The Folly of the Body
A Brief Reflection on Holy Week
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men.
Many years ago, during this very week, the world was saved by a Body.
A Body who was born and nursed;
whose eyes grew heavy with sleep;
whose ears heard the songs of birds;
whose hands felt the grain of wood;
whose feet were soiled with dirt;
whose nose smelled the dampness of earth after it rains;
whose tongue tasted the freshness of herbs.
But this wasn’t just any body. The world was saved through the Body of the Word made flesh: Christ’s Body.1 Not only in its humanity or its resurrected glory, but in its brokenness.
A Body whose eyes saw his friends abandon him;
whose ears heard mocking and scorn;
whose skin was mutilated with the scourge;
whose hands and feet were nailed to the cross;
whose nose smelled the iron of drying blood;
whose tongue’s last taste was sour wine.
A Body who died.
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For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. (1 Cor 1:22-25; 27-31)
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If you think about it long enough, a body—let alone a broken, dead body—hardly seems like a thing that could save or restore us.
So much of the time, the body is an obstacle to our wholeness and peace. Chronic illness and pain, cancer, anxiety and depression, addiction, disordered desires, dysphoria, death—the body’s brokenness gets in the way of the very wholeness we ache for. It’s a constant reminder that we are not whole, that we are not at peace.
Indeed, it seems that salvation would be more likely to be found in a transhumanist utopia where all were eternal cyborgs or some perfectly spiritual plane of existence where we were freed from our bodies altogether.
No wonder the Jews found the Gospel to be a stumbling block. No wonder the Greeks found the Gospel folly. As far as salvation goes, spiritual signs or worldly philosophies seem to be more promising.
Yet, what they get—and what we get—is something far more foolish, and far more wise: a Body, Christ crucified.
“This is my body, broken for you.” (1 Cor 11:24 KJV; cf. Luke 22:19)
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Holy Week reminds us that the wisdom of the body is about more than personal identity or practical advice. It is not simply about who we are as embodied creatures or how this fact shapes how we should live day to day.
The wisdom of the body includes the saving wisdom revealed, above all, in Christ’s Body.
For all its goodness, no amount of embodied living—cooking, gardening, spending time with loved ones in person, caring for the sick, etc.—can save any of us from our brokenness, our sin, or its ineluctable consequence: death.
This week, as we celebrate God’s saving wisdom revealed in the death and resurrection of the Body who redeemed all bodies, let us remember that our “foolishness” as Christians living in the modern age is constituted by far more than a belief that our physical bodies matter for who we are and how we live. Our folly—or, more rightly, our wisdom—is marked above all by our conviction that the hope for salvation is found in one Body, and one Body only: Christ’s Body, “broken for you.”
As I use the term “Body” here, I am in no way suggesting that Christ was just a body. I follow the ancient, creedal orthodoxy which teaches that Christ is fully God and fully man, soul as well as body. The way I’m writing here is for rhetorical purposes.