god desires a body like ours
why the humanity of god bugs us
“The condition of life was that we not seek it as a possession, but receive it as a gift, Serenely letting go in the hands of God. Confidence in the smile. Love casts out fear. Live day by day.”
“God made us bodies. God made himself body. Took on flesh, Body: image of God. Body: our destiny, God's destiny. That's good. Eternal divine solidarity with human flesh. Nothing more worthy. The body is not destined to be elevated to spirit”
From Rubem Alves, I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body (1986)
The resurrection of the body has always been a hopeful future in my mind.
As someone with a physical disability, this resurrection future is one where my pain is gone, where my walking brace crumbles to pieces that clamor metallically on the ground as I follow Jesus’s instructions “Stand up, take your mat, and walk.”
In Bible college, I was taught to understand the resurrection of the body as God’s final ushering us from the confines of this fallen world. Our bodies are raised from the grave and made anew. We bear witness to God coming in power and might to destroy “every ruler and every authority and power” (1 Cor. 15:24). Enamored by this work, we run to God, where we are gathered together and whisked us away into the heavens, never to return again.
This escapist vision is grounded in a theology that understands the world as broken and helpless and our bodies as fundamentally fallen. Our task is to wait for God to return, destroy our fallen world, and take us away into a new place. Our telos is to shed off this earthly existence as we become something entirely new in the presence of God.
But what we fail to remember is that God has a body, too.
In a small book of prose and thought titled I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body, the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves proposes that “God’s desire is revealed in our body. After all, what the doctrine of the incarnation whispers to us is that God eternally wants a body like ours. . .”
A body? Like ours? Like mine?
Yes.
God enters the waves of contingency and the ripples of cause-and-effect that God set in motion at the beginning of the world. This is what God wants. It is what God desires.
In Christ, God places Godself within the boundaries and confinements of a body that requires nourishment and rest. Jesus needs companions on his journey. He needs a mother to bring his life into the world. His gospel proclamation is limited by how far his tired feet can take him and how long his strained vocal cords can sustain vibration. Jesus breaks bread and heals the lame with calloused hands. He experiences joy and sorrow, love and grief, euphoria and pain.
Consider the alternative: God chooses to remain aloof; God does not sojourn from the heavens to earth. If this is the case, anything we say of God is mere conjecture. We have not met with God, and God has not dwelt with us. There are no “this is my body, broken for you.” No blood poured out for the salvation of the world. There is no “come to me all who are weary, and I will give you rest.” God has no hands to bend down, pick up a mustard seed, and reveal the Kingdom of God through it. This God may choose to save us. Or, perhaps not. We could never know. Maybe God snaps entirely anthropomorphized fingers and ushers us all to heaven, leaving this world behind to decay. Maybe this God forgets creation altogether, leaving us to our own devices.
But God has come. When we forget this truth, we are tempted to discard our earthly dwelling as a means to a disembodied end. When our bodies become secondary, we begin to believe God exists only in our minds and the intellectual deposits we make about God. “We want to be even more spiritual than God,” looking past Christ’s body to chase the “secrets that lie beyond the tomb.”
“We thought to find God where the body ends, and we made it suffer. [We] transformed it into a beast of burden, fulfiller of commands, machine for labor, an enemy to be silenced,” writes Alves. “And we persecuted it in this way to the point of eulogizing death as the pathway to God.”
This is faith absent of a body: “eulogizing death as the pathway to God.”
Why, though, do we set aside the body when we speak of God? Why do we discard God’s body? Alves’ answer is simple and profound: The humanity of God bugs us.
This is true for us today, just as it was when Jesus’s feet touched the earth. We, like those who met with Christ, desire to know the deep things of God. “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Mt. 24:3). “What must we do to perform the works of God?" (John 6:28). “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Mt. 11:3). “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” (Mt. 18:1). “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Mk. 10:17).
But Jesus does not talk about himself by offering long theological declarations about God and the world. No, he tells a story and asks a question in return. He talks about what he loves and what he desires. He calls the little children to him and declares that the Kingdom belongs to them. He bends over to mix his saliva with the dirt below, creating a miraculous healing balm. “Consider the lilies…” he asks.
“We expected that he would talk about divine things,” says Alves, but he talks only about human things: “Little ones. About the delights of heaven and the terrors of hell only a discreet murmur, if not silence…of the tranquility of the birds, the beauty of the wildflowers, the sun that rises on the good and the evil, the rain, as well.”
Jesus does not climb the ranks of the religious, political, and intellectual elites. “He eats and drinks with ordinary people, speaks in an enigmatic manner, knowing that pearls should not be cast before swine (to the pigs, slop).” He “prefers the company of the marginal and the despised to the bowing and scraping of those who use sacred deodorants.” And he “tells frightful stories in which the villains of real life always appear as heroes and the heroes of real life always appear as villains.”
“Right,” Alves concludes, “He talks about our world. About life. About our bodies. He talks about smiles and tears. And we shake with fear.”
This is the humanity of God—which is to say, humanity. And this is what God gives to us, “not seek it as a possession, but receive it as a gift.” Yes, our humanity is a gift. This is the foundation of life’s value: God has bestowed it upon us to cherish and embrace. In the pain of loss, the agony of wounds, the ache of hunger— and also the joy of love, the power of words, and the embrace of dear friends—our embodied existence is a gift.
If the body were secondary or accidental, God would not desire a body for Godself. But this is not the case. The body is of the utmost importance. Our bodies are of the utmost importance.
They are a gift God beckons us to receive. God desires for our bodies to join hand in hand, embracing, feasting, loving, singing, dancing, praising, lamenting, reading, speaking, listening, and living as the Body of Christ in our world until he returns. And when he does come again, our bodies—our fragile, lovely, Spirit-filled bodies—will be raised again so that we might look to the East and embrace the resurrected Christ with our own bodies, lacing our human fingers with his.