We are One Body: Decapitated or Recapitated?

On Good Friday, we will celebrate our Lord’s Passion. We will read the narrative of his death from the Gospel according to John, which is the only Gospel to include the piercing of Christ’s side as he hung lifeless on the cross. This week I am musing on Christ's role as the "New Adam," or the head of our one body, and will also reflect on the blood and water which came forth from his side after being pierced.

By one “body” I am referring to all of us as part of Christ’s mystical body (see 1 Corinthians 12:12-31). To be clear, we are not a decapitated body. We are not without a King to lead us. Through his obedience to the Father and in his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus is the head of our mystical body that is the Church.

Jesus as the “New Adam” means that Jesus has brought about a new Genesis, or a new beginning. I think this is why the Savior says “I make all things new” in Revelation 21:5. Jesus replaces Adam as the head over humanity and sets things right by overcoming temptation and sin.

The term “recapitulation” of Christ means that, through his humanity, he recapitulated human life. He took the place of Adam as the head and steered us back toward obedience by showing us how to obey. Jesus lived our human life in order to redeem each one of our human lives.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “the ‘New Adam’ who, because he ‘became obedient unto death, even death on a cross,’ (Philippians 2:8), makes amends superabundantly for the disobedience of Adam,” (411).

Here are 2 examples of Jesus as the New Adam. Think of the Garden of Eden and the Agony in the Garden. While Adam was overcome by temptation in Eden and ate the forbidden fruit, Jesus reverses this sin by overcoming temptation and obeying God’s will in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus returns to the garden and is faced with the same temptation as Adam but he obeys the Father’s will while Adam did not.

Here is another example. Let’s think back to Genesis, when God forms Eve out of Adam’s rib while he is in a deep sleep (Genesis 2:21-22). When Adam awakens to find his counterpart, he rejoices, saying “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” (2:23). If Eve was born from Adam’s side, what or who was born from Christ’s side when blood and water flowed from his heart. The answer is the Catholic Church, the body which we make up! Christ died on the cross so that we may be born and have new life through the Church.

Regarding the blood and water from Christ's side, it is tradition to think of the water representing Baptism and the blood as representing the Eucharist; from Christ flows the Sacraments. The water from Jesus washes over our sins: “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” (John 4:14).

Jesus’s precious blood is the Eucharist which we receive at every Mass. It is the blood of the New Covenant. St. Thomas Aquinas said that Christ’s wounded side “flowed forth the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entrance to the life which is the true life.”

The blood and water is a sign of his merciful giving. During the Divine Mercy chaplet we pray, “O Blood and Water, which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus, as a fount of mercy for us, I trust in You.”

“In Christ all shall be made alive,” 1 Corinthians 15:22.