There are some wonderful
words in today’s readings; delight,
rejoicing, pleased, glory. And what links them all is that they are all
words which are being used in the context of material creation, of physical
existence, of the flesh and blood reality of human life.
There’s been a
persistent trend in Christian history to shunt the focus of faith from the
realm of the physical to the realm of the spiritual, from this earth which we
know and inhabit to some sort of hazy ethereal place in a distant heaven, as if
the world to come is the only world that really counts. “Pie in the sky when
you die”, is the caricature. It’s a temptation that dates right back to the
early days of the church, when the Jewish faith of Jesus’ first Galilean
followers was embraced by the Greek-speaking and, more importantly,
Greek-thinking people of the Eastern Mediterranean nations beyond Israel. Many
schools of Greek influenced philosophy at the time of Christ were very
ambivalent about bodies and physical stuff generally. Some held that the world
was really the botched initiative of a lesser god, others that the material
creation was just a shadow of a better, purer ideal which was beyond our grasp.
Many ancient Creation myths viewed men and women as a nuisance to the Gods, or
as playthings to be used for divine convenience.
And while Greek
sculptors gave us some of the most glorious statues of the human body, like
those from the Parthenon, they were very definitely of the body at its most
beautiful, youthful and strong. We may think that the obsession with body image
is a modern one, but if the Greeks had had Photoshop, you can bet they would
have used it to the full. The Greeks may have celebrated the body, but only at
its best, and let’s face it, for most of us that’s a fairly unreachable
ideal. Perhaps I just speak for myself
here, but it seems to me that most people don’t look like Greek Gods and
Goddesses. Human bodies sag and bulge and creak and wrinkle. They don’t work
the way we want them to. They let us down at vital moments, and ultimately they
let us down completely in death. It’s no
wonder that people have so often preferred to believe that we are really just
waiting for the moment when we can cast off this clayey prison and waft up into
the air as an incorporeal spirit.
But that’s not what the
Bible says. It’s not what traditional Jewish theology says. It’s not what our
readings today tell us. Instead, they talk about creation, all of it, including
our fallible human bodies, as something to delight in, to rejoice in, a glory
and a wonder. Material creation, this stuff which we, and everything else
around us, is made of isn’t a second-best, botched job, a ghastly mistake on
the part of the creator. It is God’s pride and joy.
In the first reading,
from the book of Proverbs, the figure of Wisdom works with God to create the
world and then rejoices with him in his “inhabited
world” “delighting in the human race.” The Psalm is another joyful celebration of the
world its writer lived in. “How manifold
are your works! In wisdom you have made them all.” God meant us to
be as we are, saggy bits and wrinkles and all, growing, changing, stumbling,
aging, not in some state of static, botoxed perfection.
The Bible doesn’t
downplay or ignore the problems of physical living – its pains and struggles –
or the reality of the sins we commit which mar and damage the world. It doesn’t
pretend that everything is always as we, or God, would like it to be But that
doesn’t mean that God has rejected his creation. I have never been able to get
my head around a theology that believes that God has withdrawn from us in some
kind of divine huff because, in his holiness, he is somehow allergic to human
sin and unable to exist in its presence. Nor can I believe that there was an
unbridgeable gulf between humanity and God until Jesus came. The reason that’s
never made much sense to me is that when I read the Bible, that unbridgeable
gulf doesn’t seem to be there. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Again and
again in the Old Testament, just at the point when human beings have screwed up
completely and when all hope is lost God is there alongside them. He shows
himself in a burning bush, in the vision of a ladder set up to heaven, in a
still, small voice that comforts the prophet Elijah as he sits in despair in a
mountain cave. He is present with slaves in Egypt and exiles in Babylon. They
may not notice him. They may have turned their backs on him, but he is right
there beside them all the time.
