Noel’s Reviews > This is My Body: A story of sickness and health > Status Update

'Christ's resurrection is our forerunner. We are a new creation and our bodies are new gardens, new Ways to walk with God. Faithfulness is about going deeper into our own bodies: digging deep. To honor our surviving bodies is to honor and reveal the risen Christ who wells within us like a dayspring.'

'We are awake, alive; we have risen, and our ultimate life's task is to rejoice with God who is the beginning and end of all life. Each new day is an invitation to be charged with resurrection light.'

'We can mourn our dying bodies in life and so, with thanksgiving, commend ourselves to God, just as we do a dead body at a funeral. The Church's liturgies teach us to see our days in this way, though for many of us today it may appear macabre. It is good to prepare to Rest In Peace when the sun has set.'

'Our days can be seen as a microcosm of our lives. We see the close of each day of our lives as a death and commendation to God in the hope and expectation of a new day—a resurrection and eternity shared with God.'

'[T]hose whose sick bodies seem pushed to the margins by the healthy centre sometimes learn to sit through terror and look expectantly for new life in unlikely places. A gash in the flesh makes way for a birth; twined thorns form a crown; dead wood flourishes into a blossoming tree; and opened tomb hatches new life.'

'The rolled-away stone creates a gash, a rupture that initially does not seem at all propitious. Yet it is here where Adam and Eve are released from the imprisonment of shame. Matthew writes that at the resurrection an earthquake occurred (28.2). The earth shifts and is realigned.'

'It is dawn when the women go to the tomb to anoint Jesus' dead body. Dawn: that in-between time, that cusp point in the day when the dying tend to slip away. This first light time is the dawning of a very new creation.'

'Christ's public journey began with a baptism; he was plunged into the dark watery chaos of death. Publicly and symbolically he enters into the world of death and the judgement of others.'

'Crucially, his dead face and disfigured body hanging on a cross over a desolate rubbish heaps is not an end in itself, just as Adam and Eve's transgression was not. This is part of Christ's Way, where death is creative. The dead body of Jesus on barren land is not even a stumbling block: if we follow Christ and walk, it is the path to new life.'

'Looking at the dead face of the Messiah we can learn to die well. Christ's crucified body depicted in sculptures and paintings and millions of other objects is concave and sharply chiselled, emphasizing his lifelessness. There is no prettiness now. This is not a sign of life or hope at all if we fix our eyes on the crucifix out of context or disconnected from past and future.'