Coming Home to the Body That Awaits Resurrection — A Reflection for Sunday of the Prodigal Son on Mark 16:1-8 and 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
The younger son squandered his inheritance in a far country, and the far country was his own flesh. He did not travel to distant geography alone; he journeyed into the exile of a body misused, degraded, made instrument of appetite rather than temple of encounter. The husks he fed to swine were not merely physical hunger but the hollow aftermath of pleasures that consumed him while he consumed them. And when he came to himself—that curious phrase, as though he had been elsewhere, as though the self he returned to had been waiting all along—he rose and went to his father. The prodigal’s homecoming is always homecoming to the body. The body that sinned. The body that starved. The body that will be embraced, robed, ringed, feasted.
This is the inner work the Church sets before us as Pascha approaches: not escape from flesh but reconciliation with it. The far country is wherever we have been that made us strangers to our own embodiment—treating it as tool for gratification, as obstacle to spirituality, as shameful thing to be transcended. Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you? Paul asks the Corinthians, and through them asks us. The question assumes forgetting. We have forgotten what we are. The prodigal forgot he was son; we forget we are sanctuary.
Mark’s account of resurrection morning arrives in this liturgical context with terrible precision. The women come bearing spices for a corpse—reasonable ministry, tender duty, the body honored even in death. But the body is not there. He is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. The absence thunders. They expected to anoint dead flesh and discovered instead that flesh itself has been transfigured, that the tomb which held mortality now gapes empty because matter has been assumed into glory. Maximus the Confessor understood this cosmic upheaval: “In Christ, human nature has been entirely transformed… the corruptible putting on incorruption.” The resurrection is not the soul’s escape from the body but the body’s victory over death. The place where they laid him becomes the womb from which new creation emerges.
And the women flee, trembling, amazed, afraid. Mark’s Gospel ends—in its oldest manuscripts—with fear and silence. This is not failure but appropriate response. What has happened exceeds the categories they brought with them. They came to minister to a corpse and met instead the firstfruits of universal resurrection. Their bodies, their own mortal flesh, suddenly meant something unimaginably different than it had meant at sunrise. Every atom was now destined for transfiguration.
Paul’s letter to Corinth addresses a community confused about precisely this: what the body means, what may be done with it, whether it matters. All things are lawful unto me—the Corinthian slogan, perhaps, that Paul quotes before qualifying. Yes, freedom. But freedom for what? I will not be brought under the power of any. The body given to fornication is not free but enslaved—not because sexuality is evil but because union without love makes the self a thing, fragments what should be whole, scatters what should gather. The prodigal in the far country discovered this: appetite promising freedom delivers bondage. The husks never satisfy. The harlots never fulfill. The body used as mere instrument of pleasure becomes prison rather than temple.
Gregory of Nyssa perceived that sin against the body is sin against the image of God within us: “The human being is a sacred thing… fashioned as an image of the transcendent nature.” To treat this sacred thing as common—whether through sexual degradation or through spiritual contempt for flesh itself—is to forget whose temple we inhabit. Paul’s remedy is not flight from embodiment but deeper embrace of its meaning: glorify God in your body. The body is not obstacle to holiness but its very medium.
God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power. Here the empty tomb and the temple of flesh converge. What happened to Christ’s body will happen to yours. The resurrection is not spiritual metaphor but material promise. The same power that rolled away the stone—and the women wondered who would do this impossible thing, and found it already done—that same power works already in the bodies of the baptized. You are being raised. It has begun. The far country recedes with every step toward the Father, and every step is taken in a body destined for glory.
This is the ascetical preparation the Church offers as we approach the Fast: not hatred of flesh but its healing. Irenaeus declared that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive,” and full aliveness requires reconciliation with the body that has wandered, the body that has been misused, the body that carries wounds and memories and shame. The prodigal must return in the same flesh that departed. There is no other way home. And the Father runs to meet this body—runs, the text says, which no dignified patriarch would do—runs and falls on this neck and kisses this face and calls for robe and ring for these limbs.
You are bought with a price. The price was a body—broken, pierced, buried, risen. Your body is answered by His body. Your homecoming is made possible by His. The empty tomb is not absence but presence relocated, presence that now indwells every temple of flesh that welcomes it.
The women’s fear was the beginning of wisdom. What remains is to move from fear to joy, from silence to proclamation, from the far country to the Father’s house. The body you have is the body being saved. Come home to it. It is where resurrection will find you.
prodigal son, resurrection, body as temple, embodiment, transfiguration, homecoming, Pascha preparation, empty tomb, incarnation, theosis
The Greater Horizon 