Picture a starfish by the ocean. How many arms does it have? One, two, three, four, five. Five arms. Obvious, right? Anyone who has visited an aquarium and seen one knows this. But guess what ? We’re wrong. “The answer,” writes Dino Grandoni in The Washington Post, “is stranger than anything most scientists expected. Simply put, the starfish appears to be mostly just a head.”
So, the correct answer is … zero arms. Starfish are just heads that crawl along the seafloor. If that is not surprising enough, Grandoni reports that starfish, “despite their strange appearance, aren’t that distantly related to humans, sharing an ancestor 600 million years ago.” You may think that you have some odd-looking relatives. Most of us do. But none quite as strange as a starfish.
Like a starfish, Jesus was stranger than they expected. The words and actions of Jesus were shocking to the people of Nazareth. If Jesus had been a starfish, the people of Nazareth would have tossed him back into the ocean.
So, how many arms does Jesus have? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve?
We might think so because he called 12 disciples. But the answer is zero arms. Like the starfish, Jesus is mostly just a head.
Saint Teresa of Ávila, the great 16th century mystic, said:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which He looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which He walks to
do good, Yours are the hands, with which
He blesses all the world.
Teresa knew that followers of Christ are the physical presence of Jesus in the world today. We are the ones who cook meals for I-Help. We are the ones writing letters to people in prison. We are the ones who sit with a grieving neighbor, give showers to the homeless, mentor a struggling teenager, or teach English to a group of immigrants. Christ has no body but ours.
Shalom, Paul