All Loves are Bodily

Maundy Thursday, Year C
17 April 2025

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

 

I was 23 when I was diagnosed with periodontal disease. It should have been sooner but that’s another story. It was then that I could no longer deny that my teeth had shifted. I started to smile with my lips closed, which isn’t the way I normally smile, self-conscious of my teeth and my appearance.
Someone else I knew was diagnosed around the same time and her dentist recommended that she have all her teeth pulled, which I think, she did, at age 26 or 27.
In my case, I only recently needed more serious dental work, though for decades I have been on a three month cleaning schedule. Not long ago I had dental surgery and a lot of anxiety about it. Partly it was about putting myself into someone else’s hands, and partly it was about continuing to be able to be a pastor, for if public speaking is part of one’s work, then one’s teeth are important not only for eating and appearance.

Some of you have had far more serious and invasive surgery. I know that I am not special, or at least not that special. But it is one way I experience my body’s limitations. I know that I am blessed to have been able to have had those procedures and that it was only that.

I was reading an editorial in the Globe and Mail this week by a woman who became disabled at age 28 and became a parent six years later.¹ She writes, “I became a parent six years after becoming disabled. When my newborn demanded a slow and still life, I was ready for it; her evolving needs reminded me of my own. My daughter is 8 years old now, and instead of needing her mom to have the patience for thrice-daily contact naps, she now needs a mom with the patience to listen to every word of the Wicked soundtrack, over and over. My disability prepared me for both.
Becoming a parent requires building a relationship with disability, even if most people don’t notice this connection.”

I am not suggesting that my periodontal disease is a disability, or that I bear a particularly heavy burden.
However, I do appreciate how the author takes her disability as a gift, though, not only as a burden, how she is able to see not only her own limitations as a person with a disability, but the limitations we all encounter. In her ability to accept her limitations,² she can help us accept ours.

I think of this as I think of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Most of us are not comfortable with re-enacting the footwashing and washing each other’s feet. I think it’s too close, too personal, too bodily for us to truly embrace it. There is a sense of giving up control when someone else washes us, feet or sponge bath, or shower. Like Peter, we think that the feet may just be the part we don’t want someone else to wash, let alone see, or smell.
We think of our faith as spiritual, not embodied, and because we think of disembodied souls fluttering up to heaven we have difficulty to understand our faith as embodied even though we know that Jesus touched, healed, spat, and was in every way like us (though he did not sin).
There is a poem by Scott Cairnes, entitles Loves, in which Mary Magdalene speaks. I will not read all of it but some of it.

That the body is something less
than honorable, say, in its
… appetites? That the spirit is

something pure, and—if all goes well—
potentially unencumbered
by the body’s bawdy tastes.

This disposition, then, has led
to a banal and pious lack
of charity, and, worse, has led

more than a few to attempt some
soul-preserving severance—harsh
mortifications, manglings, all

manner of ritual excision
lately undertaken to prevent
the body’s claim upon the heart,

or mind, or (blasphemy!) spirit—
whatever name you fix upon
the supposéd bodiless.

I fear that you presume—dissecting
the person unto something less
complex. I think that you forget

you are not Greek. I think that you
forget the very issue which
induced the Christ to take on flesh.

All loves are bodily, require
that the lips part, and press their trace
of secrecy upon the one

beloved—the one, or many, endless
array whose aspects turn to face
the one who calls, the one whose choice

it was one day to lift my own
bruised body from the dust, where, it seems
to me, I must have met my death,

thereafter, this subsequent life
and late disinclination toward
simple reductions in the name

of Jesus, whose image I work
daily to retain. I have kissed
his feet. I have looked long

into the trouble of his face,
and met, in that intersection,
the sacred place—where body

and spirit both abide, both yield,
in mutual obsession. Yes,
if you’ll recall your Hebrew word.

just long enough to glimpse in its
dense figure power to produce
you’ll see as well the damage Greek

has wrought upon your tongue, stolen
from your sense of what is holy,
wholly good, fully animal—

the body which he now prepares.³

When Mary Magdalene says, “you are not Greek,” and later makes reference to the Hebrew word (I believe Cairns refers to heart – לֵב), she is speaking against an existence that is not embodied, an existence we may wish for but that does not exist. All our human experience is embodied, which is why we can never say that something is “only the body.” And remember how in the poem Mary Magdalene says,

I think that you forget

you are not Greek. I think that you
forget the very issue which
induced the Christ to take on flesh.

All loves are bodily, require
that the lips part, and press their trace
of secrecy upon the one

beloved

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, ⁴got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. ⁵Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.
(…)
⁸Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’ Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’

All loves are bodily.
When I had my dental surgery and at the beginning I received a needle into my palate and jaw, the assistant calmly and firmly held my shoulder. She could have said not to worry, or that it wouldn’t take long, or that all would be good. But her hand did far more than words could have.

It is at Christmas when we remember the incarnation, that Jesus took on our flesh. But it is during Holy Week when we remember that Jesus suffered like us and for us, that his flesh was pierced, and that when we celebrate the Last Supper that we break his body, and that we are his body, not in some esoteric way but concretely as the church gathered around the table, understanding as much or as little as the disciples. And we remember that Jesus rose bodily and that the disciples recognized him because he called them by name, because he blessed and broke the bread, and because of the marks of his wounds.

All loves are bodily, require
that the lips part, and press their trace
of secrecy upon the one

beloved

And the last lines again,

you’ll see as well the damage Greek

has wrought upon your tongue, stolen
from your sense of what is holy,
wholly good, fully animal—

the body which he now prepares.

Amen.