The Need

"That which was from the beginning... we have touched with our own hands" 1 John 1:1

Life, it's often said, is full of surprises. The problem with such jolts, of course, is that they are, by nature, unexpected, and can be for good or ill, but they usually push us to face something in a way we haven't, and that can do us a great deal of good.

I was shocked this week, gradually, by a fresh awareness of what it means to (truly) be flesh.

There is that astonishing moment in Genesis 1, where God takes something inanimate, and, whilst touching it, breathes into its deadness and creates beings to reflect Himself.

The book I'm reading notes how all that truly signifies what we really are revolves around the miracle of that moment - taken from the commonplace, endowed with the most extraordinary gift, we are made magisterial by the very touch of the most high, who grants us life by His breath.

We, of course, threw it all away, but the need for what that moment made us - the ache for the touch that makes our flesh vital and genuinely living, is present at every moment in our short lives here, and when God graciously intervenes to redeem us, it is through the total inhabiting of that same flesh, and, as John notes, by touching our flesh once more.

There are many times in the Gospels where Jesus engages with the sick and the lost, not only by speaking, but by touching them, or by allowing them to touch Him. Taken in the light of our creation's first moment, we see an echo of God's great intention - to invest the flesh of His hands with wholeness and worth that cannot be provided elsewhere.

Redemption, above all else, is the unveiling of the resurrection of the flesh - the glorifying and re-engaging of all that was promised in Eden, that the kingdom begun in Christ's incarnation may be completed in the filling of the earth.

We have yet to see the great splendor of what is intended, but in creation and redemption, we are pointed repeatedly to the spark, the seed of what flesh will truly become.