Elbows, hair, eyes, shades of melanin, larynx, colon, earlobes, fingernails, big-toes, and all the rest of it. God made this thing this way for his glory and called it good.
Often, however, we are ashamed of this body he gave us, ashamed of all of the parts we share with the animals (circulatory, digestive tracts, tear-ducts, etc.), ashamed also of the parts we do not share with the animals (our opposable and prehensile thumb, the expressional zone of the human face, human larynx, etc.). We are embodied souls. And both soul and body confront us in both a pre- and post-cognitive way with the fact of our distance from our Creator. And so we become ashamed of the body. This takes many shapes and forms, some more obvious than others, among which is the current trend of post-humanist thinking (a la Aubrey de Grey, Stephan Warwick, Benjamin Bratton). As varied as these thinkers are they are unified by one common denominator: a hatred of the human body which they see as prosaic, undesirable, and discardable.
Over and against this current of posthuman thought (so hot right now) stands the incarnate Lord. God himself who became man, underwent mammalian gestation and human puberty, suffered a human death. God is not ashamed of the human. God became human and in doing so restored to humanity the dignity of our being.
The events of John 11 (the raising of Lazarus) ring with God’s affirmation of the body. Chief among the affirmations of the life of the body in this episode is the way in which Jesus relates to the dead body of Lazarus. He simultaneously affirms the reality of death, he weeps over the death of his friend, and yet refuses to allow the fact of death eschew his image of the human body. He speaks to the corpse of Lazarus, clearly assuming it to be capable of obedience.
Moreover he does not, in this event, raise Lazarus to the Resurrection. Lazarus is not still alive. He died a second time. Martha planned two funerals for the same man. He raises him to resuscitated life knowing full well that that same body would fall ill and die again. To posthumanists such a resuscitation is foolish if not cruel (“…and what a waste of valuable medical resources” some might say). But no, Jesus was willing to raise this body again, knowing that it would die, “for the glory of God” (Jn. 11.4b). How does that work? Because the human body, the blessed human body, is the glory of God; it is his diadem and signet upon the work of creation.
We are all little Lazaruses, each day rising from the deep dark of sleep, called-out of the bedded-sepulcher into a waking brightness of sensory life in which God proclaims his love to us and gathers us into his Body —the church. Though we will die again before the Resurrection, God so chooses to give us each day in the body (as many as he gives) as the site of encounter and response to him and to his glory which plays in a thousand places: in ankle joints, chest cavities, rounded shoulders, hair lines running across the crest of the forehead, and countless others. Tomorrow when you awake from sleep wiggle your toes and speak the words of the prophets over your baptized body: “The Lord has come into his temple, he has filled this house with glory" (cf. Psalm 11.4; Malachi 3.1; Haggai 2.7). If you have not been baptized, perhaps it is time to have that blessed body washed and waked.