Our grammar often betrays us. We say we have a body. That seems to suggest that I am something distinguishable from my body. In good capitalist fashion, the body becomes another possession I can use as I see fit. But Paul does not think there is an “I” that has a body. We are our bodies. And the body we are together is one that has been bought with a price. Our bodies are, therefore, not our own to do with as we please. Rather our bodies are a resting place for the Holy Spirit. Paul even seems to think that what our bodies do and do not do makes a difference for our ability to be a holy people.

Christ is alive! Let Christians sing.
His cross stands empty to the sky.
Let streets and homes with praises ring.
His love in death shall never die.

Christ is alive! No longer bound
to distant years in Palestine,
he comes to claim the here and now
and dwell in every place and time.

Not throned afar, remotely high,
untouched, unmoved by human pains,
but daily, in the midst of life,
our Savior in the Godhead reigns.

In every insult, rift, and war
where color, scorn, or wealth divide,
he suffers still, yet loves the more,
and lives, though ever crucified.

Christ is alive, and comes to bring
good news to this and every age,
till earth and all creation ring
with joy, with justice, love, and praise.

Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. In the arrangement of “lawfulness” in Jesus’ time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion. The norms of law (social control) are never accommodated to persons, but persons are accommodated to the norms. Otherwise the norms will collapse and with them the whole power arrangement. Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of his social context.

I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among (people) of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them so as to love them just as they are. For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal. I do not speak of helping them, because as far as that goes I am unfortunately quite incapable of doing anything as yet.

Alone, O Lord, alone with thee,
Where none could speak nor hear nor see,
The bar I’ve placed across my heart
I’d lift, and bid the doors to part—
On rusty hinges open wide
And let just once your love inside;
And when I’d turn to close the door
And put the bar in place once more,
My heart so filled with thee I’d find
The doors could not be closed behind.

When we are brought face to face with the theological task, we see that this whole issue of picturing God begins from a new departure point. It rearranges the task, gets at it from the other side, so to speak, not the self’s side, but the other’s. For we come up against a hard fact that is right at the center of our faith—that we really do not get to God from our side, that we do not get to God by strictly human effort. We may think we have long grown beyond the idea of God as a sort of scoutmaster from whom we earn merit badges, a Santa Claus to whom we submit our lists of needs and wants. But old habits die hard. Our ideas of God may just be more refined versions of the old ones. We may be working strenuously to remake our pictures of God in order to reach God, or believe that through our well-intentioned social causes, we are coming closer to God. But we always must come up against the hard fact at the center of the Gospel: we do not get to God by our own efforts. God comes to us.