Body (Essay)

A Communion Meditation

By Amirah David

As I thought about the bread of life we eat on Sunday - as the body of Christ…I started contemplating our own bodies.  Our culture has a complicated relationship with body.  In one way our culture is body-obsessed - hyper-focused on appearance,  while also holding a low view of the body - as something expendable or subduable or only for pleasure at any cost.  Nancy Pearcy in her book “Love Thy Body” says we treat it like “malleable matter”.  We probably represent a wide range of relationships to our shape and appearance and food.  Our culture tends also to separate the mind from the body, valuing the mind often above the body as somehow more our true self, forgetting that the brain and mind are a part of the body, housed in it, and deeply affected by it.  We know this in psychology as well.

Even in our life with Christ, it can be so easy to live only in the mind as we read scripture, study theology, or listen to wonderful sermons or podcasts…but neglect our bodies as an essential part of our walk with Christ - even the psalms invite us to sing and dance our praises to God with the body. To bow down, to shout even.

God knit you together in your mother’s womb.  Isaiah 49:1 says “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.”   God, who is Spirit, got a physical body.  Scripture also declares we were made in his image, which means we somehow reflect him, or were meant to reflect him in character, deed, and also perhaps with our body somehow.  

When Jesus said in John 2, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up…he was speaking about the temple of his body.”  Of course in 1 Corinthians 6 we read: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?  You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

What does it mean to glorify God in our bodies?  The Greek word for glorify is doxazō, which means “to honor”  - honoring God in how we live, what we do with our bodies.  I am struck by God’s high view of the body…that he values it and us so much that he would make our bodies in the first place - (which by the way if you’ve ever studied the body, it’s astounding how brilliant it really is) - he makes us AS a body, and he promises us a new body at the reunification of heaven and earth - and he makes our bodies his dwelling place on earth!  Your body is his home, as we also find our refuge in Him. This is a great and beautiful mystery.

So Jesus is our model, or example in all things to behold and therefore become - he sacrificed his body so that we could be reunited with God - and what a reunification!  Words like “abide”, “in Him, or He in us”, “Branch to the vine”, or “one flesh” - words of ultimate and complete intimacy.

And then in Romans 12:1 - we read “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”  This is revolutionary! [Especially in the realms of spirituality that imply that this body is an expendable vehicle for a higher god self to have this illusion of a human experience - burn off karma and then go home to rejoin a spiritual oneness without body.]

But the Bible teaches that the oneness we are seeking is in and through Jesus.  Romans 12:5 says “So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another (like parts of the body).”

Further, 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 we hear “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not participation in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?  Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread.”

Not only is communion an invitation to participate in the blood and body of Christ - to participate in the love and redemption of God, through our physical bodies that eat and digest...but also if we could truly grasp this: “We who are many are one body for we all partake of one bread” - I cannot think of a more complete pathway to peace with each other - how would we treat each other if we really GOT that we were one in Christ?

So, as we take of this bread and wine/juice, let us become aware of it, of Christ, of His spirit in our literal bodies, and slow down enough to see what it feels like to come into agreement with God about the value and beauty of these bodies he has given us, with which we are meant to fully experience, even through our senses, and commune with his creation, with his people, and with God Himself. Personal. With us.  Even in our body.  That close. Not just out there.

Let’s pray.