Our bodies play an enormously important part in our life in the Risen Christ. The Incarnation has given a sacramental quality to our flesh and blood, so that we can offer an unceasing prayer of the body, which can begin here and never end, sanctifying not only the suffering of the body but its joys too, in preparation for the eternity, when our bodies, which are now all too often a drag upon us, will be glorified as the Risen Body of Christ is now.
When Christ rose from the dead, he rose with the same body that had grown in his mother’s womb, shivered in Bethlehem, labored in Nazareth, fasted in the wilderness. The body which had hungered and thirsted and slept, which had been wounded and suffered and died, the same body, too, that he had taken into his hands and given to us in the breaking of bread at the Last Supper.
About all this he left us no possible doubt. Had he been only a ghost it would have been unnecessary, even absurd, to have told Mary Magdalene not to touch him, and equally without meaning to have taken the hand of the still hesitating Thomas and thrust it into the very wounds of the crucifixion.
But Christ was not content only to prove the reality of his Risen Body, he wanted, during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, to teach us the mystery of our own prayer of the body in our life in him – to teach us how this prayer was to be made, not only in extraordinary things inseparable from our bodies, their necessities, their limitations, their temptations, their labors, and their joys. Christ need not have eaten in his Risen Body – a glorified body does not require food – but to stress the simplicity of our prayer he did eat. Moreover, to show us again that our bodies were to be sanctified by his sacramental body he again broke the bread and gave it to his wondering disciples.
Caryll Houselander
(Copyright 2007 Scepter Publications, Inc. N. Y., N. Y)
