The good of Good Friday 5: bodies

Thomas places the fifth through tenth ways in which the incarnation of God in Jesus is shown to be appropriate for our restoration under this heading:

So also was [the incarnation] useful for our “withdrawal from evil.”

This second list begins, then, with:

First, because man is taught by it not to prefer the devil to himself, nor to honor him who is the author of sin; hence Augustine says: “Since human nature is so united to God as to become one person, let not these proud spirits dare to prefer themselves to man, because they have no bodies.”

Secondly, because we are thereby taught how great is man’s dignity, lest we should sully it with sin; hence Augustine says: “God has proved to us how high a place human nature holds amongst creatures, inasmuch as He appeared to men as a true man.” And Pope Leo says: “Learn, O Christian, thy worth; and being made a partner of the Divine nature, refuse to return by evil deeds to your former worthlessness.”

     We humans sometimes think of “withdrawal from evil” as something we get at by escaping from humanness, specifically from human embodiment. Among Christians that sort of idea has often been dressed up in elaborate theological attire, but it just comes down to not wanting to think of our imperfect, clumsy, and messy bodies as being what we really are. Shadows of such wrongheaded theology are present in a secular age when we call a very good person an “angel” or see cartoons depict humans having become angels, complete with wings, halos, and white nightshirts, after death. So we identify our best and blessed selves with beings who are, for their part, tempted to think themselves better than us because they aren’t burdened with bodies.
     Thomas Aquinas teaches us, here in III.1.2 and elsewhere in the Summa, quite differently: we humans have a higher place in creation than angels, and we do not begin to fulfill that place by setting up angels or any other sort of disembodied beings as our ideal. Whatever goodness or escape from evil we should hope for comfortably coexists with our bodies — even more, is expressed in our bodiliness.
     If we hate our bodies we can abuse them with either partying or self-torture, opposite extremes that are really nearly-identical twins, like too fat and too skinny. But that God comes to us as a human gives us a greater respect for our bodies.
     Jesus is God incarnate, so that whatever he is and does he is and does as God and as human. In addition to showing us God, he shows us humanness. Rather than bringing an understanding of humanness to our understanding of Jesus as a human, we gain our understanding of what it is to be human from knowing Jesus. From reflection on ourselves we learn about humanness off-track. In Jesus we see the continuation of God’s human project. He is the definition of humanness, the presentation of what we were created for and of what the future of the redeemed is, of, that is, our sanctification.
     Hear this paraphrase of Colossians 2:8-10a:

Organize your thinking not on the basis of human tradition and worldly basics, but on the basis of Christ.
     Why Christ? Because
in him God and body are joined, and
in him you are fulfilled.

• The good of Good Friday
  1: introduction
  2: faith and hope
  3: and love
  4: doing and being
  5: bodies
  6: humility
  7: brought low and lifted up
• Jesus shows us what humanness is about:
  • Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II) 22: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come [Romans 5:14], namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
  • Karl Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5 (New York: Harper, 1956), 75: “To find that true and essential nature of man, we have to look not to Adam the fallen man, but to Christ, in whom what is fallen has been cancelled and what was original has been restored.” See further Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/2:40, 44.