Consider the body

In church on Easter Sunday: The sermon is about life. But more specifically, life in the resurrected body. “And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus” (Luke 24:2-3). The corpse they expected was walking around alive—in a physical body, not a shimmering spirit. My mind spears off on a tangent: Consider that body.

When our mortal bodies are not clamoring for attention with a stubbed toe or a hammered thumb, we ignore them. When they embarrass us by tripping or stuttering or limping across the finish line dead last, we’re disappointed in them. When they age, and remind us of it with every twinge, we wish they didn’t matter so much.

But the Resurrection says they do. Our bodies matter. Matter matters.

The sophisticated world of A.D. 50 begged to differ. Learned men of Athens listened to Paul’s intriguing ideas about the Unknown God “in whom we live and move and have our being,” some of them even nodding along. An unknown, invisible, all-powerful God made sense. Until Paul got to the part about the resurrection of the body, and that was a speculation too far. Bring back bone and muscle and blood and dung? Please!

The intellectuals of the age knew that real life was in the mind. That’s where “know thyself” took place, according to Socrates. Bodies were only vehicles of the soul—slave-guardians at best, diseased dumps at worst. The sooner we ditched them in the grave, the better. Until then, they were to ride or unruly beasts to master. Or (if you were the hedonist at the other end of the stoic spectrum) eat, drink, and be merry because indulgence of the perishable body made no dent in your imperishable soul.

The Platonists and Neoplatonists agreed. So did the sophists, who could argue from both sides because nothing was truly real, or really true.

So do transgender advocates who locate identity entirely in the mind.

So do educators who bend all their efforts toward reasoning and cognition, not recess, art, or practical skills.

So does Satan, for whom bodies are only useful avenues for temptation.

But Christ does not. He insisted on His own physicality: “Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Sitting still on the pew, I experience my own flesh and bones, cheerfully sustaining my life: blood pulsing, oxygen flowing, gut squeezing. Red corpuscles trek single-file through threadlike capillaries, freshening every cell with oxygen. Acids are breaking my breakfast into proteins and sorting potential energy from waste. Light from sun-pierced windows pours through pupils and projects moving patterns on twin retinas. Muscle fibers are breathing and brain synapses are firing, weaving thought from sound waves that ride the air. “Jesus himself stood among them.”

Every square inch of me is alive. Body and mind together; it’s all me. My body doesn’t hold me prisoner. It holds my joy.

I blink away tears. Christ does not disdain or disregard this body—on the contrary, He loves it. He has big plans for it and is so determined to carry them out that He became a body. He descended way, way down, all the way to particle level. He formed His own body, grew it, birthed it, walked it through a short lifespan, and took it to the grave—torn, shamed, and bloodied. But then …

The forests and fields are excitedly whispering that someday the sons of God will be revealed. Will they eat and drink? With pleasure! Will they work and play? That’s what bodies do best! Will they copulate? No, because the practical need to multiply no longer exists, but more because they were made for pleasure even more intense. It was planned from the first moment in Creation when “Let there be” brought forth earth and sky, water and rock, root and leaf, feather, fin, and flesh. He breathed in the Fall and breathed out the New Creation, battle-tested and victorious and no longer bound by corruption. On a church pew on Easter Sunday, I can almost smell that rarefied air.

“For our song of application, turn to hymn No. 276 as we stand and sing, ‘Up From the Grave He Arose.’”