pervasive brokenness
week 3 of "embodied for eternity"
It is Holy Saturday, and I can’t help but think about the specificity in God’s timing with this week’s content. Way back, thousands of years ago, those faithful followers who knew the deep goodness of God through the embodied person of Jesus sat on their Saturday sabbath and wept, waiting… wondering if the darkness and brokenness that pervaded the world would get the final word. They sat waiting for the Lord to fulfill His promise, to seal redemption through resurrection. Good Friday and Holy Saturday were weighty days of darkness; despair stood at the threshold waiting to overtake God’s people. … And we know that Sunday is coming. We hope for it. But my challenge to you today is to take this piece as is: let yourself grieve what feels lost, and sit in the Saturday.
Do you find it difficult to relate to food and your body? Are there particular pain points you see in your culture/your story?
Opening Quote
“All of us experience something of the shame of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. All of us feel the need for covering. All of us have some degree of self-consciousness. In many cases, the brokenness is not so much the body itself, but how our experience has taught us to view the body. The brokenness of our culture, our family, our friendship circle, our own distorted view of who we are meant to be and what we are meant to look like—all these things interact and contribute to our sense of shame.” - Allberry, What God Has to Say About Our Bodies
Focal Scriptures
Read all of Genesis 3, then reread these verses:
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. - Genesis 3:7
But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” - Genesis 3:9-11
To the woman [God] said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” - Genesis 3:16-19
Bonus Passages: Romans 6:12-13a; 7:5, 21-24
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You don’t have to look far to realize that the pain and devastation of humanity’s rebellion have reached our bodies. We see this as we look around at a world filled with sickness and death, abuse, pain, toil, eating disorders, and shame. Oftentimes, our bodies seem to work against us or, at the very least, stand in the way of what we desire... But why is that?
The Bible is not silent on this. You read all of Genesis 3, and then zoomed in on some particular selections (v. 7, 9-11, 16-19). What does this chapter bring to our conversation? ... It tells us an origin story. It is in this moment of rebellion, the moment humanity chooses against God, that the whole host of embodied strife enters in. This act is the genesis of body shame, of the alienation of man and woman from each other and from God in their nakedness. They become aware of themselves laid bare, and they want to hide. This changes everything. Kleinig describes the serpent’s deception in the garden as “a full-frontal attack on the whole person,” insisting that “Since they rebel against God with their whole person, their whole self is corrupted by that original sin, the first sin that is the seed of all subsequent sins” (Wonderfully Made, ch. 2). This sin that was committed in the body affects not just the body, but every part of life for every human thereafter.
The embodied fallenness and sin of Adam and Eve are the inheritance of our human family. We share in their shame and the fierce fracturing of relationship with the body. Paul outlines this specifically in Romans 5, establishing a paradigm of the first man (Adam) through whom condemnation comes to all apart from the new man (Christ). In the passages we read from Romans 6 and 7, we saw that—because of the plight of the Fall—sin can “reign in [our] mortal bod[ies]” (6:12) until we are lead to ask, like Paul, “Who can rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24). We experience the brokenness of the world in our bodies; we sin against God and our neighbor in our bodies; we sin against our own bodies. Our bodies are the locus of our humanity, in all its pain and all its glory.
We could easily insert ourselves into this riff, also from Kleinig: “Something is wrong, terribly wrong, with us and our bodies. We are no longer as we know we should be. In our shame we have lost face with each other and with God. We become aware of our all-too-naked, exposed bodies... Since we are now no longer happy and at home in our bodies, we dissociate [our]selves as persons from them. ... we cover ourselves and hide... we hide ourselves from God” (Wonderfully Made, ch. 2; italics indicate replaced pronoun).
Does this mean the body is all bad, then, since Adam? Is there no hope left for us? Surely not! Though the ravages of sin have misdirected our bodies, the good creational “structure” of the body remains. To quote Al Wolters, “God does not make junk, and he does not junk what he has made” (Creation Regained). This includes the human body. All is not lost, for the brokenness is no match for our God.
For Further Reflection
Was this story of body shame and brokenness new to you? How does this shape your perspective on your body? Feel free to explore this in journaling or prayer.
{P.S.—If you want to access the activity that accompanies this week of the study, feel free to reply or reach out to me. I would love to share it with you!}