In Christ’s wounds, we the fallen rise to heaven

prophecies supposed to reassure doubters of God’s loving, caring and protecting hand?

Well, if our Lord, dazzling with the fullness of divine immortality, power and glory, still found sumptuous sustenance from baked fish, as we mortals do, does it not doubtlessly demonstrate that our earthly lives and needs are also holy in heaven’s eyes? And since holy, then worthy of God’s protection and provision.

Not just our everyday necessities, but even our mortal weaknesses and agonies carry divine import above and beyond the clouds. Precisely why Christ bore and bared the bloody nail and spear marks on his risen body.

Besides proving he was the same Jesus crucified on Calvary, the wounded hands, feet and side declared that the paining, wounding and dying of human flesh was utterly Godly and worthy of heaven’s infinity and eternity.

The distress and death that are the hallmarks of our fallen nature since the banishment of Adam and

Eve from Eden, are now part of the fullness of divinity in Jesus Christ.

And if everything in our lives, even the throes of death, can be imbued with holiness, as the risen Jesus exudes, then God shall make sure to give all that we are and do His fullest attention, transforming grace, and uplifting power.

Still, even devout believers may just wonder if God would truly take all our human appetites and agonies, foibles and frailties, into His infinite and eternal Being, the sole Reality subsuming our ephemeral cosmos.

That’s where the second part of St. Luke’s story comes in. Those denying the Divine’s determined and detailed drive to make heavenly holiness out of earthy fallenness are totally refuted by Christ’s fulfilment of His plan of salvation as promised and prophesied over the millennia of Biblical Israel’s history.

In the story of salvation and our humanity eternalized in the Resurrection we are assured that God loves and saves us all. Amen.