Paul Thelakat

In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ touch takes a different tone and meaning. It is Mary Magdalene who is chosen to be the sole witness of the resurrection. She is looking for His body, but does not find it. She cries and asks the gardener if he has taken him away elsewhere. Begs him to tell her where he has laid him. She wants to take his body away. She then hears someone calling, “Mary!” Immediately she responds. There he is! she wants to touch him. He tells her not to. This is a unique description that we find nowhere else. “Every hoc est enim corpus meum is haunted by a noli me tangere,” wrote Luc Nancy, a French Catholic thinker. He hints that thinking over this haunting paradox is decisive for renewing Christianity. Thomas is insistent on touching Jesus. So, there are those who want to touch Jesus in the Gospel of John. They want his body, for there is danger of him being taken away, of them losing him. They want the presence of his body in the world among them.

History needs his presence in body; there cannot be any real presence without his body. The touch of God has to be present. To touch God’s power, which is not anyone’s property. It is the touch from above. The angel came to Mary in bodiless presence. The divine took a body in her. The touch of no-thing, it cannot be kept on to or appropriated. It is a gift—which cannot be annulled nor reciprocated nor compensated.

The body that Jesus prohibits Mary from touching is his risen body, also called his glorified body. A glorified body is the ideal for the angelic logic of Christianity, since a glorified body is a body whose presence is fixed, whose significance is secure. But Jesus tells Mary not to touch his glorified body, not to become attached to it and to hold it back.

Unlike angelic logic, where spirit re-presents itself in flesh, the logic of “Don’t touch me” (Noli me tangere) presents flesh and bodies, which in a way make sense in their coming and going. The Church makes His body. The sacramental act of “this is my body” is sacramental presence of his body, which asks every Christian to give body to Christ the Risen but departed. To think about the paradox of Hoc est corpus meum and not to hold in His historical body can lead to a disclosure of remembering of forgotten and brutalized bodies. Remembering Him until he comes back. It is through the giving of his body in history that his divine touch continues uninterrupted. This is the ethos of touching the world with his body. Christianity is commitment to touch humanity in its pitiless condemnation of worldly temptations. The Christian commandment to love overturns Roman power of domination and servitude. Christian love declares the impossible possible, namely, an unforeseeable cultural mutation by which everyone is assigned an incommensurable price —everybody is regarded as of inestimable worth and dignity, irrespective of wealth or hierarchy. No one is an untouchable. Touching provides a conspicuous feeling of the body. It is a kind of contact that is mysterious: the touch of something other. To be sure, at the very moment one raises one’s hand over the body of the other, one does not touch the other, skin to skin—this being a gesture made before in order to check its effects or to explore the body for the next point of purification. The touch goes deeper than the actual touching of the hand, since the divine light penetrates the body, runs through it in giving.

Religion signifies a relation, link between people shaped by dignity and shared value, rather than rules, regulations, rituals, and rigid order. Christian mysteries will offer this to the world: to salute to shake hand with another life. The inertia of the central Christian mysteries leads to the clear conclusion that body is all there is. Any “outside,” any “not of the world,” “traverses the body.” Our bodies are entirely, in their turn, openings of the world, and so are other open bodies. They can all salute. The “salute” of bodies bids adieu to mystery as a matter of observance, to religion as worship of the otherworldly, to spirit’s overtaking the body. “Salute” is another name for “adoration.” The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian “understanding of Faith” presents the single most comprehensive Rahnerian defense of the essential unity in plurality of spirit and matter. Rahner states that matter is in a sense ‘frozen’ spirit.” His “spiritual” characterization of matter with a “material” depiction of spirit: “The spirit must only be conceived in the sense that the finite spirit searches for and finds itself through the fulfillment of the material itself.”

Eyes do not see but touch, but it is not simply a touch. The skin does say, yes he touched me. Skin touches and lets itself be touched. Skin caresses and flatters, gets wounded, flayed, and scratched. It’s irritable and excitable. It absorbs sunshine, cold and heat, wind, rain; it inscribes marks from within-wrinkles, spots, warts, peelings-and marks from the outside, which are sometimes the same, or else cracks, scars, burns, slashes. But the truth is skin. Truth is in the skin, it makes skin: an authentic extension exposed, entirely turned outside while also enveloping the inside, a sack crammed with rumblings and musty odours. It is giving oneself to the other.

To give something that doesn’t belong to the realm of give–able things, neither that nor to give myself, because one could be seduced by the idea “yes this means to give myself.” If myself is once again something I could give, then this myself is only the myself which I have. Then this definition means that love consists in giving something which is nothing. Nothing has to do with what is not a thing, not at all a thing — then what is not a thing, what is not an object? If you want, this is a subject. But this doesn’t really mean to give the subject, as the subject would be once again something that I would be. Love consists in my giving what is not mine in any sense of a possible possession of mine, not even my person. So to love means to give what is behind or beyond any subject, any self. It is precisely a giving of nothing, a giving of the fact that I cannot possess myself. This is to abandon, because in that case I would say that to give is the same as to abandon. To say donate is the same as abandon, to give up. Ah, that is wonderful. To give is to give up.