6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Romans 8:6-11 (NRSVUE)
I wake up to the news of death. 175 in an elementary school in Iran. Over 20,000 children in Gaza. Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Rohingya refugee and elder. I cry, and my young child asks me why I am sad as we lie together at bedtime. Why does Paul insist that setting the mind on “the flesh” leads to death? Isn’t it a failure to love these bodies that has ended their lives?
To grapple with these questions, I believe that it is critical for us to realize that the flesh is not the same as the body. The Greek word for “flesh” is sarx, and it is different from the Greek word for the “body” (soma). The flesh is our “meat”: the parts of our bodies that wrap around our bones, that flex and squish and scar and grow and thin. When we die, our flesh decomposes–because it is no longer inhabited by our spirit. The Greek word for “spirit” is pneuma, and it literally refers to our breath, the wind inside of us. In Genesis, it is the breath of the Divine that gives life to the first human being (2:7).
The body includes both the flesh and the spirit. If you can, touch your hands: feel the meat of your palms, check the edges of your nails, trace the tendons under your skin. This is your flesh. Now, take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out. You were breathing already, weren’t you, because you are alive? This is your spirit. There is no place in your body that does not depend equally on both the flesh and the spirit.
So, if the flesh is not the body, what is it? Let’s hear Paul’s teaching again, with the translation “meat”: “To set the mind on the meat is death.” If I regard a body, whether my own or another person’s, as a commodity, as an object of sacrifice, as collateral damage in war, then I have treated it as “meat” and I have accepted its deliberate harm or even complete severance from the spirit. The Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers has used the word “flesh” to describe how enslaved Africans were denied social rights, instead being legally defined by their ability to be wounded.
It is no accident that violence against certain populations becomes normalized. Whether on the basis of race or disability, immigration status or gender identity, language or nationality, power for some comes at the expense of placing others in harm’s way. As the queer theorist Judith Butler has differentiated, although all humans, because of our mortality, face the general potential to be harmed, living in a state of “precarity” means being at comparatively higher risk of harm, whether in the form of active violence or simply failing to be given protection. When a marginalized person seems “to embody the unthinkable and even the unlive-able” in the eyes of dominant society, their deaths become not only accepted but naturalized–and even excluded from being grieved.
As war continues in Iran, it is very telling that top U.S. government officials make the effort to justify deaths within the U.S. military, but feel no need to even bother addressing civilian deaths in Iran. As U.S. service members have begun to be killed, the president tactlessly spoke about these losses as expected “casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.” His callous words represent the meaning of their lives in economic terms as a “deal,” a necessary sacrifice on the altars of capitalism, imperialism, and the military-industrial complex. But this is more consideration than has been given to the over 1,200 Brown bodies killed in Iran. When the president blamed Iran for bombing the elementary school and Defense Secretary Hegseth merely stated that it was being investigated, they used misinformation and obfuscation to deflect the possibility of Americans’ feeling rage, guilt, or grief over their deaths. Instead, sickeningly, U.S. leaders ask everyday Americans to feel cartoonish joy. The White House posts memes on social media, and Trump boasts, “now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
If the words of Paul sound harsh, it is because they are–and I am glad that they are. To those who treat other people as bottomless vessels for pain, Paul delivers these rebukes: “This is not lawful. This does not please God. Christ is not in this.”
I am writing during the season of Lent, which has been traditionally associated with reminders of our mortality: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (cf. Genesis 3:19). Although I grew up Christian, we did not attend churches that observed Lent, and I am still getting used to it. When I received ashes a few weeks ago, I asked for them to be placed on the back of my hand; I haven’t become comfortable with them on my forehead yet. As a young adult learning about more Christian traditions than my own, I gave up a range of “worldly” distractions for forty days: eating sweets, straightening my hair, using tumblr. Later, I realized that I did not only have to choose something to give up, but could instead add something in–something life-giving.
“To set the mind on the Breath is life and peace.” I encourage us to read Paul’s exhortation not as a redirection of our attention to the non-material world in contrast with the physical one. The Spirit or the Breath equally includes the Holy Spirit who we cannot see and the flow of divine life in every person, which we can see in others and can personally feel, running within our chest, through our throat, across our lips.
This divine flow both shows us that we are alive, and it opposes forces that seek to kill us–or to turn us into killers. When the “flesh” is associated with sin in the writings of Paul, I urge us not to see this as a condemnation of the physical body, which has too often been denigrated in a racialized and sexualized way as a source of weakness and temptation. Instead, this rhetoric can show us that sin turns living beings into “meat,” whether this happens to us or whether we cause it to others.
In contrast, the Breath is a source of righteousness. The divine literally makes a home in human bodies (oikei, “dwells,” Romans 8:11), acting alongside human agency so that we can participate in cultivating life and peace in our communities. Among local organizers in my area, a common phrase is, “We got us.” Although some may feel tempted to sit and wait for a political savior to fix the mess we find ourselves in, this is a call to lean into our own agency, not just as individuals, but as a group.
Paul uses the image of resurrection to demonstrate the power of the divine flow to not only bring about life and allow for its continuance, but to actually overcome death. In many Christians’ doctrines of salvation, it is the death of Christ that saves people from sin and death and inaugurates possibilities for life and righteousness. In some places, New Testament authors certainly communicate this. But here in Romans 8:11, and in many other writings of the New Testament, it is the renewed life of Christ that is salvific: “If the Breath of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Breath that dwells in you.” Both images are meaningful: life from death, and life from life. But in the face of propaganda that seeks to justify the deaths of some bodies with the excuse that it saves the lives of others, it matters to insist that there is another option.
How can we set our minds on life without demanding that death precede it? In the lectionary texts for this week, resurrection is the image that we see over and over again: the dry bones whose breath is restored to them (Ezekiel 37:1-14), Lazarus whose death causes the very divine breath (pneuma, “spirit”) of Jesus to be outraged (John 11:1-45; v. 33). I want more stories. I want stories where people live and just keep living. I don’t want to forget that it was Ezekiel who was prophesying over those dry bones, because against the odds he survived the destruction of Jerusalem and continued to live, although in exile in Babylon. I don’t want to forget that Jesus is not only “the resurrection” but also just “the life” (John 11:25). I want to press into a world that sounds impossible, where “everyone who lives” in Jesus “will never die” (11:26). I want to enter into conversation with Paul, and I want him to convince me. He insists, “you are not in the Meat; you are in the Breath, since the Breath of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9).
Heard in this way, Paul’s rhetoric does not shame the body. Both the flesh and the spirit, the meat and the breath, are embodied metaphors that grapple with the complexity of the agency and vulnerability of the body. This Lent, I am seeking to reject death and to breathe life into my daily efforts to protect the bodies in my community.
