Easter 3, the Revd Dr Brutus Green

When I was twenty, I got a little cut on my thumb playing hockey in South Devon.

Two days later it had turned black and swollen.

I was a bit worried but it was a Friday and too late to get a doctor’s appointment.

I was going to wait till Monday but my then girlfriend convinced me to go down to A&E at the hospital to get it looked at.

The doctor took one look at it before getting me into immediate surgery.

When you have a blood infection you get a red line that travels from the infection towards your heart.

When the line reaches your heart the infection will kill you.

The red line in my case had reached my shoulder.

I spent the next four dull days languishing in hospital on an antibiotic drip clearing my body of septicaemia.

Shortly after joining the army, I had a similar incident where again a tiny cut brought on from ‘taking a knee’ a lot on exercise and degradation from lack of sleep led to a similar infection. 

It was Rhiannon this time who convinced me to seek help and more weeks on antibiotics to fix me.

I have a studied mixture of stubbornness and optimism that has often made those close to me despair.

When we have weaknesses, vulnerabilities; when we are afraid, when we’re suffering from bodily malfunction, there’s this human tendency to pretend they don't exist,

Even when it will lead to further and worse problems;

or to conceal our injury from the world;

to keep it to ourselves, to hide our fragile bodies.

You may have noticed before, the deliberate continuities between the Easter resurrection appearances and the liturgy of the Eucharist. 

In Luke’s account of the walk to Emmaus the disciples only realise it’s Jesus with them ‘when he was at the table with them, [and] he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus greets the disciples by saying ‘Peace be with you’, just as the liturgy of the Sacrament traditionally begins with the Peace. 

He then displays his wounded body to them and eats with them. 

The Gospel writers are quick to note that Jesus is not a shade, a spirit —

this is not a haunting experience or a vision.

Luke emphasises that he eats a ‘broiled fish’ in their presence —

It doesn’t get much more real than that.

The fish doesn’t pass through him like some Harry Potter ghost.

But equally Jesus is not reappearing in his Sunday best as it were —

in some perfect photoshopped body.

He returns with his wounds;

He invites Thomas to place his hands inside them.

But while crucifixion is intended to display the broken criminal body in shame, Jesus now returns with no shame.

He openly displays his wounds.

In Christ, the weak human body becomes the sign of God’s victory.

Why does this matter?

The first thing is that bodies matter. 

People sometimes think that religion is a ‘spiritual’ thing. 

That it’s concerned with our souls not our bodies.

That what we do with our bodies is not important.

It’s about what we think, or how we pray.

As though you could cut away from your body and happily drift into some wacky astral plane.

The Christian faith though has a body at the centre of it. 

A body that is damaged, broken and resurrected.

There’s no distinction between body and soul.

And just as when your mind plays tricks when you don’t get any sleep;

or when you drink too much alcohol you might end up saying or doing things you would not otherwise;

we cannot distinguish between who we are as body and who we are as soul.

Our bodies matter.

The second thing is that the body which is most venerated, has most honour, is the wounded, broken body.

Today this does not seem such a strange idea.

In the last years, the work of Help for Heroes, the great success of the Paralympic Games since London 2012,

have helped change how we look at bodies.

But when we look at ourselves I wonder if we have the same attitude.

Are we happy about exposing the vulnerabilities and weaknesses we have?

Are we so forgiving of our own shortcomings?

Our husband’s shortcomings?

We may be more accepting of disability but we also spend more time and money than ever on ‘perfecting’ our physical appearance.

We will hopefully never find the weakness of our bodies so tortuously and degradingly exhibited as the crucifixion, but the Gospel is trying to suggest that all our weaknesses are redeemable, are forgivable and have their place in God’s world — when we bring them before him;

that the ideal human being is not some blonde 20-something gym-junky but a woman or man who has come to terms with themselves and is honest before God.

The third and final thing is that the body, in whatever state, will be perfected, brought into a state of grace before God.

Too many religions, too many theologies, suggest we can write over the experiences of this life with the whitewash of glory;

suggest heaven would be a race of six foot superwomen and men with chiselled abs and perfect jawlines;

that the drama of this life is forgotten in blissful perfection.

This has a superficial attractiveness.

We want to think that the most acute and unjust suffering of this world may be compensated by an afterlife of joy and ease.

But this is to return to our own standards of physical perfection.

To God the perfect body bears the wounds of suffering.

If this life has significance, our experiences, which write themselves upon our body, must find their place in eternity.

If Christianity stands for anything then it is the elevation of humanity’s suffering into God.

The experience of so many who suffer affliction is that they have to conform themselves to fit an unsympathetic world.

We have become a little better as a society in changing to fit the needs of all our members.

But it is so much more so with God.

The divine is more than capable of expanding its understanding of what it means to be perfectly human.

It has already done so in Jesus’ broken body.

And as today’s epistle tells us.

‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.

The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’

Jesus offers a new broader definition of humanity that the world does not necessarily recognise, not recognising him.

But: ‘Beloved, we are God's children now;

what we will be has not yet been revealed.

What we do know is this:

when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.’

For us, our bodies do matter. 

We have our imperfections, our frailties, physical, mental, moral, spiritual, but we can hold these before God in trust that God has a big enough sense of what it means to be human.

And also we can trust that God holds the whole of us to him.

That when we find ourselves in eternity it will not be some sanitised version, but ourselves in all our broken, misshapen, irregularities.

At the eucharist we share in the body of Christ.

It is the ‘body of Christ that was broken for you’.

a moment of reconciliation, not only when we reconcile ourselves to the broken body of Christ, but also when we, in sickness and in health,

in tiredness and confusion, become part of that broken body.

And in this broken body we too are offered back to,

and accepted by God.

Amen.