Flesh and Death

To set the mind on the flesh is death.

 - Romans 8

This makes lots of sense. Flesh ages and decays. We feed the flesh, or we die. The flesh is our natural preoccupation. We make excuses for our behavior, because of what the flesh compels us to do. The more we focus on the flesh, if past a healthy point just to stay alive, the more we feed every little urge or hunger. We can no longer distinguish between survival and just "feeling good." Many contemporary Christian devotionals, even, suggest that "sexuality" is on a par with water, food, and shelter, in a list of human needs.

Jack Miles, in his two masterpieces "God - A Biography" and "Christ - A Crisis in the Life of God" suggests that the fact that we are sexual is proof that we are mortal. God cannot be a sexual being, for He does not die. How interesting! (But too big a topic to investigate here!)

But here in Romans, Paul makes essentially the same claim. The urges of the flesh, the hungers and the drives, are equivalent to death itself. This is why fasting from food is such a healthy spiritual practice. We want to live - it is our most primal, and eternal, motivator! But any time we feed more of our hungers than it takes to live, we are living according to the flesh. And this takes us away from God.

Christ went to the Cross, which was the ultimate denial of the flesh. His steps to cavalry were motivated by a desire not to live. He started His walk by fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. And He ended it by willingly offering up His own life. When He had breathed His last, they even pierced his side, so that what was left of the food and drink He had ingested, could empty out along with His blood.

In the end He had nothing at all, of this world, left.

The paradox is that life comes from a denial of the very things that make us feel good, and that even enable us to live on to the next day. When you deny the flesh, you are establishing your dominance over it.

And one cannot be holy if one cannot control one's hungers.