As a society, we are obsessed with our external images. As Christians we should recognize that our energies need to focus on how we can allow Christ to shape and mold us into new beings.
The two texts focused on for this week approach the question of self image from two different but related perspectives. The text from Mark tells the story of an exorcism, a dramatic but not unbelievable or unheard of event in the first century A.D. Today we think that the type of demon exorcism Jesus practiced in Capernaum is no longer a part of our culture. In reality, however, we are all engaged in superhuman efforts daily to drive out demons from our modern lives. Only our methods have changed. The text from Corinthians features a particular demon we still fixate on - the god of food.
We are a nation of food fetishists. We try to rid ourselves of anxieties and insecurities through over-use and addiction to both food and, more recently, technology. Whereas being overweight and keeping out of the sun used to be marks of status (we tend to forget how recent this preoccupation with the body is: as late as 1954 only one in ten French dwellings had either a bath or a shower), now the affluent sport sleek, tanned, sculpted, and cultivated bodies as signs of their wealth and leisure time. The body is now everything, as our aerobics, jogging, body sculpting, and dieting reveal.
By combining our food-fixated culture with our technology-fascinations we strive to create the perfect outer self, a slimmed-down and firmed-up body. Once a "Ten" or "Gold's Gym" body is achieved through makeovers by Moore's Nautilus and takeovers by TCBY (the new breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions), the consensus reads, those demons that hound our soul and grind down our spirits will be dispossessed. But in trying to drive out our demons through Lead-Us-Not-Into-Baskin-Robbins prayers for perfected shapeliness, we invest in an Optifast faith, a diet technology of salvation in which we sip our way into beauty, truth and goodness, and mostly slimness. This very focus on external, artificial, sleek for-keeps solutions to our self-image problems only serve to provide food for our demons to stay in us, not starve them out. Satan is the master of masquerade (2 Corinthians 11:14). And Satan is masquerading in the promises of an Optifast faith.
A whole pantheon of deities has cropped up to feed on our doubts and anxieties, fostered by our addiction to what others (most notoriously models in GQ and Cosmopolitan) deem an acceptable standard and kept flourishing and vital by our own dependence upon them for our self-image. Eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia, as well as prestige sport diseases - joggers get "Black Heel" and "Jogger's Nipples," golfers get "Black Palm," tennis players get "Tennis Toe" and "Tennis Elbow," surfers get "Surfer's Ear," skiers get "Skier's Knees" - are symptoms of a problem larger than the mere cult of thinness. By the way, evidence that eating disorders are not new to the 20th century comes from the book of Isaiah 55:1-5, where the writer admonishes those whose ambition it is to be stick figures: "Delight Thyself in Fatness." Better love handles among the living than great legs among the dead. Other similar but more contemporary responses include:
"I'm not overweight, I'm undertall."
"Thin is in, but fat is where it's at."
Plagued by self-doubt, we increasingly turn to externals, such as the food-technology alliance, to solve all our problems, to design for ourselves a new self. U.S. News and World Report (15 February 1988) did a special report called "Designer Diets" in which they found a plethora of "diets that promise everything but an afterlife." Reversing the aging process or curing what ails you, even if you have to turn your kitchen into a chemistry set, can sound pretty good. Says Mt.Sinai's Dr. Victor Herbert: "People want to believe in magic. They see nutrition as a religion, not a science."
The drive to shape our own bodies, sculpt our own selves, denies the existence of an intimate dependent relationship on the One who created us. The more we seek to re-create ourselves in Madison Avenue's perfect image, the less chance we will discover the true shape God intended for our bodies and our souls. There are a lot of bodies beautiful walking around who don't feel as good as they look. Body and soul formation are the work of the Spirit - we are to grow our own body, that is the body God gave us; we are to grow our own soul, the soul God gave us. Different natures will have different needs, different personalities different carriages, because God created each one of us to be an original. The notion that with the right effort and willpower you can have the body you want to have denies that God is our sculptor. God is the shaper. We are not our own. When we surrender to the Master Potter, we are being "shaped" by God. Romans 9:20-21 reads: "What right have you, a human being, to cross examine God. The pot has no right to say to the potter: 'Why did you make me this shape...' "