OUR BODIES ARE amazing, miraculous things. I’m personally fascinated by neuroscience and the constant stream of new discoveries about how our brains work. Moreover, there are so many bodily experiences we could appreciate if we took the time to pay attention. We could savor good food, lovingly prepared, instead of wolfing it down. We could breathe in the smell of a freshly bathed baby instead of stressing out over the next thing on our list of childcare duties. We could listen to how the birds sing instead of griping at them for waking us up.

Much of the time, though, we simply take bodily experience and our bodies for granted — until they stop working. We get sick. We get injured. We get older.

Add to that the little indignities of daily life that fall under the headings of good hygiene and meeting public standards of presentability. We get bedhead and bad breath; we rely on makeup and makeovers. And we make sure to keep plenty of toilet paper and Kleenex on hand because…well, you get the point.

God created us in his image, and God created us with bodies. We’re not spiritual beings that somehow got inconveniently trapped in physical bodies; by God’s design, we were created as embodied beings. We don’t hope for a day in which we will no longer have bodies; we hope for a day in which these bodies of ours will no longer be fragile and mortal. (Don’t ask me if we’ll still need toilet paper and breath mints in the resurrection. I haven’t a clue.) The Incarnation, when the fullness of God became flesh in the person of Jesus, tells us that embodied existence didn’t need to be done away with; it needed to be redeemed.

It should be easy to imagine, though, how some strains of Christianity have thought otherwise, wanting to emphasize the spiritual over the physical, sometimes to the extreme of suggesting that it’s below our God-given dignity to even have a body. And if that kind of thinking was already circulating in Colossae, that might explain why Paul speaks as he does about the physical body of Jesus. Here are his words again, this time from the Common English Bible:

But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death, to present you before God as a people who are holy, faultless, and without blame. (Col 1:22, CEB)

What the CEB translates as “his physical body” could be rendered more literally as “the body of his flesh.” As I suggested earlier, Paul could simply have said that Jesus reconciled us to God through the death of his “body” rather than “the body of his flesh.” Why say it that way?

It seems likely that Paul is emphasizing the physicality of Christ’s body in order to combat the so-called “Colossian heresy.” That makes particular sense if it’s true, as many believe, that the heresy was an early form of Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is a broad label for what would eventually become a variety of teachings. Typically, though, these teachings shared something in common: a deep reverence for the spiritual and a deep disdain for the physical. This influenced their view of the man Jesus, whom they wanted to distinguish from the being they called the Christ. While Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human, the Christ was not. While Jesus was physical and subject to all the indignities of living in a body, the Christ was a perfect spiritual being.

How, then, could the two be reconciled? Some taught that the Christ took the form of Jesus, and though he seemed to be a man, he really wasn’t. That eliminates the body by turning it into nothing more than an illusion, the mere appearance of humanity. Some taught that the spiritual Christ temporarily joined with the man Jesus at his baptism, but fled at his crucifixion, so as not to suffer the indignity of the cross.

Such philosophies, in some basic form, may already have been gaining traction in Colossae when Epaphras made his report. If so, it makes sense that Paul’s letter, in some way, would assert the physicality of the one who died on the cross and in whom could be found the fullness of God. Again, Paul’s emphasis is on reconciliation. But for him, there could be no reconciliation without the cross, no cross without a body, and no body without the Incarnation.

Some scholars note that while the word “body” is a neutral term in Paul’s letters, “flesh” is often not; it’s a word he uses to suggest a life lived in opposition to God. Thus, it’s possible that he’s also suggesting something here that he develops in more detail in his letter to the Romans: that Jesus took our fleshly sin and rebellion to himself, in his body, so that it could be condemned and put to death on the cross.

Why does any of this matter? Because even some two thousand years later, we can still have a hard time embracing the fact of our embodiment. We emphasize and celebrate spirituality, but downplay or even denigrate our physicality. Yes, we sin with our bodies. But we also do good with them. We can use our hands to strike our enemies, but also to hold and comfort a child. We can use our mouths to curse or bless. Our feet can run from responsibility or run to places where God calls us to be.

Sin is the problem, not embodiment itself. Jesus lived entirely under his Father’s will while in the body, and it was through his physical body that we are reconciled to God. But miraculous as these bodies are, all the fullness of the embodied life that we were meant to live is still for the future. We still suffer weakness, illness, and indignity. God may even heal us today, but eventually we will die. That’s why Christians are repeatedly taught to live in hope, as Paul teaches the Colossians. Let’s explore that next.