
further, there’s something we need to first understand.
God could have created human
beings any way he wanted to. (He’s God, he can do anything he wants.) He could
have made us with three heads, six arms, eight legs. He could have created us
in six genders--or no gender at all, designing another way to bring new people
into the world. Or he could have created us purely spiritual like the angels,
with no bodies at all.
But God deliberately fashioned
humanity with bodies, crafted with a specific design, because he intended to
create in humanity an image of his very self, a visible expression of his invisible
reality. And this was the design
he chose to express who he is.
So it all means something.
It means something that God
created the human body, this image of himself, with sexuality.
It means something that in doing
so God created two specific sexual identities, male and female.
It means something to be male; it
means something to be female.
It means something that God
created people in these two sexes to yearn for each other, and to join themselves
in covenantal communion that brings forth new life.
It all means something, because
God does everything for a reason.
Thus, the way we behave with our
God-imaging bodies either shows the divine image they were created to be, or it
does not. How we behave with our God-imaging bodies affects not only how we
live on this earth, but how we will live eternally in the “resurrection of the
body.”
There is a “theology of the body,”
and we really don’t know God, we really don’t know ourselves, and we really
don’t know the meaning of life, until we begin to understand what God has
imprinted about all of this right in our bodies--the image of himself.
St. John Paul II devoted a series
of 129 talks early in his pontificate to presenting this “Theology of the
Body.” In this series of articles we will explore in “bite-size pieces” this
profound theology.
As St. John Paul II said: “The
body, in fact, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible:
the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality
of the world the mystery hidden from time immemorial in God, and thus to be a
sign of it.”
