Dear Parish Family,

While the disciples who had returned from the road to Emmaus were explaining how they recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread, Jesus suddenly appeared in their midst. Frightened, they thought they were seeing a ghost, but Jesus told them to look at his wounds and even touch him. He knew they were having trouble believing what was before them. As if to convince them that he was somehow, albeit strangely, flesh and blood, he asked for something to eat in their presence.

This, like other accounts of the risen Jesus, is amazingly wonderful. And despite the efforts of countless commentators and interpreters over the centuries to reduce these narratives to something neither quite so strange nor nearly so wonderful, one fact remains: The resurrection community that had experienced Jesus’ dying now experienced his risen presence. And it was, quite insistently, an embodied one.

This is a Jesus of sight and sound, of memories and relationships, of love and tenderness. He would take food and allow himself to be touched. Even his wounds could be examined. It was a recognizable and identifiable Jesus, a realization of his bodied existence. And yet he seemed to transcend the conditions of sheer organic materiality. He would appear out of nowhere, supposedly pass through walls and closed doors, walk on water, and reveal wounds startlingly different from the open sores of earthly trauma.

Christ appears in some kind of bodied existence that is not the same as our sheer physical limitedness. It is a kind of existence that enters our world yet is not cramped by it. Human destiny after death appears to have fascinated every human community from Greeks to the modern day existentialist philosophers. Thomas Aquinas saw this problem in his own time in the thirteenth century. There is no way we could talk of personal immortality or our destiny if our bodies were not somehow part of the picture. If a disembodied soul survived our deaths, that might be nice, but it certainly would not be us. We are ‘en-souled bodies’. A separated soul may live on—but it would be drastically incomplete.

This is why St. Thomas Aquinas loved to dwell on the resurrection narratives. It suggested to him that we, like Jesus, would have a new bodied existence, truly related to our bodies in this world, but nonetheless freed from their organic disabilities. Thus he speaks in glowing terms in the Summa Contra Gentiles about the kind of bodies we might have in the next life: fully realized even if we died young, fully supple if we died old and frail, capable of every bodied joy, and gloriously transcendent of our every bodily-wound.

While the immortality of the soul was a proposition Aquinas held on the evidence of reason, the immortality of the body he affirmed on faith—faith in the Resurrection. We Christians believe in glorified bodies, resurrected bodies. In fact, in the Apostle’s Creed we recite we say, “I believe … in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.” These days we are receiving strange confirmations of such beliefs by the numerous accounts of near-death and out-of-body experiences. But our convictions go back to the testimony of the early Church, those who experienced Christ in his body, but so gloriously that even his wounds were lovely invitations to faith. We need to nourish our soul with prayer and sacraments, care for our body by food and exercise. Our life on earth has a glorious future as we will dwell in glory in the embrace of God’s love forever. “Happily ever after …” will be our life’s final never ending chapter!

Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.