GOD OF THE FLESH
Canberra Baptist Church, 20^th March 2011.

I wonder – have you ever felt uncomfortable in church? I mean irritable. Distracted and just plain annoyed. Shifting about, glancing at the doorway, watching the clock, waiting for it to be over?

Judging by the pews in this church, it’s highly likely that you have. These days we know a lot about ergonomic seating and what’s good for your back and and your overall comfort – and traditional pews really don’t fit the bill. But that aside, scientific research conducted at Yale, Harvard and MIT in the States has shown that feeling shape, texture, temperature and weight significantly influence our thoughts and behaviours. In fact, they concluded that a hard chair creates a hard heart.

But – put a warm drink in someone’s hand before you talk to them and they’ll be generously disposed towards you.

Perhaps if preachers had known all this before now, they would have encountered far less resistance from their parishioners over the years.

This idea, that our sense of touch is organically linked our minds and our emotions, seems quite obvious – but is only a relatively new idea in practice. The French philosopher Descartes in the Enlightenment popularised the idea that mind and body are separate, and we’ve lived with that belief for a long time – like the computer concept of the body, with the brain being like a computer and the body is just the hardware or shell to contain that brain. But in actual fact, that concept of the human body is wrong. Science is quickly closing that longstanding divide between mind and body as two separate entities. Now there is a whole new field of enquiry called ‘embodied cognition’, which explores this collaboration between the body, mind and emotions. And the sense of touch is key. Flesh affects mind, and mind affects flesh.

A good example of this is found in the common flea. If you are a dog lover, chances are that at some point you have experienced an infestation of fleas in your house. I have a kelpie – Sophie - we’ve had her for five years – she was a rehomed pound dog, as they say. I’ve had dogs in other cities before, but we’ve never had a problem with fleas in Canberra – until recently, when we took our dog on a holiday – into NSW mind you - and we’re fairly sure that that’s where she picked them up. And so occasionally we see one around the house. But after you see just one, you keep having to swat yourself because you feel itchy as if they’re all over you. But you look, and there’s nothing there. Your mental anxiety about having fleas actually projects onto your skin so you have a physical sensation with your emotional experience.

Or you can watch a powerful scene in a film or a play and get a very physical sensation of goosebumps as if you were touched – but in fact, you were touched in your mind or soul. There is a tremendous collaboration between mind and flesh at work.

Whether it’s in our tushy or our fingertips, our sense of touch is always on the go. Our skin is in fact the largest organ of the body – and throughout our skin and our muscle tissue we have thousands of sensory receptors – some which respond to pressure and vibrations, warmth and cold, pain and pleasure, and some which keep track of where our limbs are in space. When part of your body touches something, this highly complex network of receptors sends signals through your spinal cord to your brain. Then your brain jumps into action to respond to those signals – do I have to hold tighter, do I have to let go, or perhaps get out of the way, for instance.

This is a wondrous invention of our heavenly Father: body and mind working together as a unity. And for the Christian it is not a great leap to think that perhaps there is also a strong collaboration between spirit, mind and body (though of course science has not yet found and measured ‘the spirit’).

But even the spirit we tend to think of as separate. For example, we think of the spirit departing from the flesh at the end of life. But in 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul speaks of a time after death when we will be raised to life with new, imperishable bodies. In other words, when we die, we are not going to be bodiless spirits. We will not be absorbed into some great spiritual ether or nirvana as taught by some religions. We will have a form and substance for the purpose of immortality, which, to Paul at least, can best be described as a body. It’s my personal opinion that this collaboration of mind, flesh, and spirit is a holy design to reflect the collaborative relationship of the trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one. Food for thought.

But today, let’s think on the Son and his remarkable engagement with humanity through the sense of touch, through the body.

In Jesus Christ, God takes on human flesh. He strips his eternal majesty, and enters our world through the body and mind and spirit of a woman, into the body of a child, who feels. As he grows, he feels the prickle of a thorn, the arms of his mother, the heat of the sun, the breeze across his face, the sand and water between his toes. But not only does he feel these sensations, he experiences the heights and depths of emotions that go with them. Inside human skin, God’s identification with humankind becomes so intimate, so understanding.

And it all begs the question – why? Why would the God of the Universe bother? Why would he stoop so low?

I think we can learn a little about this from the theatre. I am the director of a drama school, Canberra Academy of Dramatic Art – where we teach people the art and craft of acting for stage and screen. You might say, why do we need to teach people to act? Well, actors are the storytellers of our culture. Throught their performances, they show us something of who we are, and they transport us to other worlds and thoughts. That’s if they’re good actors. We’ve all seen examples of bad acting, where we just don’t believe what we’re seeing. Everybody hates that. We want actors to embody their role, and we want to be fully convinced of their performance. If we aren’t convinced we might even walk out of the theatre.

