Reflection on January 14, 1981

https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/jp2tb52.htm

Using the freedom “as a pretext for living according to the flesh” is exactly the way I would describe what the world is trying to push. In almost every aspect of secular life, this is the way they excuse their actions. Any limitation or constraint on the ability to do what we feel like is met with the argument that we are a free people and restriction of that is unhealthy. (Although no one, unless they are psychotic, actually believes people should be 100% free to do whatever they want.)

What I see SJPII is saying is that the “law” of the Old Testament was an attempt to conform the “life according to the flesh”. You have laws of cleansing, of circumcision, of material sacrifice, all in an attempt to curb the flesh. What St. Paul is looking to and what has been established by Christ is taking the idea of established in the Old Testament, and applying it further, into living a “life according to the spirit”. All the rituals, sacrifices, acts of the Old Testament are a foreshadowing of what we are supposed to do for our inner being after Christ. What they worked towards in the physical we fulfill in the interior with the help of the Spirit. Thus we see that circumcision is not entirely erased but is transitioned into the act of baptism. (Removal of the foreskin transitions into the removal of original sin)

“Christ set us free that we might remain free”. I thought that was an interesting way to put it. The freedom that the secular world brags of offering, as we have discussed, is not a freedom but slavery to sin, life according to the flesh, an inability to control yourself and have self mastery. SJPII brings all this back to the beginning with the importance of fully giving yourself as a gift and receiving another fully. When you are not “free” in the way described by St. Paul, there is no way to give yourself fully. You cannot give what you do not have. Any part of you that is tied to the world is a part that you do not have the ability to give to another. This understanding of “life according to the flesh” ties directly in SJPII’s understanding of the importance of being able to freely give yourself and that experience and what we learn from that. I think, in some ways, that seems obvious as you are following along. In another way, I think making the connection shows the unity in the theological interpretations from Christ to St. Paul to SJPII and continues to establish the importance of SJPII’s Theology of the Body.