In my homily for Easter this year, I said that if you wanted to summarize our faith in a few words, you could do so by saying, “Christ is Risen.” But let’s now complete the picture…If the Easter proclamation, “Christ is Risen” is the capstone and fulfillment of our faith, then what words capture the cornerstone, the foundation, of our faith? 

For this we look to the Christmas proclamation: “God became man.” The foundational act of our Christian faith is the Incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, taking on a body and becoming a man. Christians take the body seriously and reverently first of all because it is created good by God, and most importantly because of the Incarnation of the Son of God who took on a body and became man. 

As we heard in the second reading from Colossians, “Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” It is the body of Jesus which is the image of the invisible God. His body expresses who God is since he himself is perfect God and perfect man. His body reveals him as Son of God and Son of Mary, as a first-century Jew, and in his engendered personhood as a man. Jesus laughed, wept, slept, admonished, healed, broke bread, prayed, and told parables in his body. Jesus died on a cross for us and was raised from the dead at Easter in his body. His body (and his blood) is what we receive at Mass in the Eucharist. His body is the Church of which he is the head and to which we belong. God reveals himself most fully through the body of Jesus, as St. Paul again writes, “In him all the fullness was pleased to dwell.” This fullness of God is revealed and shared with us through Christ’s body in all of these ways.

Like the body of Jesus, our own bodies reveal our identity, and we are obliged to look at our own bodies and the bodies of others with respect, recognizing the dignity and value of the body. As we reflect on the reading from St. Paul to the Colossians concerning the meaning of the body of Jesus in revealing the invisible God and restoring peace through the blood of the cross, and as we look to the Gospel of the Good Samaritan as to how to treat the body with compassion and dignity, I would like to correlate the Christian significance of the body to a grave depreciation of the body prevalent in today’s world. 

In Catholicism, the body is good, revered, the foundation of meaning and openness to truth. But the modern conception of the body is far removed from the Catholic teaching about the body I just described. Instead, the secular world tends to see the body as meaningless matter, as something to change however we see fit. Instead of the body openly revealing the truth about who we are as God created us, modernity sees the body as mere matter, as a deception or mask that hides who we are, and as an obstacle or limitation that technology can overcome. 

You can see the damage of this approach to the body in the recreational drugs, substance abuse, overuse of stimulants, and unnecessary prescriptions people take to ‘medicate.’ You can see the indifference to the body in the lifestyles people lead by unhealthy eating, not exercising, not getting enough sleep, and not praying. You see this damage more destructively in treating the body as an instrument of pleasure through non-conjugal sexual acts, in sterilizing the body’s fertility through contraceptives, and in the resulting decimation of the family through immaturity, selfishness, or a downright refusal to take responsibility in the covenant of marriage. You see the rejection of our neighbor’s body in abortion and euthanasia, and every rejection of the right to life. You see the damage in the push to deny the difference and complementarity of our male and female genders in same sex marriage, or by neutralizing gender’s significance with gender ‘neutral’ bathrooms, and even in the very harmful psychological consequences of God’s children who undergo a gender ‘reassignment’ surgery, as if the gender God gave us is an ‘assignment’, like homework, that we could easily manipulate at will without consequence. More than any of this, the core issue of minimizing the meaning of our own body is that we fail to see the meaning of Christ’s body, the Church, and the Eucharist. When we don’t take the Christmas proclamation, “God became man” seriously, our humanity suffers on all levels: personal, communal, and institutional.

Whether you agree or not with this (non-exhaustive) assessment of the problems we face, I hope you will consider the necessity of conversion, turning from the view that your body or the bodies of others are just things to use to one’s liking or preference. I hope that, instead, you will strive to rehabilitate a robust and meaningful sense of the body as bearer of truth, meaning, individuality, uniqueness, and purpose. In this  personal and communal conversion, I believe we as the body of Christ can literally incarnate and make visible Christ’s love once more in our Church, families, schools, workplaces and communities. 

To do this, we start by looking once more, first and foremost, to Christ’s body as the foundation, as the cornerstone, of our faith. The words “God became man” are rich with depth and meaning. Where this teaching has been taken seriously, it has been explosive in evangelizing cultures of death and turning them into verdant cultures of life. This transformative effect doesn’t begin with good policies and politics. It doesn’t even begin with you. It begins with Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh. From Christ’s body, learn that your own body and the body of every human being is holy, a home for the Holy Spirit. Take good care of yourself (body and soul) and, like the Good Samaritan, the bodies and souls of others. After all, we will all have our bodies forever in heaven, glorified!