My Present Answer to Bunions, Arthritis, and Such

The question caught me a bit off guard.  I am used to being asked to defend and
explain my theology, but this was something different.  A couple of weeks ago, I had been talking to a retired/aged friend and chaplain about some physical aging fears, i.e.: arthritis, bunions, skin cancers, explaining that what had helped me to move past them was largely due to faith that gives me hope in a world beyond them.  His response pulled me down from my seemingly ascended place.  "What is your theology of the body?" he asked.  "How does God speak to your physical existence right now?"  I didn’t know how to respond.

I suppose it’s because in the last chapter or so of living, my physical hasn’t been a matter that my spiritual has often considered.  He challenged me by asking questions.  What does it mean that Christ came in the flesh, with sinew and marrow?  What does it mean that he lived and breathed, died, and was raised as a body?  Perhaps more importantly, what does it mean that the risen Christ today, as a corporal being, is ascended and sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven?  What does Christ's wounded body have to do with my own?  What of his ascended body?

Since that conversation I have concluded that thinking that my modern divorce of the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, what is now and what will be, has made those difficult questions difficult to truthfully consider.  On the other hand, the promise of the Christian is union with none other than Christ himself.  In faith and by the Spirit, I am united to the same body that was on the cross and was in the tomb, which is now also in heaven.  I am united with a body who is very much a living, immense, and physical promise.  "Since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ" 1 Corinthians 15:21-22.

As I look at the issue with vigor and fresh open mind, I confirm that the biblical depiction of salvation and sanctification is far more "earthy" than I have entertained during the last decade. No matter how privatized, removed, or other-worldly I might describe Christianity, it is unavoidably a faith that intends me to encounter and experience both King and kingdom in the here-and-now, everyday, hand-dirtying occurrences of my life.

In an unapologetically corporeal account, the book of Acts describes the risen

Christ among his disciples:  "After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.  While eating with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father... And when he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight" Acts 1:3-4.   When the two men in white robes appeared and interrupted the disciples' stupor, their question was as pointed as the one my friend had stumped me with: "Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you, will return in the same way as you saw him go forth" Acts 1:11, (emphasis mine).

It is no small promise that Christ came as a body, was wounded as a body, and now sits as a real and living body in heaven until the day he will return and wipe every tear from my eyes.  The ascended body of Christ represents something more fully human, more real than myself, and it is this reality that he lifts me toward, transforms me into, and advocates on my behalf.  My union with Christ and communion with the Trinity add a certain and heavenly dimension to my life, and it is indeed one that correctly and profoundly orients me here and now, in a real body, to the world around me.

 

Father, thank you for speaking into my physical existence!  In these weeks from the physical shock of Easter to the corporal gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, I’m going to make a deliberate time to consider the Christ who walked among the world as a risen body, who invited Thomas to physically put his hands in scars that still mark pain, who ascended as one fully human after sharing a meal with those he loved, and who sent the Holy Spirit to live powerfully with me.  I pledge to You that I intentionally will consider the body of Christ, who now sits at Your right hand, The Father as advocate, offering his body for the sake of mine, calling me to physically model that body in the world of Bill Prather.  Amen