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
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
