Re:Verse passage – Matthew 8:1-4 (day three)
“Go, show yourself to the priest.”
Your body is intricately connected to your spiritual well-being. This must be affirmed, especially against the tendency to think that valuing the “inside” means devaluing the “outside”. Such reasoning is disastrous. When the body is thought of as having little value, people will violate others’ bodies with abandon. The resulting pain in the human race is staggering: body-image issues which devastate a person, human trafficking, abuses of power, unchecked disease, and more. God values the body so much that one day he will raise it from the dead. Accordingly, Jesus told the man whose body he healed that the only way to understand his healing and to nurture his body is to steward it within the community of those who will help him remember how fearfully and wonderfully he is made.
Your first and last sentences were so completely succinct. Truth and direction in two sentences. Beautiful, Brian. Thankyou.