Touch and See (Mystagogy, Part 5)

“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
— Luke 24:39

One of the great questions in the Church’s understanding of Christ concerns the properties of His resurrected Body. From the time Jesus exits the tomb, there is something evidently different about His embodied life from how it existed prior to His Resurrection. The Evangelists take special care to demonstrate that Jesus continues to have a body, that His body is continuous in some ways with the body the disciples had known before the Passion; yet His body now possesses new properties that begin to reveal and oblige a new relationship that Christ will have with His disciples as He ascends to the Father and the Spirit comes upon them. For the final entry in our series on mystagogy, then, we turn to the sense of ‘touch’ and its place in our worship of the risen Lord.

The problem of death had been a riddle within the wisdom writings of the Hebrew Scriptures for centuries. One formulation of that riddle asked how a creature like mankind, created in the likeness of God and endowed with such wondrous capacities and such a high calling in the created order, could at the same time diminish and succumb to death like a common beast or like the grass of the field. The impermanence of the flesh, known best in the decline and dissolution of the human body, did not easily correlate with the kinds of redemptive promises made to those who faithfully kept covenant righteousness. How could the righteous inherit the Land, stand in the congregation of the just on the judgment day, if they were undone and their spirit thought to dwell in Sheol? Did not death negate the promise of God?

In the pagan world, as well, this riddle proved one of the greatest mysteries. The Greeks, for instance, knew a vexed relationship between the aspiration to glory and remembrance, and yet also the hazards presented by opportunities to win such fame: how often renown put one in proximity with the risk of death. So, too, the notion of Hades to the Greek was a place where all was forgotten. In other words, it did not matter who you were among the dead once you joined their company. As the godlike warrior Achilleus lamented to Odysseus: “It is better to be a slave among the living than to be king among the dead.” Moreover, even when a notion of the immortality of the soul emerged in Socratic philosophy—a destiny of the well-ordered spirit among the ultimate forms of goodness, truth, beauty, and being themselves—there was still little place for the body. For the true philosopher, to part ways with the lowly body was to be desired, and thus death could be seen as a friend that arranged that liberation. It was an elegant solution to the problem of death—if you set aside, that is, the Scriptures.

In truth, the Scriptures vindicate the body. As theologian Christopher West notes, God made Man on purpose and out of love, forming his body and in-breathing a rational soul. To be human is to be a body and to be a soul. The Hebrew Scriptures knew nothing of a disembodied paradise as the ultimate destiny of the departed. They resolutely asserted (unlike many contemporary Christians, sadly) that God’s redemptive vindication for humankind, being what they were, must entail a bodily stake in the world that God made and called good. The tangible, material world was not accessory to the spiritual life of the worshiper. Rather, the embodied life of humanity was the very field in which the spiritual life was to be lived. To believe in the promises of God meant the utter commitment of one’s whole life to the terms of those promises. Biblical faith has always been something that obtains in the world of things that can be touched.

As human nature was revealed in the Creation to be both rationally-ensouled and embodied, the redemption of that humanity in Christ necessarily embraced both. That the Evangelists are so insistent to demonstrate that Christ rises in a Body means that the humanity He assumed at His Incarnation is not discarded when He rises from the dead. It means that God does not deliver us from our humanity into a different species of life, but rather that He delivers us within our humanity, even if it must be regenerated. It means that the ancient riddle of His covenant people had been answered, and that the trust in the promises of God in which many died was not in vain. And it means that the hope of the pagan to eat and drink and dwell with the Fount of all Life was not merely a myth.

Yet for as much as the risen Christ invites His disciples to touch and see Him, to begin to understand the new life that He has opened up for them, this is not the only word He speaks concerning touch. In one of the more ponderous passages of the New Testament, in St. John’s Gospel, we see Christ speak to Mary Magdalene, the first witness to His Resurrection, in a different way. In chapter twenty we read:

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”—and that he had said these things to her.

The encounter our Lord has with St. Mary Magdalene before He dispatches her with her message to the Twelve pauses us as we consider the risen body of the Lord. In this passage, Mary does not recognize Jesus, supposing Him to be the gardener. She asks where the Lord’s body has been taken away, and offers to go and retrieve His body wherever it is. When Christ calls her by her name, and she recognizes it is Him, He immediately exhorts her not to touch Him, because He has not yet ascended. While commentators are largely puzzled as to why He forbids her, in this instance, to embrace Him, the likeliest clue to His meaning comes with the knowledge of His impending Ascension. By ascending to the Father, the Spirit would come to the disciples to make the risen Lord present in a way that was more intimate and near than anything they could know by walking side-by-side, closer than any embrace. St. Mary Magdalene alone, of the disciples of Christ, is given the knowledge that the Lord’s risen Body, while continuous with His crucified Body, had been translated into the Kingdom of God. His Resurrection was not a revival of the old work, but the revelation of the new. And, as some commentators have noted, this is perhaps why she first addresses Him as “My teacher!” but then remembers Him to the Twelve as “The Lord.”

Our worship of Christ preserves this tension in the way it makes use of our sense of touch. Every Sunday, we are invited to receive the risen Body of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. We are invited to touch, but this touch is unlike all other objects we touch. With nothing else in life do we so carefully prepare to touch (whether it be in our hands or on our tongues). That Christ invites us to touch Him and see that it is Him communicates His nearness to us, how He is indeed present with His Church unto the end. That Christ also invites us not to cling to Him communicates His will to draw us onward into the consummation of the Kingdom. Our worship, in this way, expresses the fact of life that we are living in an inaugurated Kingdom that is being manifested to the world, but which will, at a future point, be perfected. We are living in the now and not yet of the Kingdom. The One we touch now in the Sacrament, we will see when He stands again among us, before Whom every knee shall bow.

The tangible dimension of sacramental worship upholds the full truth of the new humanity that Christ has bestowed upon us, and the truth that God means to redeem the whole of who we are—He means to renew His whole creation. We may not divide life simply between the spiritual and physical; we may not neatly sever what we call heaven from the world. As we are brought close by the proclamation of the Gospel to encounter the risen Christ in the little outposts of heaven all throughout the world—those parishes in which the people of God bear witness in every time—we are brought closer to the time when we, without shame, know God face-to-face. With every sense, the Kingdom of Heaven has been proclaimed to us. With every sense, we show forth our praise of the God who is in our midst, in us and among us. With every sense, we anticipate the great day when the good, the true, and the beautiful—the love of God—are known outwardly as they are inwardly, are known on the earth as they are in heaven.