I love the questions of children! With both innocence and intense curiosity, children can fling out zingers that rip away all of our adult certainty. One of those times for me was many years ago in preschool chapel, the week after Easter. I had just talked about Jesus being “alive again” and how glad his friends were to see him. One of the puzzled four-year-olds raised his hand and asked: “Why can’t we touch God?” Before I could recover, another one added with concern: “And why can’t we see God?” I honestly don’t remember what I said. I think I quickly mumbled something about God being too marvelous or powerful to touch except in our hearts. But whenever I read today’s Gospel lesson, I wish that I could take back my vague words. “Touch me and see,” says the resurrected Jesus to the frightened and disbelieving disciples. Touch me and see.
The trouble is that we adults shy away from talking about bodily resurrection. We have trouble believing it; we have trouble conceptualizing it; we have trouble describing it. You might think that our struggle with the resurrection is just a modern reaction, born of a scientific worldview or distance from the event itself. But look at the disciples: everyone from Mary Magdalene and the women at the tomb, to Thomas, to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the whole group gathered in today’s lesson … they’re all afraid and disbelieving when confronted with their risen Lord. If Jesus returned as a ghost--we could deal with that. Ghost stories and TV ghosts populate our imaginations even today. If Jesus returned as a spiritual, disembodied feeling in our hearts--we know about those. If Jesus returned as a resuscitated body, even that--we can understand medically. People “die” and are resuscitated all the time in our hospitals. But Jesus as a new kind of body—a body that can walk through walls, yet still eat fish? A body with the wounds of crucifixion still oozing? That kind of body blows our minds. It’s like nothing that we’ve ever known. Unlike those preschoolers, I’m much more comfortable with a God that I can’t see and touch. I don’t really want a God wrapped up in this strange, improbable kind of body.
The body problem isn’t just about Jesus, either, you know. When we say in the Creed each week that we believe in the “resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” we are saying that we believe that our bodies will at some point rise again. We’re saying that we too will join Jesus in this new kind of embodied life after death. The resurrection of the body is a central tenet of our Christian doctrine, yet it brings up all kinds of questions: We wonder if a purely spiritual resurrection wouldn’t be more logical--for us, as well as for Jesus. Don’t we read in the Bible itself that the desires of the flesh are occasions for sin? Aren’t our bodies what pull us away from God in the first place? Surely an unchangeable God wouldn’t have much use for our frail flesh? Doesn’t God love our spirits best—or our clever minds or our loving hearts? Why not be done with bodies as soon as possible? With all of the money spent on make-up and plastic surgery and with all the time spent at the gym, I know that we human beings are interested in grooming and “perfecting” our earthly bodies. But I’m not so sure that we believe that God loves them enough to give them everlasting life.
I remember that I didn’t have much use for my often sickly, always uncoordinated body, when I was younger. My arms were the puny ones that always collapsed in Red Rover; my feet were what tripped me up in dance class; and my lungs were what kept me home with asthma when I wanted to be out having fun. It was my mind that was my friend. It allowed me to escape my unreliable body in books and in the world of imagination. It was what brought me attention and approval at school. If I had to pick something to keep for eternity, it would be my disembodied mind or my ethereal yet loving soul. My body I could do without.
It wasn’t until I had children, I think, that I gained any appreciation at all for my body. The miracle of birth created in me a respect for what the body could do, for the way in which we are all so carefully and wondrously made. Indeed, when I think about Incarnation, about God “taking on flesh,” I think first of the baby Jesus: His silky smooth baby skin; his perfect little fingers and toes; his sweet baby smile …. If God is going to take up residence in some kind of body, the fresh, new, adorable body of a baby just might suffice. God entering the world, loving the world, through the miracle of birth at Christmas—I have no problem with that kind of Incarnation. But our Christian faith doesn’t just stop with Christmas. Like our bodies, the body of the sweet little baby Jesus must someday ache and bleed, must someday suffer and die.
Therefore, after the resurrection, Jesus returns to his disciples with his body. He comes to them with the same frail, wounded body that had hung on the Cross. He comes with a body that is hungry for some supper. He comes with a wounded body that they are invited to see and to touch. This new, post-suffering, post-death body is also part of Incarnation. The triumphant God didn’t shed flesh as soon as possible. The triumphant Easter God didn’t come out of the tomb as a golden beam of light. Jesus didn’t appear to the disciples as a soft and loving breeze. The risen Christ came to the disciples, presenting them with his beaten-up body to touch with their own embodied hands. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Touching the truth with our minds alone is not enough. We are made to touch it with our bodies. I think this is why Christian tradition clings to the reality of resurrection… The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.”[1]
Matter matters to God. This is the lesson that we are to draw from the stories about bodily resurrection. As Earth Day approaches on Thursday, this is an important lesson for us to hear. Not only does God love and sustain the human bodies that God created, but God loves and sustains the whole earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well. Theologian Sallie McFague rather controversially calls the creation, “God’s body.” For McFague, the whole creation is the sign of God that we can touch and see. With the universe as a metaphor for God’s body, our care for creation takes on a whole new level of importance. Perhaps Christ is holding out to us a hand broken by fracking and whispering, “Touch and see.” Perhaps Christ is showing us a belly filled with plastic waste and whispering, “Touch and see.”
Yes, Jesus still wants us to touch and to see. To our doubts about the loveliness of our own bodies, Jesus invites us to “touch and see.” To our doubts about God’s love for all bodies—white, brown, black, young, old, broken, whole—Jesus invites us to “touch and see.” To our doubts about God’s commitment to our world, to our doubts about the truth of Resurrection, Jesus invites us to “touch and see.” To those preschoolers, I should have said what I say to you today: Touch God in the warm hand squeezing yours as you pray together. Feel God in the cool, moist earth that you turn with your trowel as you pull away the weeds. Look at God in the mountain sunset. But also, weep with God at the injuries done to any part of Creation. Care for God as you care for the earth, seas, skies, and creatures. Matter matters to God. All that pertains to bodies, matters to God. The resurrection of the body tells us that our salvation, our healing, our eternal life, is to be found there. Life is not just for the soul, and faith is not just for the mind. Touch and see—and testify with your lives to God’s presence in Creation.
No comments:
Post a Comment