1 Cor 11.23-26, John 13.1-35
One of the things I have been
particularly aware of this Holy Week is just how physical our observance of it
usually is. It is full of material things - Palm Crosses, service sheets,
candles, Messy Church paint and glue and tinsel. Hot cross buns and Easter eggs
shared in church, interactive prayer stations which people can gather around
and perhaps stick things to or write on, singing, processing, and of course the
bread and wine of communion. We’ve never gone in for ritual foot-washing here
at Seal, and perhaps that’s just as well because that’s one thing I haven’t had
to try to rethink or scrap this year – everything else has had to be risk
assessed, adapted or abandoned. We’re doing our best, but there’s no denying
that without all those physical things, Holy Week feels a bit anaemic, a bit
thin. Here we are celebrating the gift of the Eucharist, the wine and the bread
which symbolise Christ’s presence with us, but I can’t give you the wine, and
the bread will be delivered with tongs, an awkward process at best… Of course,
for many people even being in church at all is impossible at the moment. All
they are getting is worship through a screen or a disembodied voice on a
podcast, or even just printed words on a page. It’s not how we’d want it to be.
The Word became flesh, but it feels we’re having to turn it back into words
again at the moment.
But that is because this year we
have had to recognise that physical matter – including our own bodies - can be
problematic as well as a gift. The virus that has given us so much grief is a
part of the physical matter of the universe, just as much as the beauty of the
sunrise, the hand of a friend, the food we eat. It is the fact that we are
physical that causes the problem. Physicality brings pain as well as delight.
And yet, the Word became flesh –
not just in an adorable baby in a manger at Christmas time, but also on a
cross, suffering and dying. God didn’t send an idea to redeem and rescue us. He
sent a flesh and blood person, into the mess of the world, a bodily being among
the rest of us bodily beings. He did that because our God is a God who loves
bodies and the physical stuff they are made of.
At the time of Jesus there was a
school of thought which regarded the body as a prison, something to be denied,
subdued until it could be cast off and the spark of light that was trapped
inside us, the true self, could fly free. Those who held ideas like that were
often called Gnostics, though there wasn’t ever an organised movement that bore
that name. It’s a very persistent idea,
though, which has lurked about throughout history, and still does. People often
think that Christians believe in disembodied soul, imagining it as a
wifty-wafty thing floating up to heaven when we die. It’s understandable that
we think like that. Our all-too-solid flesh (I speak for myself) can be a trial
at times, with its aches and pains, and its tendency to start falling apart and
generally deteriorating after a while. But the Bible reminds us from beginning
to end that this mortal flesh, this temporal life, this here and now, is God’s
gift. When he created it, God looked at it and said “that’s good – I like it”,
and when things all went wrong, he didn’t abandon it. He came, as flesh and
blood himself, to be part of it. He didn’t scoop us up out of the physical
world; he came into it. He was hungry and thirsty, tired and in pain. He
eventually died, and was raised, a physical being. That’s why it is so
important in the stories of the resurrection that Jesus eats with his friends,
and shows them the wounds in his hands and feet and side.
It would be quite understandable if
we were fed up with flesh and blood this year, with having to protect it by
wearing facemasks and keeping our distance and not being able to do the things
we want, but it is because we recognise that it is blessed and precious
that we do this. Our care in the way we have used our bodies this year – all
that “hands, face, space” stuff – is an act of thanksgiving for the gift of
bodies, our own and others. It’s a statement this life matters, that matter
matters.
It’s no accident, then, that Jesus’
tells his disciples on the night before he dies that something as basic and
physical as eating and drinking will be the place where they’ll encounter him
in the future. And he doesn’t say that it should be some sort of special ritual
meal. Any meal will do. The God who was present with his disciples in the flesh
and blood of Jesus is still present with us in the stuff of the world around
us, blessing it and declaring it to be good, if we have our eyes open to see
him. The God who was present with his disciples as he washed their feet is
still with us in the practical care we give to one another, even if it has to
be rather “hands-off” at the moment. As the choir will sing later in a
recording Philip has edited together from our separate voices and instruments,
“Where love and loving-kindness are, there is God”. It’s a quote from the first
letter of John. “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est”, as it is
in Latin.
We may not be able to touch each
other today. We may not be able to do many of the physical things we would like
to, but God is present in the love we show and share, including the loving act
of protecting each other’s bodies by not touching or getting too close to each
other so we don’t pass on the virus. Whether we are able physically to receive
the bread and wine of the Eucharist at the moment, everything around us,
everything that is us reminds us that matter matters to God, and so it
should to us. It is blest. God loves it.
Amen
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