![]() ![]() In one of my favorite Gospel passages, Jesus says: As Jesus ascends into paradise, he leaves us with the hope of things to come. They are called to something even greater than what this world provides. When Jesus was taken up into heaven after his resurrection, he not only re-affirmed his victory over death and bodily corruption, but he reminds us that our bodies are destined for something beyond what we can see. What’s incredible about our faith is that since Jesus truly became one of us in human likeness, his actions through his life, death, and resurrection in a human body, have significant implications for us who believe in him and follow him and you’d better believe that his Ascension does too! This World Is Not Home “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Philippians 2:6-7 He does this in and through his own human body, because: While our bodies and souls are imperfect because of sin, God took on our flesh not only to save our souls but to save our bodies as well. God has revealed it to us through his incarnation. What’s even scarier about these notions is that if this were true of the body of Jesus, then what does that say about the value of our own bodies? It essentially says they’re worthless! It was this idea that Jesus didn’t really take on a human body, but was just in the mere appearance of one, which actually stemmed from something even deeper: the speculations about the imperfection or essential impurity of the body. In the second century, the heresy of Docetism became common among many influential people. This is not a new concept, but one that has been greatly challenged through time. This truth sets us free to love each other fully as Christ intended and demands that we use them intentionally. Our world and even those in the Church misuse and abuse their bodies and the bodies of others because they are missing this key truth: that our bodies matter, and what we do with them matters. We lost the original unity that God created within us, and now we are living with its effects. But after Adam and Eve sinned in the beginning, we see a break in the original understanding of the human body and its connection to our soul. God created them in his likeness and called everything he made “very good” in Genesis 1:31. The body is a vessel for the Lord’s work in us and through us. When we nourish our souls, it is seen on the outside and expressed through our bodies, and when we participate through our bodies in the life of Christ, our soul is nourished. Their bodies revealed their holiness their wholeness. Knowing this to be true of all human bodies, we know that the incarnate body of Our Lord and the body of our Mother Mary must have been the most beautiful of all bodies on this earth. Our bodies express the essence of our inmost being. If what JPII said is true, then our bodies reveal something of what is in our souls. ![]() “the body and it alone has the ability to make visible the invisible-the spiritual and the divine.” After all, the soul is connected to the heart, and the heart is what the Lord is after, right? It wasn’t until recently that I learned the beauty of JPII’s teaching on our bodies, their integration, and necessary connection to our souls, that I understood why it is impossible to separate this integral unit, and why it would be foolish to want to. For most of my twenty-five years of life, I had looked at my soul as the most important, if not the only, component when it comes to faith. The Theology of the Body has played an integral role in my faith and in my relationship with Jesus. But what gets me is that, while it’s true that is the destiny of our soul, it just as much-maybe even more so-the destiny of our very bodies! TOB as Essential to Christian Understanding Have you ever caught yourself imagining it? How does this whole eternity thing work? For the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around it, and yet, heaven is the goal of the Christian life more specifically, to be one with our Creator, who satisfies the longings of every heart. I have pondered what heaven must be like my whole life. Can you imagine the sheer glory it must have been to watch Jesus being lifted up and taken to eternity? After forty days of walking on the earth testifying by his wounds his victory over death, Jesus raises our eyes to something even greater and more glorious: heaven.
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