But a good actor really gets inside the skin of their character. They look closely at the script. They examine the world of the play or film in great detail, to determine who their character is in relation to that fictional world and they look for clues as to how they should best play their role. And then go through a rehearsal process where they adopt a vocal quality and a posture and physicality and a psychology which will allow them to best communicate who they are in that role. Incidentally, the actor Alec Guiness reportedly said that he never felt he had found his character until he got the walk right – the gait, that strong physical attribute which tells you about the character.

And after all this in-depth preparation, an actor is ready to perform. They bring their body, their flesh - to the word on the page – why? To touch us. To convince us. To make us believe in their make believe world enough, that we go away from that experience touched.

So much more it is with the God of the universe, who reads his creation in minute detail, even before it is made, assesses its frailties, its needs and relationships, and embodies his own character in human form. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. Why? To make contact. To touch us. To convince us of his love for us. The incarnation is evidence that God is highly motivated to love – so motivated to express his love, in fact, that he would send his Son to take our flesh in order to touch us in a way we can understand. And the Scriptures teach us that this contact is part of his salvation plan to win us to himself and to forgive us our sins.

And so we see Jesus, ‘God with skin on’ as an old pastor friend of mine used to say. Jesus is a man who lives and embraces the deeper meanings of touch - when the waters of the river Jordan rush over him at his baptism, when he puts mud on the eyelids of the blind man, when he places his hands on the children to bless them, when in fury he pushes over the tables of the moneychangers at the temple, or when he takes the hand of the dead girl and commands her get up, when he holds the cup and the bread in his hands at the last supper and feels the texture of those things for the last time.

He also uses touch to teach his disciples and embed memories in their minds and bodies. There is the time during the storm on the lake when Jesus is asleep in the bow of the boat while the rain and wind rages around them, smacking their flesh and filling them with fear. And Jesus stands and commands the wind and waves to be still. Will not next time, and every time, they are in a storm and feel the rain on their faces, think on Jesus? And when Lazarus dies and is put in a tomb, Jesus calls him out and directs the disciples to move the hard stone and untie his graveclothes. Next time they feel the rough surface of a stone or the texture of a cloth – will they not think on Jesus?

Or when Jesus asks the crowd, “Who touched me?” and the disciples dismiss his sense of touch – and the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years comes forward, and Jesus sets her free from her infirmity. Next time, when they are touched in a crowd, will they not pay more attention? – and think on Jesus? Texture, touch, weight, feeling – all very much a part of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

No one can accuse God of not knowing what it’s like to be human. We simply cannot hold that charge against him. Jesus knows what it’s like to be in the flesh – with all its pain and pleasure, with its cravings and yearnings and memories.

Which takes us to the cross.

And here Jesus suffers not only the physical pain of crucifixion, but the emotional and mental trauma that went with it.

Not all human touch is welcome or positive. Violence is the use of force to break down the resistance of another. It can be inflicted with bare hands or with weaponry, but its chief end is to abuse our sense of touch. Violence aims to either to threaten with physical harm or inflict it. Jesus, an innocent man, was a victim of it in the most barbaric way. And we have to ask why – “Why would the God of the universe allow his Son to experience such suffering?”

There are many answers to that question and we do well to reflect on the many dimensions of that question. But in the context of human touch, I think there is one very compelling reason.

For many years I worked in an international human rights organisation where I commonly had horrific images cross my desk – people with limbs missing or scarring and even beheadings. Terrible human rights abuses, which we were fighting to stop. But these days you don’t have to be a human rights campaigner to be exposed to this kind of material. Recently we’ve had television footage of people in Queensland, Christchurch, Japan – much of this uncensored because it’s coming to us in a live stream. So we are all catching glimpses of dead and injured bodies. And in past times we’ve seen footage of the mass graves of the Jews in World War II, and many other horrors of the 20^th century. Seeing a desecrated human body, no matter what race or creed, is disturbing and abhorrent, and sometimes mesmerising. You know why? Because we feel their pain. The human skin allows us to empathise with others. The sense of touch allows us to imagine ourselves walking in another’s shoes. We can feel a shiver of their desecration in our own skin. A shiver of what they must have been through, what they must have felt. Such is our sense of touch.

