Luke 24.36-49 

The Revd Catherine Edenborough, Cathedral Curate

Some of you know that I love to dance the tango.  The Argentine tango, not ballroom tango; there is a difference!  It’s the dance the couples on Strictly do towards the end of the series because it is supposedly the most difficult.  On the TV, it looks all flashy and leggy.  In reality, when you are dancing on a crowded dance floor, it is a much less dramatic spectacle.  For the couple, it is all about how it feels rather than how it looks.  it is the physical experience that makes it so special: the sharing of the space, the movement, the musicality.  The improvised nature of the tango means that you are co-creating it as you go with lead and follow between the couple.  Every time it is a new creation, even if you are with the same partner and the same piece of music.

And having had the best part of two years not being able to dance because of Covid, it has been a particular joy to get back to it.  I went dancing last weekend and realised how much I have missed it.  You can listen to the music at home, some people get really into studying the different tango orchestras and the history of it, but all of that does not come close to the experience of dancing.  The theory and the practice are two very different realms.

Which brings us to tonight’s passage from Luke.  As the risen Jesus appears to his disciples, they were terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost and it is interesting that Jesus uses his body in the first instance to demonstrate to them who he is before going on to ‘open their minds to understand the scriptures’.  He tells them to look at his hands and feet and then ate a piece of fish in front of them.  Very physical actions.  His immediate response to their doubts is not to give them a detailed explanation of everything that had happened and what the Scriptures mean – that comes later.  His first thought was to show them his body and to prove he was alive by eating something.  It must have been such a shocking thing for the disciples - to see someone you thought was dead eating some fish and being able to see the scars on his hands and feet.  Yet the answers to their doubts were as much in the tenderness of these wounds and scars as they were in a detailed explanation of biblical texts.

Tonight I want to explore the relationship between our physical experience of our faith and the intellectual side of it, and to suggest that we are often out of balance, giving too much weight to everything that goes on in our heads and not enough to our physical experience.  Jesus shows us here and throughout his life that he loves and values the body.  What if our bodies are as much an expression of God and part of God’s revelation to us as what goes on in our heads in prayer or worship?

Down the ages various philosophies have separated out the spiritual and the physical, usually making the spiritual elevated and sought after and the physical body lower and base.  To be spiritual was somehow to transcend the evils of the body and reach a higher state of being.  That makes God very much ‘out there’, something to be strived after and discovered, rather than anything to be found dwelling within us.

Our society has put a lot of weight on learning and the cerebral side of experience; our education system is largely based around learning facts and regurgitating them onto exam papers. So we grow up learning that what we can keep in our heads is good and to be valued.  And of course, it is, but it is not the only aspect of our experience, or how we can experience God.

And so we tend to stick with the intellectual side of our faith and shy away from the bodily aspects of it.  It's also a very British thing to do: we like to keep ourselves buttoned up and under control.  It’s far easier and more comfortable to stay in our heads than to focus on our bodily experience.

Our culture also makes our bodies things to hide away, to keep under control with diet and exercise.  We see them as things to be mastered, rather than loved and celebrated as places where God can be experienced.  Our bodies are also messy and unpredictable.  They get spots, start to sag as we age, make embarrassing noises!  We share ourselves with other people via our bodies.  We hug and caress people.  We love people with our bodies. 

This makes it seem a radically shocking thing that Jesus comes to us in his own human body, and in doing so he completely validates our bodily experience.  Much of Jesus’ earthly life was spent eating and drinking with people, enjoying their company.  Taking on human form, he did a lot with his body: ate with outcasts, made mud out of his own spit and some earth to heal the blind, touched lepers, washed the feet of his disciples.  It was not the ascetic and rather austere life of prayer we might imagine.  It was full of life and physical connection.

And the act he gave us to remember him by in the last supper is also an embodied experience.  Eating bread and wine - using our bodies as part of that remembering – this tells us that God values our bodies as much as our minds.  As Franciscan Richard Rohr puts it: “Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Stare at this” or even “Worship this.” Instead he said, “Eat this!”

So, what difference does all this talk about the body make? Jesus taking on our flesh and living as one of us says that the physical and material are things to be trusted and enjoyed.  The body and the world are God’s dwelling place and revelation to us as much as anything we might learn with our heads.  It transforms our bodies from something to be hidden away or controlled, into something to be cherished and celebrated.  The physical life can be a spiritual life.  the experience of dancing the tango can be as much a place to experience God as a Sunday service.

We need both an understanding of God from what we have learned with our heads and our lived experience in order to be in step with Christ.  so I leave us with a question: What would it be like for me to let Christ inhabit my body as much as my mind?