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.
