The Rank He Gave His Own Body

He drew it on a napkin once, years ago, for a student who had asked him a question.

Three levels. Spirit at the top, mind underneath it, body at the bottom holding the other two up. He drew it quickly, the way you draw a thing you have known for so long that it has stopped being an idea and become furniture.

The student thanked him and went away happy.

He has thought about that napkin four times in the last month, because of something that happened in a friend's kitchen at Christmas.

Somebody had asked him a completely ordinary question about looking after yourself, and he had given a completely ordinary answer, and then, out of nowhere, he heard the shape of what he had said.

He had said, well, it is the least of the three, but it still matters.

The least of the three.

Nobody in that kitchen noticed. It was a warm room and there was bread on the table and the conversation moved on immediately. But he heard it, and it sat with him through the drive home, and by the time he was on the ring road he had realized he did not know where he got it.

So he did what he does, which is to go and look.

He went looking for the verse that ranks them.

He has spent thirty years in these books. He knows where things are. And he could not find it.

He found God making a body with His hands before any breath went into it. He found the Son taking a body and keeping it, right through the resurrection and never once putting it down. He found an ending to the whole story that has bones in it and refuses to be talked out of them.

He did not find one line anywhere that puts his own frame on the bottom rung.

If you are carrying a ranking of yourself that you inherited and never checked, pull up a chair. The bread is out and the kettle has just gone.

The verse where all three are named together

There is a line at the very end of a letter, in the middle of a blessing, and it settles the question by simply listing them.

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.1 Thessalonians 5:23

Read it for what it does not do.

It does not rank them. It does not say the spirit chiefly and the body incidentally. It puts three words in a row inside one prayer and asks for the same thing for all of them, and the word governing the whole sentence is wholly.

And the thing being asked for the body is preservation. Not tolerance. Not management. The same keeping that is being asked for the spirit, in the same breath, from the same God.

You are named in that verse in three parts and no part of you is standing under the others. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 asks for spirit and soul and body to be preserved together and puts the word wholly over the top of all three, and the Holy Spirit kept that list flat rather than tiered, which means the ranking you drew on a napkin has never had a verse under it.

Where the ranking actually came from

Let us be honest about the inheritance, because knowing where a thing came from is what loosens its grip on a man who thinks for a living.

The idea that the material is lower than the immaterial is very old and very respectable and it is not from Scripture. It arrived in the church from outside, early, and it has been quietly furnishing rooms ever since, and it is still doing it in kitchens at Christmas.

The Bible's own instinct runs the other way at every turn. A garden. A body formed on purpose. A God who eats with people. Bread and wine at the center of the whole thing. A resurrection.

You have a faith that is stubbornly physical, and it has never once asked you to think less of your own frame. John 1:14 says the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and it is written as the hinge of everything rather than as a regrettable necessity, and the same Spirit who came upon Mary is named in the account of a body being formed, which means the ranking you inherited would have had to argue with the incarnation to get itself established.

Nothing here is a program

Let us be careful, because this is where a man like you will start building a system, and the system is not the point and would become another shelf. There is no diet in this. No regime, no supplement, no schedule, and no opinion about anything a doctor has told you. If you are under a doctor, stay under your doctor, and let nothing here get in between. And nothing in this suggests that a body which is unwell has been neglected by the mind living above it. Bodies do what they do for reasons nobody chose, and that is not a mark against anyone.

You are not being handed a standard, and nothing your body is doing has ever been read as a verdict on you. John 9:3 has the disciples asking whose fault a man's condition was and being told the question itself was wrong, and it is written down early so nobody would have to carry it, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter rather than the examiner.