The Naked Truth ?

"Yet in my flesh, I shall see God"  Job 19:26

"Not in another flesh, but in my flesh shall I be resurrected. Some say the soul will be clothed in a new body, but then it would not be a resurrection. If the body did not rise again, the believer would not be completely happy - if the soul goes to eternity, but not the body, then we are never fully saved".  Thomas Watson. A body of Divinity.

I have really enjoyed re-visiting this week 'An offering of Uncles' by Robert Farrar Capon (as you will see from my last entry, as well as this one). You can truly savour that this man was a gem in his practical gifts of cooking and writing; his thoughts zing and crackle across the pages of this reflection on what it means for us to be priests, and inspires you to think and act in ways that respond to the marvel and splendor of this fact.

His section on personhood (discovering who we are) is sublime, and he follows this by looking at how everyday activities well-nigh cry from the rooftops concerning how we see our value resonate in these callings. He goes from there to the means God provides us to facilitate all of this - the wonderfully adaptable but equally admirable dress of our bodies.

He starts well, noting how going gnostic about this key part of us is totally wrong - "God made it, loves it, put Himself in it, died, rose and ascended to redeem it, and reigns forever in it ... showing all that pertains to the perfection of man's nature".
After touching on how we can effectively desecrate God's gift (by seeking to loathe the body) and how we can, when seeking to truly appreciate our forms, validate such, he makes the comments that as we will be eternally garbed in 'white robes', nudity (in respects to nudism - social nakedness) would appear to be a "wrong turn".

A couple of initial observations to think on.
First, the 'robes' we ARE clothed in by God are the garments of salvation (Isaiah 61:10) - the righteousness made ours in Jesus Christ's giving up of Himself for us, hence our 'garments' are made pure and spotless by His precious blood (Revelation 7:14).

Secondly, one of the key passages on the nature of our adornment in the new creation is found in 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, where the Apostle Paul informs us that just as we are currently dressed in the 'tent' of our present bodies, we will be eternally clothed in the 'mansion' of those bodies once they are glorified (that is, as he shows in 1 Corinthians 15, have put on immortality).

Nudity, as part of everyday social life, was actually enjoyed principally without issue in the early church. If you wanted to get clean in Roman times, then the baths were the best place, and although some of these had divisions for men and women, some also were places of mixed bathing. Archeology has shown that Christians used these places for baptisms and early writings show that baptism itself was often performed naked.

This 'down to earth' approach to life and theology speaks deeply to us. Whilst critical of contemporary attempts to ill-fit equality through practices like modern naturism (the philosophy was faulty from the start), C S Lewis understands what is entangled in such ambitions. 
In his work, The Weight of Glory, he speaks of how we all know this deep longing (see Romans 8:19) to not just encounter or appreciate beauty, but to be united to it in a manner that is whole and complete. Later in the same work, he states that this longing is wholly true of our bodies, alive amidst our garments, which long to be naked in the fashion once tasted in Eden. That true estate lies ahead.

The splendor of what is being promised here is often lost behind the splintering of approaches towards the spiritual that wish us to divorce the physical and the eternal, but the Incarnation and the ramifications of this for God and His children are total.

God has married our full redemption to Himself in the offering of all that is found in Him through the life and body of Jesus, that we might indeed become a people who in turn offer all that is good in worship through our bodily existence. Death temporarily severs the body and soul, but eternal life is seeing these united in living well so that creation truly conveys the majesty and beauty intended when all was 'very good' on that glorious day in the garden.

The coming pinnacle of the new creation may be a city, but it is a garden city, with a river flowing from the tree of life where the throne of the Lamb resides (Revelation 22:1). This will crown a renewed realm where all that was good in the beginning is evidenced once more (Romans 8:20-24). This was expressed in early Christian art and the rejoicing in such beauty depicted in the Renascence. It should equally inform our faith, life and actions today.

"Consider the lilies", said Jesus, for such natural glory is truly a gift from God. It is and always will be part of our significance as well.