15 June 2019
Saturday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
St. Paul relies heavily on the distinction between the flesh and the spirit. He points that we used to know Christ according to the flesh, “yet we know him so no longer” (2 Corinthians 5:16). He means that the physical, fleshy, natural body of Christ was once upon this earth. He was seen and heard and touched and smelled just like any other human person. However, now that Jesus has been assumed bodily into heaven, we can only know him in the Spirit. The Eucharist, for example, is truly the body of Christ, but we can know that body only through the Spirit, that is, only by faith. The Church, too, is the mystical body of Christ, but we can know that only through the Spirit, only by faith.
“Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians, 5:16). This is an astonishing conclusion, and one that should be challenging to us. This means that our natural method of interacting with human beings has to be replaced. It has to be improved. We can no longer regard each other according to the flesh. Instead, we must regard each other according to the Spirit. In other words, we have to try to see people as Jesus sees them. We must try to see them with their strengths and weaknesses, with their good deeds and their bad deeds, with their habits and the quirks and their preferences, all in one whole person that was created by God and loved by God so much that he sent his only son to save them. If we can regard each other according to the Spirit, then we can esteem each other as Jesus esteems us, and we can love one another as Jesus loves us. “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (John 13:34). What makes such love possible is learning to regard each other according to the Spirit. May God grant us that grace.