In the same way, in the passage from John 19 we read earlier, we can imagine the crucified Christ - the texture of the sponge held up to his mouth, and the bitter sensation on the tongue – and it becomes our sensation. We can imagine him hanging there outstretched, the nails, the gasping for breath, and at least in small way can perceive the pain he went through, because we know our own pain. We can imagine his final words, and they become somehow, our words – “It is finished” – and somehow, something is finished for us too. Though his legs are not broken, as John writes in chapter 19, the crucified body is a desecrated mess of sweat, blood, mangled in a crown of thorns, distorted and pierced and dead. We can imagine it because of our own experience of skin and sweat and blood. So when the apostle Peter interprets these images he says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24) – we ‘get it’. He bore our sins in his body, on the tree.

The incarnation is not only God’s way of identifying with us, it is also our way of identifying with Him. It is our own experience of physicality and touch which allows us to imagine ourselves in the place of Jesus on the cross, just enough to see ourselves as deserving of that punishment before God – and to cry out to him with relief and gratitude that we did not have to serve that punishment ourselves. The crushing of the Holy Son of God, the Immanuel, God with us, takes on mystical proportions beyond a physical bodily significance into a collaborative mental, emotional and spiritual significance that draws us into worship of the Christ who would give himself for me. In Christ, my sins are carried away, and I am healed. This identification is so strong for the apostle Paul, that when he is persecuted and physically abused for his faith in the risen Lord, he says “I bear in my body the marks of Christ” (Galatians 6).

But for those present at the time, without the benefit of hindsight, all they experienced was the desecration. And so we come to Thomas, the disciple who was absent when Jesus returned after his resurrection. What does he say? Verse 25 of chapter 20: “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will never believe.”

Here Thomas describes the desecrated body of Christ in detail. He has seen it. He can’t get rid of that picture from his mind. It’s scarred him.

Thomas is often much maligned as ‘doubting Thomas’ but really ‘devastated Thomas’ seems a more apt description. His cry is indeed one of unbelief, but I suspect its origin is not hard-headed philosophical scepticism - it’s trauma. I’ve interviewed enough traumatised people to recognise the mix of anger, powerlessness, depression and disbelief that surfaces. It’s the cry of a man who is utterly crushed. “Unless I touch him, I will not believe. I cannot. It is not within my power to do so.”

The testimony of the others is simply not enough for him, he needs to touch the risen Lord to believe it’s true. He requires physical evidence.

Thomas is always called ‘the Twin’ in the gospels, but his twin is never mentioned there. Could it be that his twin brother or sister, with whom he shared a life, who was a picture of his very soul, has gone? Died of an illness, or perhaps a terrible accident? Did he know personally that no matter how much you want a dead person to come walking through that door one more time, it’s just not going to happen? Did the body of Jesus remind him of that? Whatever his backstory, Thomas is convinced that Jesus is gone.

But God in his mercy sees Thomas at his lowest point. Eight days later Thomas is present with the others, and Jesus appears, right there in bodily form. And he turns to Thomas and says, “Put your finger here, see my hands, put your hand in my side.” (v 27.) He doesn’t say, “Your request is too much to ask” - Jesus invites Thomas to touch him. Why? The key is there right at the end of verse 27: he says to Thomas, “Do not disbelieve but believe.” Jesus is concerned about Thomas’ faith. He wants to convince Thomas. He knows the power of physical touch and how important that is to Thomas’ faith. He knows Thomas’s need for evidence and offers it.

Well, Thomas is aghast. In the end, he doesn’t even need to touch Jesus. I think as he gazed upon the Lord he probably felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up, his skin prickle and his finger tips quiver. In a sense, he felt those scars without even reaching out his hand. “My Lord and My God” he says – an expression of belief, of confession, repentance and worship all at once.

And then, as if to ram the point home, John inserts a little editorial comment for our benefit: “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (30-31). This story of touch – the desire for it – the longing to have Jesus right there, so close that you can touch him, see him, believe him is something we all yearn for at times. But this story was written so that you may believe – to convince you that the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the embodied character of God has made his presence felt. It says that even though we are reading this two thousand years on, you can still worship this same Jesus in spirit and truth - and be blessed. You have enough to go on. You have the Word, you have his flesh lived out for us, and we have our flesh and all the memories and experiences that go with it, and the memories and experiences of those who wrote down the story of Jesus. God has designed us so that he can use our senses go a long way to filling in the gaps where we are unable to see him face to face. To say there is no god, as atheists do, is to switch off these magnificent senses that God has given us and which allow us to commune with him in mind, flesh and spirit.

In the end, even Thomas who was right there didn’t need to touch him to believe Jesus was Lord and God.

And if you also risk belief in the glorious risen Christ, you, too, will be blessed. That is his promise to you. As you reach out to him, he will touch you.