Body of Christ Incarnate for You by Pryor Adam;

Author:Pryor, Adam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Healing

Above I noted that reading together wisdom christology and the Luke-Acts narrative provides a reasonable framework for reading gospel stories in conjunction with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh. Wisdom christology emphasizes how right order can be realized through the accompaniment of wisdom/Christ. Further, the creation motifs of wisdom literature help make the significance of wisdom/Christ wider than just human beings; the harmonious order envisioned applies to the relation of humankind to all of creation. Focusing on gospel stories from Luke-Acts was sensible because of the elements of a realized eschatology (while maintaining aspects of the parousia) and its focus on addressing political conflict toward the end of developing community within the reign of God. In both wisdom christology and the Luke-Acts narrative, the significance of understanding who the Christ is, what it means that God is incarnate as the Christ in Jesus, bears directly on the discipleship of those who proclaim Jesus to be the Christ. The temptation and transfiguration accounts are highly significant christologically in the Luke-Acts narrative; though veiled at first, these stories explore what is at stake in claiming Jesus to be the Christ. Moreover, the harmony and right order for community within the reign of God bears a striking resemblance to the function of the flesh in Merleau-Ponty.

The connection here is more than superficial. Reading through the ontological lens provided by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh allows us to more clearly interpret the harmonizing aims of wisdom christology and the Luke-Acts narrative as ontological claims, not simply ethical ones. These traditions of understanding the incarnate Christ certainly help us realize the importance of our behavior, but that behavior makes a violent, perceptive claim upon the flesh; it limits or augments ways of understanding who we claim to be in the midst of this flesh. Our place as sensing and sensible beings in the flesh creates chiasmic intertwinements by which we incarnate and advent possibilities for how we take up flesh in the world. But we do not solipsistically incarnate and advent the flesh; so, the possibilities and limitations we institute through our incarnating and adventing the flesh have critical ramifications for others. As was asked at the end of chapter 5, is our incarnating and adventing the flesh so discordant for others, so limiting of the way they might subsequently take up the flesh, that the concept is more harmful than helpful?

As we look to the stories of Jesus in the temptation and the transfiguration, we get two glimpses into the way that the Luke-Acts narrative is distinctively framing the issue of christology. In both of these events, like the Luke-Acts christology in general, the Christ stands in the middle of time: simultaneously pointing back to the promised relationship of God to God’s people and forward to the way in which Jesus as the Christ has a distinctive role in the fulfillment of this relationship. The transfiguration makes this clear through the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Jesus, symbolically indicating a continuity with the law

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