The Smell of Esau

Old you certainly are, if we are going to tell the truth — you who are so easy on your own appetite; and you are quite right to boast about coming first. I know the smell of Esau anywhere, the hunter of wild game. Look at you: nobody is more devoted than you are to catching thrushes, and you come in from the field of your own thoroughly slack discipline, and you are faint in spirit. Hold out to you a cheap dish of lentils dyed red with boiled-down grape juice, and on the spot you will sell every claim you have to first place. With you, love comes to the boil in stewpots, faith warms itself in kitchens, hope drops anchor in the serving trays; but love counts for more, because love is how your young men get to sleep with their sisters. Appetite’s hangers-on, as everyone knows, are lechery and self-indulgence. The apostle knew about that partnership too. That is why, having first said, “Not in drunkenness and carousing,” he added, “nor in beds and lusts.” [a]

Part of the charge against your appetite is this: the “double honor” owed to the men who preside among you gets paid out in double helpings. The apostle gave them double honor because they are two things at once, brothers and officers. Who among you counts as the holier man, except the one who dines out most often, who lays on the most expensive spread, who is best schooled in wine? You are men of soul and flesh and nothing more, and you are quite right to want nothing to do with what is spiritual. If the prophets were pleasing to people like you, they were not my prophets. So why is this not your standing sermon: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”? We, for our part, do not shrink from giving the order like men: “Let us fast, brothers and sisters, in case tomorrow we die.” Let us defend our disciplines in the open.

We are quite sure that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” — meaning, of course, not those who are in the substance of flesh, but those who are in its cares, its affections, its business, its will. Thinness does not offend us. God does not hand out flesh by weight, any more than he hands out the Spirit by measure. Thinner flesh may well get through the narrow gate of salvation more easily; lighter flesh will rise more quickly; drier flesh will keep its firmness longer in the tomb.

Let the Olympic glove-fighters and the boxers stuff themselves full. Ambition for the body suits men who need the body’s strength — and even they build themselves up on dry rations. But our muscles and sinews are of another kind, since our contests are of another kind: ours is a “wrestling not against flesh and blood, but against the power of the world, against the spiritual forces of malice.” Against those it is not stoutness of flesh and blood that we have to make our stand with, but stoutness of faith and spirit. A well-fed Christian, on the other hand, will be of more use to bears and lions, I dare say, than to God — except that even to face the beasts it will be his job to train himself thin.