Our Bodies Make One
by Fr. David M. Knight
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Twenty-Sixth Week of the Year
Lectionary 458
Jb 19:21-27/Lk 10:1-12
Job 19:21-27 puts suffering in the context of resurrection. The New American Bible notes say:
The Vulgate translation [St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, which the Church has adopted as her official version, without saying it is always accurate] has Job indicating a belief in resurrection after death, but the Hebrew and the other ancient versions are less specific.”
Whether the text is precisely accurate or not, the traditional interpretation shows the Church’s belief about resurrection. In heaven we are not just “absorbed” in some kind of “divine fire” of Light, Life and Love. We retain our individuality. We are conscious of ourselves as unique persons. Although we are “gathered up” in Christ to form that “perfect man, who is Christ come to full stature,” we will all have our own bodies.
But as for me, I know that my Vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust. And from my flesh I shall see God; Whom I myself shall see: my own eyes, not another's, shall behold him.
Philosophers call the flesh, our physical bodies, the “principle of individuation.” The play “Macbeth,” as an abstract plot, a story, is only one play. But there are as many individual copies of it as are printed in physical books. There is likewise only one “human nature.” But it differs, is multiplied and becomes individual in each physical body that is human. “Resurrection” says we will not lose our individuality at death.
Knowing that we will eventually be fully restored to life makes any diminishment we suffer easier to bear.
Luke 10:1-12 shows us Jesus was conscious of the limitations of having a body. Bodies can only be in one place at a time, which meant Jesus could not possibly reach all the people in the world. But God “wanted us to be saved by one like us.” As human beings we rejected our relationship with God, and God willed to restore it by using humanity itself: that is, the human body! He did this first in Jesus, and continued it in all who would “become Christ” by giving their bodies in Baptism to be his body on earth and continue his mission. (Sunday Preface III)
This is the task to which we are called to abandon ourselves completely as “stewards of his kingship.” When we died in Christ through Baptism, we rose up out of the waters as out of the grave: a “new creation.” Having “become Christ,” we exist for nothing else than to continue his mission. We have given all we have and all we are to God, to live only as the body of Christ on earth. He has put all back into our hands to manage for him: “our” possessions, time, relationships, health, life itself. For us, to live is to live as Christ. (Philippians 1:18-27)
Initiative: Use your body for Christ’s work on earth. That is what you exist for.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
コメント