The Third Word, Part 3

Pronouncing the third syllable of Pauline Eschatology

01/06/2024

As John Paul II rounds out his reflections on Christ’s third word on the resurrection of the body, he eagerly includes the teaching of St. Paul the Apostle. It is no exaggeration to say that in the New Testament St. Paul stands as “the great, comprehensive theological mind who provides an overarching framework into which the insights and contributions of the other inspired authors can be fit” (A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament, 721). Viewed historically, John Paul carries forward the work of Thomas Aquinas, who in turn built on the labors of Augustine, but all three saints relied on the foundational work of St. Paul and his thirteen New Testament epistles. Remember the children’s game called “telephone”? The children stand in a line shoulder-to-shoulder. Someone whispers a sentence into the first child’s ear at one end of the line. That child turns to his friend and whispers it into his ear, and down the line it goes. By the time you get to the end of the line, the sentence is humorously garbled and unrecognizable. I would suggest that St. Paul, as an inspired author of Sacred Scripture, heard the original whisper of the Resurrected Christ, and all the subsequent saints have been trying to understand and reconstruct that original sentence Paul heard from the lips of Jesus the Teacher.

John Paul II wants to include what St. Paul heard at the front of the line in his theology of the body, and so he interrupts his reflections on Christ’s third word twice: first by delving deeply into St. Paul’s thoughts on the resurrection in 1 Co 15, and secondly by considering Paul’s presentation on celibacy for the kingdom from 1 Co 7. The pope is convinced that we have not yet touched upon everything the Sacred Scriptures have to teach us about Christ’s three words on our Edenic origins, our earthly pilgrimage, and our eternal destiny until we sit at the feet of St. Paul and ask him to tell us what he heard as the first child in line in Jesus’ telephone game. The pope puts it summarily: "In his synthesis, Paul thus reproduces everything Christ had proclaimed when he appealed at three different moments to the “beginning” in the dialogue with the Pharisees (see Mt 19:3-8; Mk 10:2-9); to the human “heart” as a place of struggle with concupiscent desires in man in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:27); and to the resurrection as a reality of the “other world” in the dialogue with the Sadducees (see Mt. 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:35-36)” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 404). In keeping with our theme of using the adjective “eschatological” – like we did with Eschatological Integrity and Eschatological Virginity – we will call this third syllable “Pauline Eschatology.” I know “eschatology” functions as a noun in that phrase not an adjective. Sorry about that.

First, John Paul interrupts his discussion of Eschatological Integrity – that both souls and bodies enjoy heavenly glory – by examining 1 Co 15:42-46. The pope considers these words “a synthesis of Pauline anthropology concerning the resurrection” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 403), and therefore quotes Paul’s powerful words: "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised full of power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus, it is written, that the first man, Adam, became a living being, but the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual” (1 Co 15:42-46).

As a child I sometimes watched the show “The Addams Family”. This macabre family included members like Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, the butler Lurch, Aristotle, a pet octopus, and even a disembodied hand called Thing. They were essentially a bunch of lovable monsters, both endearing and entertaining. In a sense, St. Paul sees all humanity like members of this Addams Family. But then Paul compares and contrasts them to the Family of a New Adam, namely, Jesus. In other words, by birth we become members of the first Addams Family (lovable monsters), but by Baptism we are adopted into the new Adam’s Family, the Family of God, and thus children of God. John Paul helps us understand how St. Paul employs the rhetorical device of “antithesis, “or opposites, elaborating: "By contrasting Adam and (the risen) Christ – or the first Adam and the last Adam – the Apostle in fact shows in some way that the two poles in the mystery of creation and redemption between which man is situated in the cosmos…Between these two poles – between the first and the last Adam – the process unfolds that he expresses in the words ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of earth, we will bear the image of the heavenly man'" (1 Co 15:49)” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 406). In other words, this antithesis of going from the old Addams Family to the new Adam’s Family is what St. Paul heard when Jesus whispered the original sentence into his ear at the beginning of Jesus’ telephone game.

