This Is My Body
I spend a lot of time thinking about the Day of Judgement.
I know. We’re one sentence into the homily for Pride Mass and we’re already talking about judgement. Unlike so many sermons about judgement, I promise that we’re headed to a good place with this one.
I’ve noticed that many people I know who live under oppression, as part of marginalized groups, spend more time thinking and talking about the Day of Judgement in relation to their faith than other folks do. That moment when Christ returns in the fullness of divine glory and sets about judging the living and the dead.
It’s not a conversation I’m looking forward to. I’ve done some foolish things and understanding them as God does is not going to be easy. But it is also the day when true justice takes hold. The oppression and marginalization end. The weight under which we all labour every day is finally lifted and we can be our whole, beautiful selves as God intended. That’s the part the folks I know are focused on. The freedom that is the final outcome of all of that godly judging.
I suspect we’ve all been told things about what we can expect when we are judged. And much of what we’ve been told has been unpleasant. Especially what we’ve been told about these bodies of ours. How they are, how we inhabit them, how we live and move and have our being with them. I think those unpleasant predictions are mostly wrong. So I thought today we might explore a bit about what we know about this God of ours, God’s response to our bodies, and see if we can imagine what at least part of our judgement might really be like.
The first thing we should hold in mind is what the psalmist reminds us of: It is God who formed us as we are and these works of God, these bodies, are wonderful. When God creates, it is with the utmost care and love. Not only for God’s own delight, but to create opportunities for us to discover and cooperate with God in this glorious act. And we recall from the creation story that, when God created humanity, God pronounced us “very good.” Not possibly good or mostly good, but very good.
We should also remember that God is willing to meet us where and as we are. When God has important news to share with humans, an angel is sent. For most people who have angelic visits—Abraham, Sarah, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Mary, the shepherds on Christmas Eve—the response is awe, wonder, and even fear. The angels have to console the humans before they can deliver the news.
When Jacob is alone one night, in the midst of a long journey, he finds himself confronted with an angel. Jacob is not awestruck or fearful. Jacob rolls up his sleeves and spends the night locked in a wrestling match with the messenger. We talk about discerning the Word in our biblical studies and sometimes call it wrestling with the text, but our process doesn’t hold a candle of Jacob grappling all night with an angel.
What’s important about this story for us here, today, is the reminder that God is willing to meet us where and how we are. If we’re afraid, God will comfort and console us before sharing what needs to be said. If we’re distracted or need a clearer sign, God will burn the scenery to get our attention. If we need to work for our blessings, locked in a sweaty, painful, powerfully intimate embrace, God will do that for us, too. In Jacob’s case, he needed to feel the revelation in his very bones and went away from the encounter changed. His identity was changed with a new name. His body was changed with a bum hip and a limp. He became the father of a nation through his wrestling with God.
Our relationship with our bodies is no simple thing. As that excerpt from Sonya Renee Taylor’s work reminded us, bodies are the site of so much struggle, so much exploitation, and can be the site of so much love. God’s willingness to meet us, in our bodies, in the most intimate of ways doesn’t end with Jacob’s wrestling match.
When it comes time for Jesus to demonstrate what it means to be a servant, he does so in such a way that it unsettles the disciples deeply. He takes up a towel and begins to wash their feet. If you’ve ever been to a Maundy Thursday liturgy where feet are washed, you know how unsettling this is for people in our culture. To have someone else wash you at all is an incredibly intimate experience. Never mind a body part like feet with all of the phobias, hangups, assumptions, kinks, and taboos that surround them. It’s a big deal to have anyone, much less a leader, teacher, or even Messiah, bend down and begin to wash your feet.
Some scholars claim that, in some places in the Bible, the term “feet” is used to refer not to actual feet, but as a euphemism for genitals. I’m not bringing this up just for the uncomfortable giggle or to suggest that Jesus is washing anything other than Peter’s actual feet. What I want to point out is that, whichever side of the academic debate you fall on, for this to make any sense at all, feet and genitals have to share some cultural concepts. Like modesty and intimacy. For Jesus to kneel down and begin to wash the disciples’ feet is the upending of so many assumed norms that poor Peter doesn’t know what to do with himself. This level of voluntary care, humility, sensitivity, self-giving, and intimacy is what parents show to children or lovers to one another. Jesus is speaking volumes with his body about the relationship he shares with his disciples.
God does not want our bodies to be sites of exploitation for the gain of others. God wants our bodies to be experienced as the gift they are. Opportunities for love, care, closeness, vulnerability, sensitivity, and honour of the image and likeness of God that each body bears.
God could have chosen many ways to work out humanity’s salvation. But when the time came, God chose to take on human flesh. To have a body, just like ours. In all of its beautiful symmetry and proportion, grace and strength, vigour and energy. In all of its fragility and scars, vulnerability and weakness, weariness and death. God, who feeds all of creation, knew what it was to be hungry. God, who makes the mountains smoke with a touch knew what it was to be naked and helpless. God, who speaks creation into being, who is the voice of thunder, entered the womb of Mary and knew what it was to be silent.
At the Crucifixion, where all of creation stood still for a moment, God used that body to rewrite everything we thought we knew about the established order. There is nighttime’s darkness in the middle of the day. An executed thief is admitted to paradise. Jesus, true God and true man, the king of kings who is the servant of all, naked upon the cross for all to see, is pierced by the spear of another man. From that feminizing wound, blood and water pour forth as from a mother labouring at birth. Blood and water, communion and baptism, the Church being born. Jesus gives Mary and John to one another, a new family created with the last breaths of a dying son. Humanity’s offering of violence, hatred, fear, shame, and death laden upon Jesus’ body becomes the most beautiful portal not to vengeance and retribution, but to reconciliation and life everlasting.
This is the God who will return to judge the living and the dead. This God who meets us in our bodies, who invites us to vulnerable intimacy by demonstrating it first. We cannot know for certain what that judgement will be like until we experience it. But, from what God has shown us so far, I am certain of one thing. After all of the details, all of the awkward bits and all of the joys, Jesus will hold you close. Your scars and bum hips, your fear and awe, your feet freshly washed. Jesus will gather you up and pronounce, for all creation to hear, “This is my body. And it is very good.” Amen.
