By Protopresbyter Themistokles Mourtzanos
"Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins towards the same body" (1 Cor. 6:18).
The human being becoming an object, a thing, a res, is not just a current phenomenon. Nowadays, in the third world, people are cheap labor, so that the rich can enjoy goods, especially technological ones, in abundance. In war, everyday people become “collateral damage”, while the number of dead is what matters, not who they really were. In relationships, many see the other as body and flesh and not as a complete coexistence of soul and body. Thus, relationships today are characterized by the exclusivity of sensuality.
The worst thing is that the new generation is addicted to the pornographic view of the relationship. It cannot understand and experience the beauty of seeing the other as an image of God, which means as a person with gifts, which are not limited to any physical beauty. The relationship is based on the emphasis on self-affirmation, that is, that I can conquer the other, have them as my property, enjoy the moments of physical pleasure without caring about who they really are, what responsibility I feel the need to take on for them, how precious they may be to me so that I cannot accept that there is life without them. Let's look at extramarital affairs, a common phenomenon of our times. The one who is fed up with the routine of marriage, with the other person’s inability to respond to what they are asked to be, the feeling that everything needs a break, sometimes even the temptation of the moment, the need for self-affirmation amidst boredom, give rise to ephemeral adventures, in which love does not exist, but only relief. The other person is “a certain solution.”
Our Church concludes the second week of the Triodion with the Gospel reading of the Prodigal Son, that is, the return of man from the land of being distanced from God, where everything is an object for expenditure, at the price of the expenditure of man himself, to the paternal home, to the Church, where the relationship is that of persons in which God honors man with love, the recognition that he is His child, with the ornaments of distinction, clothes, shoes, the ring, that is, the conferring of the royal title on the returnee, and man honors God with repentance, humility, the responsibility of love that knows the limits and measures, the acceptance of a fatherhood that does not coerce, but liberates in love. At the same time, the Church reminds us through the Apostolic reading from the First Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and that sin is the use of our body as a means to secure pleasure without love, without community, without the responsibility of sharing, but also the transformation of the other into an object of use, into a body without a soul, without a face, without meaning, but with the only value of existence being the pleasure it can offer.
And Paul points out that sin in one’s own body, in reality, is very serious, because it accustoms man to deny love and the view of life through the gaze and face of the other, the communion of “us”. Sin therefore turns on oneself, as it accustoms man to deny love as the goal of life. Other sins are also failures, only they remain outside the body, they do not consolidate a mentality of denial of love, but only of temporary pleasure, which, however, does not close the door to love for man. Seeing the other as an object becomes a perversion of the heart and not a simple weakness. That is why the Church calls us to see our existence as a whole again, as an image of God, and our body in particular as a temple of the Holy Spirit, as an existence that is sanctified and can offer holiness.
The period of the Triodion is a period of reminder that human relationships are not a game of bodies, but the blessing of coexistence, of companionship, of love that respects the other as a whole. The other does not exist to serve us and satisfy our needs, but for us to offer to them and for them to offer to us. If we have strayed, it is time for repentance, time for returning to a genuine view of relationships, as defined by the Church!
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
