We’ve been preaching through the ‘5 Senses’ at St. Benedict Hall with Wednesday’s eucharist homily culminating in a biblical theology of one of the senses and the way in which it leads us to Jesus. Our bodies were made for the Lord, “and the Lord for the body” (1 Cor. 6:13).
This week is our last week in the study and we conclude with “Touch” —what Pablo Maurette calls “the forgotten sense.” Often left-out of the equation when we think about honoring the Lord with our sensory life, Touch is the most intimate of the senses. Besides taste and touch, the other senses can be experienced from a distance. The disappearance of distance is what makes touch what it is. When something is touching you it is has closed all distance.
The Lord does not keep Himself distant from creation, he descends to form Adam from the ground (Gen. 1:7). There is a kind of touching going on here even if we want to argue about exactly how the ground is being worked and touched. God breathes into Adam, giving him the first kiss —the kiss of life, the mutual indwelling instantiated by the touching of lips. God descends again, closes the distance, and tears Adam open and lays him down (Gen. 2:21). He closes he wound with flesh and raises Woman from side of the Man (Gen. 2:22). They are intended for touching, to cleave together, a touching and sharing of life so intense that it renders them one flesh (Gen 2:23).
The curses and the promises which follow the Fall carry great import for the sense of touch as well: Adam will work the ground, his experience will be of sweat, thorn, and dirt (Gen 3:17-19). Eve will experience great pain in childbirth (Gen 3:16).
But in all of these pains, these haptic sorrows, the promise is that we will be delivered by one who will crush the head of the Serpent under his heel (Gen. 3:15). To crush is to touch.
Touching is never a one-way experience. To touch always means to be touched. Touching is inherently mutual. In crushing the Serpent, the Messiah Himself will be touched and that touching will bruise Him.
In the Incarnation God becomes touchable in all of its painful applications: “he was pierced for our transgressions, / he was crushed for our iniquities” (Is. 53:5). He is born from the womb of the Virgin with a body that is bruisable, whippable, pierceable, mockable, exposable, woundable, floggable, crucifiable, and —finally— killable. The same Body that came to be caressed and kissed by his mother on Christmas came also to be kissed by Judas the traitor and tortured by soldiers.
And in those brutal touches done to his Body He brought healing to our own bodies and life to our souls.
Go to church, hear the Gospel, go to the Lord’s Table and see the gifts of bread and wine He gives us as His Body. Leaving the Table after Communion you can join John the Evangelist in saying “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 Jn. 1:1).