The God of Broiled Fish—the embodied Christ

Our bodies deserve care.

There is no doubt that we grow sick, get injured, and move towards death. This is just the natural way of life. But that doesn’t mean we should neglect our bodies. We deserve medical care, nutrition, movement, and a general well-being that makes our quality of life good, even in the face of inevitable death.

Millions of people here in the U.S. can’t truly take care of their bodies. Whether that be because of lack of medical insurance, food insecurity, chronic pain and illness, or any number of other factors, the well-being of all people is not good. We are a society that refuses to help with this problem. Universal healthcare would solve the biggest barrier toward all people getting medical care. Universal Basic Income would change the game for people who struggle with food insecurity due to finances. Urban redevelopment and community gardens can combat food deserts.

All of these things are within our power as a society to change, but we live in a culture that primarily views the body as nothing more than a vessel for the true essence of what we are. As a result, the physical body is devalued. Sure, we have a medical system, but it primarily treats symptoms and, in large part doesn’t help us develop a lifestyle of well-being. That would be too expensive.

We have elevated the spirit and soul to a place of mythical proportions, viewing our bodies as a shell that houses our consciousness and nothing more. Our collective view of an afterlife consists of a spiritual reality, a disembodied existence while we wait for a new body that we don’t have to care for because it’s incorruptible and immortal.

Even in the resurrection, we can devalue our bodies.

The incarnation of God in the physical person of Jesus doesn’t let us get away with that though. Throughout the Jesus’ story, we see the reality of Jesus as an embodied creature. He ate, drank, wept, walked and did everything that we do as humans. Jesus was fully human, not the Spirit of God in the shell of a body.

Jesus’ ascension was an embodied experience.

Jesus didn’t shed this mortal coil and float away as an embodied soul. In fact, Jesus made a point that the disciples knew he wasn’t a ghost, that he was physically with them prior to the ascension.

With a greeting of peace, Jesus appears among his disciples one last time. Of course, they are startled and amazed. But they think he’s a ghost. So, Jesus offers his very body as proof.

“See my wounds? Touch them. I am here, in the flesh and bone that makes us all human.”

The disciples are still unsure. I mean, they all knew of Jesus’ death on a Roman cross. They knew he had been buried in a tomb. They knew that it had been three days that Jesus was in the grip of death. How could it be that his flesh and bone self was back among them?

“Give me some broiled fish.”

Jesus asks for something ordinary, something common, something basic: food. Jesus asks for food, for nourishment. And as he ate it, the disciples came to believe that this resurrected Jesus in front of them was real, not a ghost, but embodied, enfleshed.

Jesus shared his flesh with us. That is what community is: the sharing of flesh. We share skin and bones with each other over meals, on drives, watching movies, even over the internet. We are bodies reaching for each other. None of us are unembodied spirit floating intangibly in space. We are creatures of mud and guts, made of stardust and galaxies. This is what we all share: we have bodies.

They are different. Some are typical. Some are disabled. Some larger. Some smaller. Some are queer bodies. Some are young. Some are old. Some are Caucasian. Some are BIPOC. We are a variety of people all sharing the reality that we are flesh and blood.

The incarnation means that Jesus shared a body with us as well. Jesus moved into the neighborhood not as a demigod, but as a regular person. He could have had some fat on him. He definitely wasn’t the blond surfer dude depicted by white Christianity. He was Palestinian. Probably wasn’t short, but certainly didn’t tower over everyone. He didn’t have those Hollywood looks. Jesus was average, normal, typical.

After the broiled fish—after proving he was flesh and blood—Jesus spoke to them about how the Jewish scriptures all pointed to him. The story of regular humans with flesh and bone bodies coming to know who God is was all about Jesus. Somehow, something supernatural happened in the ordinary, gray matter brains of the disciples, and Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures. They finally, after three years, began to get it.

The Messiah had to suffer and die and rise on the third day. Jesus, in all his average, normal humanity, had to suffer and die, and his physical, flesh and bone, fish-eating body had to be resurrected three days later. This is the reality the scriptures pointed to, and the disciples could finally see what it meant. This had happened. They had just seen it. So, as witnesses, they were to go now and proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins in the name of the embodied Jesus.

Jesus said that something amazing was going to happen to the bodies of the disciples: they would receive power from on high. The physical bodies of the disciples were going to be empowered by God to fulfill this mission of witness and testimony. They were going to speak with ordinary mouths the amazing things God had done in the incarnation, in the physical person of Jesus.

Then Jesus invited all his disciples to take a walk with him. The moved-on feet that grew tired, that were covered with dust and grime and some shit. They were feet that had toes that got hit on things. They were normal feet, on the ground, that took Jesus and his followers on a walk.

The incarnate Christ walked one last time with his disciples out of Jerusalem and towards Bethany. There, he raised his hands over them, fingers outstretched, bones extended, ligaments pulling and muscles pushing. Jesus spoke a blessing over them with an ordinary mouth, with a tongue and vocal cords manipulating air from a human set of lungs.

As Jesus blessed them, his body, the one that was flesh and bone, that had been crucified and raised again, rose into the air and ascended.

Jesus flew away. It seems weird that Jesus, who had just emphasized his humanness with some broiled fish, would now act in such a superhuman way. But this amazing event happened to a physical body, not a spirit or a ghost. Jesus rose to heaven as a fully human person.

God gathered Jesus the human up to Godself and in doing so gathered all of humanity to Godself. Our flesh, our anatomy, our bones sit in heaven at the right hand of God. Humanity has been enthroned in Jesus, who sits fully human on the throne of heaven.

See, what God enfleshes, God raises to Godself. God does not abandon creation, and that includes the all too real humanity.

God gathers us all into a place where our physical bodies can be fully human in the resurrection.

This is why bodies matter, why your neighbor matters, why you matter. We are not simply souls trapped in meat suits. We are fully enfleshed. Our spirit is entwined with our bodies, made one being of unseparated parts. When we care for each other’s physical needs, when we build communities that consider the bodies of the people at the table, when we care for our bodies, we are doing the work of the ascension, the work of divinity gathering all flesh to themselves.

As we enact heaven here, in the physical world of creation and cosmos, we are recognizing that God honors our flesh and bone. We are sacred because we are enfleshed. When we care for our bodies—our own, our neighbors', our communities—we are bearing witness to the truth that God has shown us what flesh is worth.

We come to the table and eat to show we are flesh and bone, that we are human.

In the ascension, Jesus shows us that heaven makes room for the flesh. In the same way, we make room for each other, letting each person take up their space without demanding people shrink themselves, fit our standards of beauty, change their ethnic heritage, or in any way become less than their full human selves.

There is room—physical room—for all of us in this heaven we are testifying to as a different world that is possible to live in. The ascension shows us this because the physical Christ made room in heaven for the fullness of humanity.

So come with your physical self. Come to the bread, to the wine, to the neighbor, to the place you, with all your body, belong.