The question at the time caught me off guard. As a student of theology and religion, I was used to being asked to defend and explain my theology, but this was something different. I had been talking to someone about some old fears, a battle with disordered eating and a hauntingly skewed image of body. I was explaining that what had helped me to move past some of these fears was a faith that gave me hope in a world far beyond them, where wounds would one day be healed and tears would be no more. His response pulled me down from my seemingly hopeful, 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. How had my body accompanied me in life and faith? I wasn’t quite sure that it had.

The physical isn’t a matter the spiritual always consider. But for the Christian, they are severely and mercifully united and there is a world of hope in the considering. What does it mean that Christ came in the flesh, with sinew and marrow? What does it mean that the terrible events of Holy Week upon us this week were enacted in a body? Perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for us today that Jesus is vicariously human, the risen Son of God a corporal being who now sits at the right hand of the Father? What does Christ’s wounded body have to do with our own? These are the questions the church holds physically and attentively close this week, though the modern divorce of the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, what is now and what will be, has made them difficult questions to consider.

Yet, among religions, it is a most unique hope: God in a body. The distinctive promise of the Christian is union with none other than the human Christ himself. In faith and by the Spirit, we are united to the same body that was on the cross and was in the tomb, and which is now also in heaven. We are united with a body that was wounded and humiliated, dead and buried, a body that is very much a human and physical promise. Of its theology of the body, the New Testament is very clear: “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)

As it turns out, the biblical depiction of the God who comes to recreate all things is far more “earthy” than I once wanted to entertain, and the same is true for many others, whether Christianity’s critics or lauders. No matter how privatized and irrelevant, or removed and other-worldly we might want to describe Christianity or Christ himself, it is unavoidably a faith that intends us to encounter and experience God in flesh redeeming in the here-and-now, everyday, hand-dirtying occurrences of life in bodies.

It is no small promise that Christ came as a vicariously living body; he walked empathetically near the material world he came to recreate; he suffered and died in a body; and he remains a real and living body that will return to wipe every real tear from our real eyes. The body of Christ that the church holds up to the world through Holy Week and beyond represents something more fully human, more real than ourselves, and it is this reality that he lifts us toward, transforms us into, and advocates on our behalf. The real presence of Christ adds a certain and heavenly dimension to our lives to be sure, but to describe this as anything other than a dimension that profoundly orients us here and now, in real bodies to the world around us, is to profoundly misunderstand the gift.

Far from a subject for another time or place, how might God be speaking to your physical existence even now? How does your body accompany your questions and encounters with God? In the dark and corporeal moments of Holy Week, consider Christ who walked among the world as a human body, who shared a last meal and washed the feet of his friends, who set his face toward the anguish of the cross. Consider the body of Christ, who suffered through the weight of Holy Week and now sits at the right hand of the Father as our advocate, offering his body for the sake of yours, calling you to physically come further toward him even now.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) 1 Corinthians 15:21-22.

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