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Two recent injuries—to my left foot and right shoulder—have slowed me down in the past month. I’m in physical therapy for the shoulder, and I’ve been wearing a boot-cast on the foot. As a result, I’m moving much more slowly than usual, and I can’t do all the chores at home that need doing.
But there has been an unexpected benefit in the experience: It’s giving me spiritual food for thought.
Limping around with a sore foot—the result of a fall—and having to favor a shoulder that’s sore from lifting something that was too heavy, I began to think about how easy it is to suffer an injury. The human body is a marvel of design and function, an image of the wisdom and love of its Creator. But it is vulnerable, and injury can happen in an instant. Healing takes time and care.
Because my injuries happened during Lent, I also began to think about the humanity and vulnerability of Jesus. It came home to me more sharply than before that when Jesus took on human nature, he also took on the frailties that afflict all of us. He opened himself to injury, accidents, sickness and pain. During his time on earth he must have endured many of the common ills and aches that all of us experience, before the final, unimaginable suffering of his Passion and death.
He also knew mental and emotional anguish; it is recorded in the scriptural account of his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knew what it was to feel alone, forsaken and sick with dread. His spirit was in torment before his body was. But when he had determined in prayer that his Father’s will was for him to suffer death, he went forward to his crucifixion without hesitation.
I’m thinking this year about what it really means that God became incarnate. The word “incarnation” makes me think of the Annunciation and Christmas—Jesus taking humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary, Jesus becoming visible at his birth. Now I’m thinking about the meaning of the Incarnation at its darkest and most frightening moment, on Good Friday, when the God-man walked the torturous Way of the Cross and suffered an excruciating and humiliating death to redeem the world.
When he chose to take flesh, he chose to share the pains of death with the human beings he had created.
The Incarnation reaches its fulfillment in Jesus’ resurrection. As theologians teach us, his resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse; Jesus rose to new life, eternal life, with his body transformed. It is the life that he promises to all who are faithful to him. But I love the passages of Scripture in which he proves to his disciples that he still possesses his humanity—for example, when he asks them for something to eat, and when he says to Thomas, “Put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”
It requires the eyes of faith to see that the Incarnate God remains with us physically, in the Eucharist, until the end of time. But that, too, is present in the Easter account in Scripture, when Jesus joins the disciples at table in Emmaus, takes bread, breaks it and blesses it—and then disappears from their sight. He is still with them, in the bread that he has blessed, as he blessed the bread at the Last Supper, which was the first Eucharist. At his Ascension, he tells the Apostles: “I am with you all days until the end of the world.” And he is, sacramentally as well as spiritually.
Frail and fallible though we are, the Incarnate God understands us because he took on our nature. He knows what we suffer because he suffered, too. He knows our joys but also our sorrows and fears. He never gives up on us, and he never revokes his promise to be with us always.
Happy Easter.
