A Body Given Up For You

Two weeks ago my nephew lost a leg and a foot in Afghanistan.  He had wanted to serve people in a more substantial way than as a manager of a bar which had been his prior occupation. So he joined the Rangers and became a medic.  He learned to apply tourniquets, and to perform emergency tracheotomies, inject intravenous fluids to keep soldiers alive and get them off the battlefield and into a medical facility. To do this work he had to put himself in harms way. He  played a kind of "catcher in the rye".

This got me thinking.  We had just read over the last couple of months the gospel of Luke. Twice in that gospel Jesus says that those who seek to save their lives will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake will save it.  And so I asked myself, “what does it mean to lose one’s life for His sake?”   In any case, we only have our bodies temporarily and parts of our bodies might be even more temporary.  But what does it mean, to lose one’s body for Him?  Did Chris, my nephew, loose his leg and foot for Him?   He put himself in harms way to provide an essential service to those in his unit who might become casualties of war.  He didn't want to become one himself.  

“This is my body which will be given up for you and for all that sins might be forgiven,” He said, before becoming a casualty of that spiritual war in which we are all combatants.  Love, that much over worked word,  love is about giving up one’s body,  not primarily in sex acts, but in the day to day service offered to those we care about. 

Catholics believe that the Creator made a gift, a bodily gift in handing of dominion of creation over to mankind.  And again He made a bodily gift-- in the incarnation of his Son, conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit.  It was Christ’s body, but in a way,  it was His Father’s body too, in so far as he could have a body, that was given up to accompany us.  “This is my body which will be given up for you and for all that sins might be forgiven.”  He said this after spending a few years teaching  about that grand narrative of which our lives are but a part. "Do this in membory of me," He said.  We remember this each and every time Mass is said in the many venues around the world including on battlefields.

The giving of His body,  is not about His body only, but a body that is a symbol of more than just the physical- but of His life itself.  If, through faith, we were to accept His sacrifice we would enter into a kind of covenant with our Creator.  Jesus called it "a new and everlasting covenant."   Our life would be an act of worshop "in spirit and in truth" as he told the Samaritan woman at the well.  Paul observed that "we carry about in our body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body (2Cor4:11)."  We hold our treasure in earthen vessels that are subject to a kind of breakage but not annihilation.  Could the limbs my nephew lost in the course of  his service  to his Ranger unit  be construed to be such a sacrifice?  Could his  body bear a kind of stigmata acquired in  his playing a catcher in the rye in real life?