Author name: Molly Hostetler

Years ago, while perusing a dusty old junk shop with a friend, I happened across a tarnished silver serving tray. It wasn’t solid silver—just silver plate—but it was beautiful. It was also five dollars. I bought it on the spot. When I returned home I found some silver polish, cleaned up the platter, and used it to serve hors d’oeuvres at my next dinner party. I felt like the poshest hostess on the block. Considering that, at the time, I lived in a Washington, DC ghetto, that wasn’t much of a stretch. 

For years, mostly because of the hassle of traveling 1280 miles, roundtrip, on Thanksgiving weekend, I stayed in Steubenville for the holiday and opened my home to whomever didn’t have one that day. One year, that number was as large as 25. Another year, it was as small as four. A few special friends, however, have always been around the table, and those are the ones  less than pleased when Chris and I go to my parents for Thanksgiving. 

Contemporary Gnosticism is a totalizing ideology that brooks no opposition and tolerates no dissent. It wants to separate humans from all tradition and social locations (family, community, and so on) that serve as natural points of opposition. Separated from tradition, family, culture, and nature, the individual becomes a subject of the State facing the stick of coercion. But there’s also a carrot. Like all ideologies, contemporary Gnosticism entices postmodern men and women with promises of a perfect utopia, a heaven on earth in the here and now, if only we trust elites to run with their plans for us.  

The Gospel of Matthew presents itself as a universal, authoritative document persisting for all time for the Church enduring for all time through its narrative, through the form of a story. Reading the Gospel of Matthew, then, requires significant attention to its narrative dynamics. Redaction criticism—comparing passages in the Gospel of Matthew with similar or near-identical passages in the Gospels of Mark and Luke apart from their narrative contexts in the Gospels in an attempt to get at what the Gospel writers thought—fails to take account of the storyline of each of the Gospels and ironically goes beyond and behind a Gospel writer’s intention.

For the Jewish people, the number twelve was much more than a dozen. This sacred number brought to mind the twelve tribes of Israel which descended from the patriarch Jacob’s twelve sons. These twelve tribes were the foundation stones upon which the nation of Israel had been built. Jesus drew upon this traditional symbolism.

It was supposed to be a simple dinner. It was supposed to be quick, easy, and nothing about which I had to fret my little head . . . which is full up with fret these days because, as usual, I’ve taken on too much work. Supposed to be, supposed to be, supposed to be.

Actually, in one way, it was simple. It was simply a disaster.

While the death and Resurrection are the most crucial chapters in the story of Jesus, he did a lot more with his life than offer it up on the Cross. In fact, we won’t fully appreciate the significance of his death on Good Friday until we understand the mission that Jesus had for his life in the years that went before.  

As modernism sees it, the human body is nothing more than matter, to be molded, manipulated, and used. Devoid of divine purpose or meaning, it’s left for each of us, as individuals, to decide what we want to do with our body. We can ignore it and neglect it, or we can indulge its every appetite. We can nip it and tuck it, remaking it into whatever shape we desire, or we can cut it, starve it, and put it to rest when age, pain, or disease become too much to bear. We can give it away, again and again, to anyone we fancy in whatever ways we fancy, and we can do what we like with any new life that comes of that giving.

Right now, a good many minds are at work fleshing out the theology of the body’s theological and philosophical subtleties: how it builds on Karol Wojtyla’s earlier scholarship, how it responds to Scheler, how Garrigou-Lagrange’s influence runs through it. That’s good. Those discussions are important and necessary. We need them to more fully understand the complex and dense lessons contained within John Paul II’s catechesis.