Eastertime Incarnational Wisdom

We generally focus on the incarnation of God at Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus. However, Easter is also filled with stories about God’s physical being as Christ, in the form of the resurrected Jesus.

This physical manifestation of God walked, talked, and broke bread with two people on the road to Emmaus. He was taken to be a gardener by Mary Magdalene. He appeared to a group of his disciples and said, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have….” He then asked them if they had anything to eat, and upon giving him a piece of broiled fish, he took it and ate it in their presence (Luke 24: 36-43). Later, this incarnated Christ cooked breakfast on the beach for his friends.

Why was it so important that, after the death of Jesus, he should again take on flesh after his resurrection? Why not appear as a disembodied spirit, a voice from a cloud, or an image in a dream?

In his book The Holy Longing, Fr. Ronald Rolheiser sheds some light on this question. He explains that God took on flesh because God, having created our nature, respects how it operates and thus deals with us through our senses. Therefore “God takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God’s many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down, so our human eyes can see him.”

If God respects the fact that we humans interact with the world through the senses, through our physical body, then we should do the same. Often it seems like we try to approach life through our mind alone, but the body offers us wisdom we can only attain when we pray through our breath, attend to others through our listening, appreciate beauty through our eyes, recall memories through smells, and comfort others through our touch. As we age and our body becomes less functional, we should still honor the lessons it offers about humility, endurance, diminishment, and gratitude.

The first creation story in Genesis says that after God created humans, he looked at what he had made and found it “very good.” It is very good that we are physical beings, at least during our short time on earth. Let’s take advantage of every opportunity to know God through the taste of a ripe peach, the smell of the soil in spring, the sight of a loved one’s face, the sound of the wind, and the way our hands can create art, food, and music. It makes good sense, after all.