I believe that God taking on a human body in the form of Jesus Christ sends a resounding, world-changing message: that God deeply and beautifully values our humanity and our physical bodies. God didn’t have to become human. Yet God chose to live and die as a human being.
The body matters. Why else would Jesus have chosen to return people to their communities, to their loved ones, if our ordinary human lives didn’t matter? Why else would Jesus have defeated death and the grave by coming back to life? He wounds showed his disciples that he was the person they knew. He wasn’t a ghost or a figment of their collective imagination. He ate a lot of meals to prove this, using his physical self to bear witness to who he really was and is – fully human and fully divine.
This helps me to be grateful for my body. Studying how Jesus lived, died and resurrected as a human being shows me that God values my physical self. That my body, as imperfect as it is, matters.
This message is excerpted from “What the Bible says about body image” by Jenna Pulkowski in the June 2021 Café online magazine.
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