The Entangled Christ

Hunger and its call to connection | The Word in the Wild, Easter 3, Year B

Luke 24:36b-48

Photo by Denis Agati on Unsplash

At the beginning of Lent,

Ruth Gaskovski

and

Peco

, offered an invitation to fast from the virtual and feast on the real. Along the way they collected some wonderful suggestions on just how to do that, from baking bread to walking everywhere. As I reflected on their invitation, I thought about how fasting and feasting in their traditional, food oriented senses are both ways to put us into contact with the real. In the hunger of fasting we do not transcend the body and its needs, but instead open up a deeper awareness of our physicality and experience new bodily capacities. We discover that we can go without eating and be just fine, and that with practice, fasting can release new bursts of energy in our bodies.

Feasting, can also be an experience of the body. Rather than mindless gorging at an all-you-can-eat buffet, a true feast comes in a series of unique courses, each set to be experienced in its fullness. I once took part in a gathering of farmers and food producers in Italy, where each evening we were treated to some of the Piedmont region’s best food. Even though a great deal was consumed, it was done with such slow savoring that I never felt “stuffed.” Instead, my body was awakened in new ways by the food and its attendant conviviality.

I thought about these bodily encounters with the real as I read our Gospel for the 3rd Sunday in Easter. Jesus once again appears to the disciples, and at the center of this encounter is his body. There are the wounds, yes, but in this instance there is also hunger and eating. Why, of all the details to offer, does Luke tell us that Jesus asked for food and then ate some broiled fish?

In part, I think Luke is anticipating the challenges to Christ’s nature that would come to a head in later centuries. It would have been easy to see the risen Christ as some sort of ghost, or “virtual” representation of the flesh and blood human, Jesus. Eventually this sort of thinking would lead to the Docetic heresy and its kin—the idea that Christ only “appeared” to be human, but was not a truely embodied being. Luke wants us to understand that the risen Christ is still a biological person and not some Ray Kurzweilesque holographic reassembly. Ghosts don’t eat, holograms don’t hunger.

But there is also something larger at play. Eating is the fundamental way in which our bodies are connected to the rest of Creation. We live from the Earth and its creatures—the plants that turn sunlight and soil into edible energy, and the animals that concentrate that energy into meat, eggs, and dairy. Then, from our daily defecations to our eventual death, we return nutrients to the flow of connection, cycling them back to the Creation (tragically, our modern sewage systems and burial practices disrupt that flow). To find the risen Christ as one who hungers and eats, is to find a person with a body participating in the nexus of creation. But in Christ the points of contact run both vertically and horizontally. Heaven and earth have been joined in one body, and even though Christ has risen, that communion has not been disrupted.

In the early debates about the nature of Christ, St. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote: “that which is not assumed is not healed.” What he meant is that if Christ is not human in every way, then the salvation Christ brings will not heal all the aspects of our humanity. It was an important statement for the debates of his time, but I think it can also be helpful in thinking about Christ in a larger ecological context. In eating fish with a hungry body, that food would have entered a gut full of microbes and been metabolized with the aid of bacteria. There is no human body that is whole and flourishing, and thus fully human, that is not also intimately connected to other creatures. Life, as writers from Merlin Sheldrake to David Quammen have been telling us, is entangled. That Christ hungered and ate means not only that Jesus was really alive in the flesh, but also that his life as a biological being remains entangled with the whole of creation. Christ took up within himself humanity in its fullness, but he also took up the whole cosmos, which is the full object of God’s healing—all that entangled reality we call Creation, the “whole world” of John 3:16.

There have been, and will surely continue to be, salvation schemes that cannot accept every part of our humanity within the scope of God’s healing. We may imagine that only our immaterial souls can be saved, or that human beings will be saved, but the whole of creation will be discarded with the arrival of a purely ethereal heaven. These forms of religious imagination find echos in the temptations of our technologies. In them we seek the frictionless spaces where we can forget that we have bodies that are dependent on their connections with other creatures, from e. coli to salmon. We want to leave behind our hunger, to forget the difficulties of fasting, but at the same time we leave behind the deep pleasures of feasting, or the simple daily eating of whole and nourishing foods. And so we eat constantly from what will never satisfy, exhausting our bodies and the earth in a constant flow of empty calories.

Against this the good news comes. Christ was raised from the dead and his entangled, bodily life continues. He was hungry and so was fed a fish that was caught from a lake, raised in an ecosystem, cooked over a fire of wood formed from earth and sunlight. As we continue our celebration of the Resurrection this Easter, we too should continue in our hunger for the real and feast when we find it.