A Touchy-Feely God
Caravaggio, "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas," 1602.
In Luke 24:39-40, the resurrected Christ invites his frightened disciples to touch him:
“Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
This invitation to touch is underscored by 1st John 1:1: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.”
Over and again, the flesh of Jesus touches other human bodies and is touched by other human bodies.
The tactile care of God that we discover in the haptic (from the Greek, haptikos, “to touch”) ministry of Jesus does not, as I argue in my book, A Body of Praise, represent a concession to a “weak” need for physical touch; nor does it represent a rare practice in the redemptive and reconciling work of Jesus.
The haptic ministry of Jesus represents instead a consistent and definitive means by which Jesus communicates “felt” love in order to deepen our experience of “felt” communion with God, both in our common life and in our liturgical life.
“Between birth and death,” writes the theologian Paul Griffiths in his book, Christian Flesh, “the Gospels mention Jesus being touched by and touching the flesh of others at least twenty times.”
Griffiths observes:
“He is circumcised, baptized, hugged by Simeon, has his feet anointed by Mary of Bethany and wiped with her hair, is bound and whipped and crucified, is kissed, washes the feet of others, caresses children, and heals the flesh of others by touching it. The Gospels don’t provide a full account of Jesus’s fleshly exchanges, but what they do give us shows almost no embarrassment about these fleshly exchanges.”
We are wrong, then, to reject the physical ways of our Lord and we do well to make space in our corporate worship for the kind of physical touch that bears witness to the tactile care of Jesus.
Hands held together during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, hands that rest upon the bodies of the sick and dying, hands that receive in gratitude the gift of bread and wine, hands that reach out in a gesture of reconciliation with an estranged brother or sister—these are good things.
We do well also to remain alert to all forms of abusive and insensitive touch. Such forms of touch violate the law of love and result in experiences of violence against the body.
We do well to protect the innocent and to defend the injured who have been traumatized in such ways.
We do well, finally, to guard the sacred nature of vulnerability that is involved in the exchange of physical touch between people.
I write about all of this and more in my book, A Body of Praise, but for now my sincerest prayer is that you might experience such physical care this week, somehow, someway.