The famous Gospel
reading we heard today rams that message home – “the Word became flesh and lived among us” - among us! The people we meet in the
Gospels – even those Jesus chose as his closest followers – weren’t plaster
saints. They were vacillating, cowardly, sometimes treacherous people, people
who squabbled among themselves and generally blundered around making things worse
rather than better much of the time. They lived in an occupied land, often
having to collaborate with the powers that oppressed them and make uneasy moral
compromises in order to survive. Many of them had distinctly dubious
backgrounds. They were tax-collectors and prostitutes, people whose lives were
broken, who felt hopeless and helpless. Yet it was precisely to these people
that Jesus came, God with us, God in the mess, God in the chaos, God in flesh
and blood – real flesh and blood like theirs, like ours, which bleeds and hurts
and dies. Why would God want to “become flesh” if this is what being flesh
means? Surely it was in order to
convince us that, despite all this, flesh is still blessed, because his was
flesh which also held and hugged, which knew the pleasure of a good meal at the
end of a long day, which felt the silkiness of oil soothing rough skin. Jesus’
body is, quite literally, a tangible demonstration of what God thinks of human
flesh, and of the world it inhabits. It is a place he wants to be.
The physical body of
Jesus, born in Bethlehem, walking the roads of Galilee, sharing bread with the
hungry, nailed to the cross, tells us that our bodies, all bodies, are God’s
best idea, not some awful mistake. “In
him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” said our second
reading from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. And “through him” – because of his earthly, physical life, his bodily
death, his bodily resurrection – “God was pleased to reconcile to
himself all things, whether on earth or heaven through the blood of his cross.”
Human beings often feel estranged - from God, from one another, even from our
own bodies - not because God has withdrawn from us but because we are hiding
from him. And when we are estranged from our Creator we tend also to lose sight
of the blessedness of what he has made, our fellow creatures and ourselves. Through
Jesus, God deals with that sense of estrangement. He shows himself to be as
close as he can get to us, in a human body. If he has so honoured human flesh
and material creation, who are we to curse it, however troublesome or
disappointing it can sometimes be?
I’m in the thick of
writing our Lent course for this year at the moment. It’s called “Coming to our
senses”, and it will focus on each of our five senses in turn over the five
weeks of the course. There’ll also be daily reflections encouraging us to be
aware of what we see, hear, smell, feel and taste. What I’ve realised as I’ve
prepared it, though, is that you can’t think about senses without thinking
about bodies. Without a body we’d have no senses. And that brings us up
slap-bang against all our complicated feelings about being bodily people.
I’m very aware that for
some, a course on the senses may mean thinking about a body which doesn’t work
as we would like it to, or as it once did. We may delight in the beauty of the
world, but feel frustrated that we can’t see it as well as we used to. We may
celebrate the sounds of nature, but be painfully aware that we are missing out
on some of them because our hearing has deteriorated. The sense of touch, of
physical sensation, may be fraught with difficulty for us because we are in
pain, or because we’ve been touched in ways that have hurt or frightened us.
Smell and taste, so important to enjoying food, may have deserted us. Our
bodies may not be a source of delight to us, but rather of anxiety, regret or
shame.
We live in an age in
which people seem increasingly anxious about their bodies and their appearance.
Young people take endless selfies to share on social media, tyrannised by the
need for others to “like” the images they post. Eating disorders and self-harm
are rife, evidence of the profound difficulty many people have in being the
people they are in the bodies they have. Older people desperately fight the
signs of aging, buying into the lie that the only bodies worth having are young
bodies. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, there’s the whole business of
sex, with all the confusions that brings…No wonder bodies are often seen as
problems.
If ever we needed to be
reminded that flesh is good and that it is blessed by the presence of its
Creator, however imperfect it feels to us, it is now.
God, in Christ, is “making peace”, says Paul to the
Colossians. He makes peace between peoples. He makes peace between us and
himself. But it seems to me that he also wants to help us make peace with
ourselves, with our own bodies, to accept ourselves as we are, warts and all,
as our flesh grows and changes, works and loves, hurts and heals, ages and
dies.
So today, perhaps we
should go home and look in the mirror and ask ourselves “how is my flesh, my fragile, imperfect flesh, blessed by God? How can
I find God within this body, a body that isn’t some Greek sculptor’s ideal of
beauty, but the only body I’ve got.” And as we look I pray that we will catch
a glimpse of the God who dwells in us, who made us and loves us, just as we
are, and that we will delight in his creation – ourselves - just as he does.
Amen
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