Body and Soul

Back in the 90s, there was a writer named Flavius Josephus. Oh, sorry—I don’t mean the 1990s. I mean the literal 90s!

Josephus was a Jewish military leader during the uprising against the Romans in the 60s. In the year 67 he was captured in battle and made a slave to the Roman emperor Vespasian, and then as an advisor to the emperor’s son Titus. Josephus fully defected and was granted Roman citizenship; he even served as translator when Titus was laying siege to Jerusalem. That siege led to the destruction of the Jewish temple in the year 70.

Say what you will about Josephus’s choice to preserve his own life by working against his fellow Jews, but we do have reason to be grateful to him. Outside of the Bible, his writings are the only surviving source for our present-day knowledge of first-century Judaism. Josephus wrote two great works: The Jewish War in 75, and Antiquities of the Jews around the year 94. Because of these works, we have references beyond the Bible to such figures as Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate, Jesus of Nazareth, James the brother of Jesus … and even John the Baptist.

Josephus was born a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion, so we don’t know his sources for these early references. But he does write briefly about the relationship between John the Baptist and King Herod. Here’s what he writes:

Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, [who] was called the Baptist. For Herod killed this good man who was telling the Jews to practice virtue, and behave righteously towards each other and devoutly towards God and so to come to baptism. This would make the washing acceptable to [God], if it were used not for the putting away of some sins, but for the purification of the body, since the soul was already purified by righteousness.[1]

I think even that little paragraph could use some unpacking, don’t you?

The military effort Josephus references here is Herod’s war against the King of Arabia, which Herod lost; that geopolitical intrigue is covered in the previous section. Here, though, I find myself zeroing in on the words “body” and “soul,” because I’ve never heard baptism spoken of in this way before. Let’s break it down.

“Body and soul” is such a common phrase that I bet we don’t think very often about the binary it represents. Some things happen to your body, and other things to your soul. Jesus also expresses this binary later in Matthew’s gospel: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”[2]

John taught his fellow Jews to love God and to love their neighbors. He urged them to be baptized in water—not to purify their souls, which were already purified, but to purify their bodies. Interesting! So according to Josephus’s take on John’s ministry, if you are acting with virtue, this cleanses your soul. All that’s left, then, is to cleanse your body.

The thing is, the assumption that body and soul are separate from one another is not an inherently Jewish idea. It’s Greek—it comes from Socrates and Plato. This makes sense, because it’s logical to imagine body and soul separately. When a person dies, we still see their body, but to whatever degree we could have claimed to “see” their souls, we don’t now. Plato believed in reincarnation—that the soul, once it has left the body, is reborn in another body. Plato also thought the soul had three parts: our logic center, our emotion center, and our appetite center.

But the ancient Hebrews didn’t think this way. For them, the body and soul are at one, such that none of us can survive once the body dies. Now, we do hear of Sheol as the Jewish land of the dead. We may imagine it to be full of souls separated from their bodies. This may sound like splitting hairs, but my understanding of the difference is that in earlier Jewish thought, a soul without a body is ineffective and cannot be considered “alive” in any way. The soul dies along with the body.

This began to change when Judaism came under the influence of Greek culture. Plato’s ideas began to infuse Jewish theology, and by the time of Jesus, Judaism had adopted a hybrid idea: not bodily reincarnation in Plato’s sense, but the anticipation of a day in the future when all the dead will be raised to life again—with both body and soul intact! This was the philosophy of the Pharisees. Other Jews, like the group called the Sadducees, thought this was nonsense; they stuck to earlier Jewish philosophy. And so we see the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish world interacting in a way that was ripe to produce Christianity.

Now, you all know that sometimes I preach from a heart space and sometimes from a head space. So far this has been a heady sermon, I know. I want to make a shift by asking you this question: Have you ever felt that your body and your soul were acting in opposition to each other?

Just last week I talked about the urge to hit the snooze alarm. Why does my body not want to get out of bed in the morning? Why does it seem sometimes that I cannot will my body to do what my soul most wants? This can make us suspicious not of our body, which we think we should be able to control easily, but of our soul, which seems to hold divided intentions. There’s a reason that the phrase “just do it” has been effective at selling shoes. If you’re going to “just do it,” your soul and your body have to work together to put those shoes on.

It is to the divided intentions of our souls that John preaches—even when he calls the Pharisees and Sadducees a “brood of vipers.” He doesn’t trust them, because he hasn’t seen them produce actions that indicate sincerity. And sincerity is the thing John most fervently calls out of people. Without sincerity, there’s no point in getting baptized.

Josephus wrote that John’s baptism was a cleansing of the body, not the soul. I don’t know whether that accurately captures John’s own theology, but I like the idea. It reinforces that no matter what we do, we cannot purify our own souls. That’s God’s job. Since we cannot see our souls, the best we can do is demonstrate God’s cleansing of our souls by the washing of our bodies. Hopefully, before and after our baptism, our virtuous actions will show others an undivided nature, with body and soul working in tandem—or at least our sincerity in working toward this reality.

This is the theology that Jesus taught. Both John and Jesus urge us to “repent”—and that may mean changing our ways, but first it means changing what our bodies do. It means putting our souls and bodies into alignment as best we can by growing in sincerity. Love one another … don’t abuse one another. Show your sincerity through your actions. You may not want to do the right thing, but … well, “just do it.” That’s when you’ll find things beginning to change for you. That’s how we begin to develop habits that, in the long run, will become virtues. It becomes a feedback loop: the more we develop habits of love, the more loving we will become.

But it all starts with repentance. You may have some baggage around that word; far too often in present-day Christianity it calls up images of beating ourselves up with guilt. That’s not what it’s for. To repent just means to say, “I’m going to do things differently now.” Honestly, it starts with changing our minds, so that we can change what our bodies do. To paraphrase Funkadelic, “Free your mind” … and your, er, body will follow. That’s from back in the year 70. Sorry … NINETEEN-seventy.

But hang on. Now I’ve introduced the word “mind” alongside “body” and “soul.” And it gets even more complicated. Accoring to Mark, Jesus tells us, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” But according to Matthew, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And Luke puts it like this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.” Dang, how many different parts are we responsible for?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to think that the more ancient Jews had it right all along. Maybe our body, soul, mind, heart, and strength aren’t so separate after all. Maybe getting our bodies wet in baptism also affects our souls, because maybe they cannot be truly separated. Maybe when our bodies die, our souls die, too—at least for now. After all, when Jesus returns to his friends after his death, so all the gospels writers agree, he returns bodily—with the scars of his killing still imprinted on him. He’s not a disembodied soul, but a new kind of corporeal being—and still exactly the same person he was before.

It seems to me, then, that our primary work is to cultivate sincerity. This is a project we can never do alone—we need God to help us, and we also need one another to practice with. Nobody becomes a fully formed person all at once. And so today Paul calls us to steadfastness and encouragement. He urges us to welcome one another, and thus to spread love more and more broadly throughout the world.

If you want to become part of that project, the way to do that is to be baptized—to join this worldwide community that stands with Jesus as a signal to the peoples of the world. Then, as Christians together, we can help invite more and more people to get curious about Jesus’ Way of Love. Amen.

[1] Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 116-117

[2] Matthew 10:28