Jesus’ words to the Pharisees often resonate with his own followers as well:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity”.
Matthew 23:27-28
It’s easy to make a commitment to Christ, but harder to follow through. We fall into hypocrisy if we do not undergo a transformation from death to life, allowing Christ to conform us to himself. Although this change takes time, we can’t become complacent with our sins. When we return to them, we become like white sepulchers with everything looking fine on the outside, but dead on the inside. We become a tomb.
Easter marks the time that brought us from death to life. We became a new creation in Baptism, through which we died and rose with Christ. It changed us from a tomb, a place of spiritual death, to a temple of the Holy Spirit. We might compare this transformation to the Holy Sepulcher: it was a place of death but now testifies to the living presence of Christ, who dies no more. As we move from a place of death to one of life, we become a home for the Risen Christ, a temple to make him present in the world. If we fall into sin, thankfully the Lord gives us a gift of renewal in Confession, which does not whitewash on the outside, but cleanses us from within, renewing his temple.
Easter builds toward Pentecost, completing its work by transmitting the power of the Resurrection to us. The Spirit transmits the presence of the risen Christ, giving life to what was once dead, as Paul explains:
But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit who dwells in you.
Romans 8:8-11
We move, even in our bodies, from death to life. Our bodies once were sources of death, serving as instruments of unrighteousness (see Romans 6). No longer enslaved to sin, our bodies become instruments of righteousness. We see the impact of Christ’s death and resurrection on our bodies as “our old self was crucified with him so that sinful body might be destroyed” (Romans 6:6). This begins the work of the restoration of humanity, which Christ will complete when he raises us up on the last day.
Although in Heaven, we are neither married nor given in marriage (Matthew 22:30), we can see how this transformation of the body impacts marriage, as St. John Paul relates in the Theology of the Body: “In this sense marriage as a sacrament also bears within itself the germ of man’s eschatological future, that is, the perspective of the ‘redemption of the body’ in the dimension of the eschatological hope which corresponds to Christ’s words about the resurrection.” Marriage constitutes the ordinary path for Christians to experience and live out the redemption of their bodies in service to another. The power of the Resurrection transforms marriage, enabling it to be a source of life and beauty, and adding a complementary dimension to serving as a temple of God in the world.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) captured this reality powerfully, showing how the complementary beauty of the male and female body gives glory to God. Cathedral, a small marble sculpture of two hands, evokes architecture through its title. The theme extends from Rodin’s Hand of God, now showing how God’s creation continues his work. Rodin captures how humanity should point to the Creator in its natural integrity, but also in its fruitfulness. Together, man and woman form the temple and create space (as seen between the hands) for life. A cathedral building, in its attempt to point us upward and to create space for God’s glory, does not impose itself on our humanity, but fulfills the body’s role as temple.
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