John Paul interrupts his theology of the body again after discussing Eschatological Virginity. He inserts here a concise but complex examination of virtually all forty verses of 1 Co 7. One way we might unpack John Paul’s tight argumentation is to think of motivating people with either the stick or the carrot. Have you ever used the stick or the carrot, punishment or reward with your children? I remember how students at Catholic High School experienced both the carrot and the stick from our beloved principal, Fr. George Tribou. He treated freshman as a strict father or more like a Marine drill sergeant. Punishment was fast but fair. By our senior year, though, Fr. Tribou had softened up and treated us more like a grandfather. The pope argues that St. Paul was also aware of the carrot and the stick motivations. How so? St. Paul employs “the stick” to motivate people to choose continence for the kingdom of heaven writing: “I say this to you, brothers, the time has grown short” (1 Co 7:29), and later, “for the stage of this world is passing away” (1 Co 7:31). The pope explains Paul’s purpose in these passages: “This statement about the futility of human life and the transitoriness of the temporal world, in some sense the accidental character of everything created, should cause “those who have wives to live as though they had none” (1 Cor 7:29; cf. 7:31), and should prepare the ground for the teaching about continence” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 448). By the way this same stick of how the world is passing away motivated me to consider the priesthood when I left India and felt like I had lost everything. That transitoriness deeply moved me to seek what is not transitory but permanent, namely, God. And later that motivation matured into virginity for the kingdom. I felt like a freshman at Catholic High.

On the other hand, St. Paul knows precisely when to entice with a carrot. St. Paul writes: “The unmarried person is anxious about what is the Lord’s, how to please the Lord” (1 Co 7:32). John Paul notes the supreme significance of this statement: "This statement embraces the whole field of man’s personal relationship with God. “To please God – the expression is found in ancient books of the Bible (see e.g. Deut 13:19) – is a synonym of life in God’s grace and expresses the attitude of the one who seeks God, or who behaves according to his will so as to be pleasing to him" (Man and Woman He Created Them, 449). By the time we were seniors at Catholic High, Fr. Tribou no longer needed to use the stick of punishment and fear. We tried to obey the school rules out of love and admiration because we wanted to please him. We were moved by the carrot of his approbation.

When we understand how motivations like the carrot and the stick operate in the human heart – like we learned at Catholic High – we can discover why St. Paul suggests that virginity is somehow "superior" or "better" than marriage, like when he wrote in 1 Co 7:38, “he who refrains from marriage will do better.” Paul is not speaking pejoratively about marriage but only highlighting how these two motives (carrot and stick) function in virginity, but do not function as frequently or as intensely in marriage. Why not? Well, married couples have too many other things to worry about: raising kids, cooking dinner, and paying the bills! If these two motives were also operative in marriage – which they are in many holy couples – then both vocations would stand on equal footing. The Holy Father adds this helpful explanatory note: “In answering the question addressed to him in this way, [St. Paul] attempts to explain very precisely that the decision about continence or the life of virginity must be voluntary and that only such continence is better than marriage” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 445). Put briefly, what matters is the motivation – present in virginity but ordinarily absent in marriage – otherwise there is nothing “better” or laudatory about continence versus marriage. Merely the motivation makes one “superior” to the other, nothing else.

I personally met Pope St. John Paul II on three occasions. The last time was in 2003 when I attended a private Mass with the Holy Father in his personal chapel with only twenty-four other people present. The pope-saint was confined to a wheelchair and already showed signs of Parkinsons with a shaky left hand. Nonetheless, he was fully vested in priestly garments, and attempted – with enormous difficulty – all the liturgical gestures and movements of the Mass. I vowed that day I would never complain about all the priestly motions of the Mass, but to do each one carefully and with devotion. It was as if John Paul were teaching the final lessons of the theology of the body, saying in effect through his suffering: this is what we have a body for: to worship God, and precisely in that way, “to please God.” Life was all "carrot" for Pope St. John Paul II, as it was for St. Paul, to whom the pope accorded, "the theology of a great expectation, whose fervent spokesman Paul was" (Man and Woman He Created Them, 454). Today, however, Pope St. John Paul II’s body is in no way burdened with illness or old age. Rather, it rests peacefully awaiting the glorious day of the resurrection of the dead. On that last day, the great and eternal Easter, John Paul’s body will be fully and powerfully reintegrated with his soul. And he will again be able to go hiking on his beloved Tatra Mountains in Poland. Heck, he will be able to fly over them.

Praised be Jesus Christ!