“A Blood and Guts Human”

Karen Sloan 28/08/2024

Readings - Ephesians 6:10-20, John 6:56-69

I have had a hard time, in the last few months, actually most of the year.  It’s called writers block, and I have struggled to write about faith, or anything really, after writing a blog for years, and years.  I thought I would find my mojo on the Camino, like the movie, “The Way”, when the journalist meets up with Martin Sheen’s character, but it didn’t seem to happen like that.  Rather it’s been a slow burn as I have wondered about the church, as an institution, and this community and my role in it.

But the more that I look around with my eyes wide open I’ve realised that there are lots of things to write about. Things that inspire, scare, disgust, and sadden us, things that make our hearts sing and which make us weep. Things that make us human. It’s an idea that I’d  lost for a while.

 In fact I found some inspiration just the other day.

I was teaching anatomy, as I do, and have done for a long time, and it was the turn of the forearm and hand.  We have a number of specimens prepared and we help the students discover the anatomy of this area.

And it’s incredible!

If you don’t believe me, take a look at your own hand.  Yes really take a look.  Stare at it for a minute, turn it over, wriggle your fingers, move your thumb to each finger in turn. 

You wouldn’t believe how many muscles, small and not so impressive on their own make up this thing we call our hand. How they work together in a shared way that can really blow your mind. Not to mention the many fine nerves and vessels that are involved in keeping it healthy and under control.

Now take each other’s hands, yes I know its post covid, but do it anyway.  Take your neighbours hands, feel them, feel the warmth of them. Feel the comfort that holding another’s hand gives.

Okay, you can let go now.

I have always marvelled at the hand, It’s an amazing thing,  that takes us into the world, that helps us connect with others, to help others, to console others and to clap and sing with others.

Our hands, like the rest of us, display our humanity, our blood and guts, our physicality and it’s a marvel!.  In fact we are a marvel of life, which I try to impress on my students!

But Jesus says we are more than this, more than the body we inhabit, we are also spirit! They are intertwined.  We are both a physical and a spiritual body and without both we are not whole, or complete.  It’s is not an “or “ thing but an “and” thing,  for as Richard Rohr says,  all are together as one. The spirit is found within the body, in the process of life giving life. There is no separation.

This tradition goes back to the very foundation of the Christian story, when creation was seen as good, and God infused it all with the spirit of love.  

Jesus himself most truly reflects this reality. And we see it more clearly through him than anything. Jesus was a God infused human, but human none the less.

This in part is what John is saying today in the reading.

 As Bill Loader reflects, “John`s religious language has one single core claim about life in relation to God. Jesus is the major image or icon in whom we see God`s light and life.” Marcus Borg agrees, suggesting what makes Christianity Christian is centering on the God known and met in Jesus. In this way Jesus can become the bread of life, the everlasting spring, the light to us and to the world and the way to fullness of life.

Again I stress, this did not stop Jesus being fully human.

But sometimes the human part gets lost..

In the reading we also hear Jesus say, “it is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life”. 

Whether Jesus said this or not, whether it’s an amalgamation of all that has gone before for the community of John, it’s a message that has hindered rather than helped at times.

In fact Christians have a long history of finding this idea, body and spirit together as one, disturbing. There was an early Christian heresy called Docetism.  Docetists  were so certain that spirit and flesh could not exist as one that they convinced themselves that Jesus didn’t really have a human body … it just seemed that he had a body. They claimed that Jesus only appeared to be a physical being. Part of this understanding stems from the Greeks and from Plato which greatly influenced early Christianity. 

In fact when we are tempted to think that spirituality equals transcending the physical world of things and bodies, we might remember that John’s gospel also bears witness to a sensual God.

Jesus washed human feet, smelled perfume, and tasted abundant wine. He used spit and dirt to heal a blind man, and his gut churned when he looked upon the hungry crowds. He smelled the stink of death on Lazarus, his friend. He felt the injustice of others and rallied against those who abused power. He wept and felt alone and abandoned at the end. Jesus’ very own flesh tore when he was beaten and crucified. The appearance stories have him telling Thomas to touch his wounded side, which was not perfected, but bore the scars of having lived. Then as one of his final acts, he ate grilled fish on a beach.

As Nadia Boltz Weber says, “These experiences of the body are not things to be spiritually transcended -- they are perhaps the very things in which we find Christ”.

Our God model to follow is a human being, a real human being, in Jesus we see that a physical life is also a spiritual life.

…..……..

The Psalmist reminds us that God knit us together in our mother’s womb, and that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Can we really believe it, you and I!! When teaching anatomy you can, because it is right in front of you, and even as we age and become slightly less together physically, we are still marvels of the universe.  Just look at your hand or your feet or your eyes or ears if you need reminding.

But we are more than the physical.  

As Nadi Boltz Weber says, just like Bill Loader and Marcus Borg before, “Jesus came and in his almost disturbingly physical existence showed us what God looks like, not in some ethereal alternative spiritual plane, but right here in the midst of our physical, embodied earthy reality. Jesus said here’s what being born of God looks like … it looks like us”. 

So we are body and spirit intertwined, which means that we have a responsibility to follow Jesus into the world. Carrying the light of love with us. For Jesus was not different from us in substance only in degree.  And he calls us to follow him, by living, participating in, being caught up in the way of life that he embodied.

And it’s challenging!  Back then, as followers of Jesus, and now as we try to find our way in this world with others. We heard it from Paul today in the Ephesians reading, writing from prison.  Metaphorically wanting to put on the armour of God, to help him to be faithful and be ready for the fight.  Paul knew what we sometimes forget.

It’s our faith that God, who is in Christ, that leads the charge and enables us to engage in the world which is full of powers, political and personal, which actively fight against the reconciling love of God. This God, the one we connect to at our deepest levels, is the one that enables us to carry on, and in time allows us to reach outwards to others with hope for new life.

 For we are never left alone.  Because the spirit travels with us always, as part of who we are.  Body and spirit intertwined, for love and life.

I hope you can hold on to that reality, for it’s the only one worth keeping.

Amen