Handle Me and See

Flesh, Fire, and the True Holy of Holies — A Reflection for Second Sunday of Great Lent (St. Gregory Palamas) on Luke 24:36–53 and Hebrews 7:26–8:2

They were midway through a sentence when He stood among them. No knock, no threshold crossed in the ordinary way—just sudden presence, and the old greeting: Peace be unto you. And they, who had walked with Him, eaten with Him, watched Him die, did not run toward Him with open arms. They shrank back. They were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. Note that word: spirit. They assumed the body was finished, that whatever remained of Jesus must be something ghostly, ethereal, finally unencumbered by flesh. They assumed, as we so often assume in our own Lenten weariness, that the goal of the whole agonizing business is escape from the weight of matter.

He will not permit it. Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. This is not a concession to their dullness. It is the revelation toward which all creation groans. The risen Christ insists on His body. He shows wounds. He asks for food. He eats broiled fish and honeycomb—not because glorified flesh requires nourishment, but because the disciples require proof that glory does not abolish the ordinary. It transfigures it. The hands that broke bread at Emmaus still bear nail-marks. The mouth that spoke galaxies into being chews fish. And this, precisely this, is why the Church sets these readings before us on the Sunday of Gregory Palamas, that fierce Athonite who staked his life on one claim: the light that shone on Tabor was not metaphor, not created symbol, but the uncreated energies of God streaming through human flesh.

Feel what that means for the work you are doing now, in the second week of the Fast. You have begun to feel the edges of yourself—hunger sharpening perception, the prayers growing longer, the usual distractions stripped back just enough that you notice what lives underneath them. And what lives underneath is not always lovely. Old anger. Unnamed grief. The child in you who learned early that bodies are shameful, that desire is dangerous, that holiness means becoming less rather than more. Palamas stands against every such lie. As he writes, “The body is deified along with the soul” (Triads III.1.36), not by ceasing to be body but by becoming what body always was in the mind of God: a vessel for uncreated light. Your flesh is not the obstacle. Your flesh is the site of encounter.

Which is why Hebrews meets Luke here with such startling precision. The epistle gives us Christ as high priest, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens—a minister of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man. Read carelessly, this sounds like escape: Christ ascending beyond the material into some purely spiritual sanctuary. But the author of Hebrews is doing something far more ancient and far more radical. The true tabernacle is not elsewhere. It is the original Holy of Holies—Day One reality, the primordial unity where heaven and earth had not yet been sundered, where God walked with Adam in the cool of the day. Christ enters this sanctuary not by shedding His body but by carrying it there. He is, as Maximos the Confessor understood, “the one who unites in Himself the intelligible and the sensible” (Ambigua 41), the living bridge between the seen and the unseen. The veil tears not because flesh is discarded but because flesh is finally made transparent.

Here is the reckoning for your Lent. The Melchizedekian priesthood restored in Christ—older than Levi, older than Sinai, older than the separating walls that taught us God was far off and angry—this priesthood operates through bread and wine, through matter hallowed, through the very stuff of daily life made sacramental. For the law maketh men high priests which have infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was since the law, maketh the Son, who is consecrated for evermore. The oath is older than the law. The priesthood of self-offering is more ancient than the priesthood of slaughtered beasts. What Christ restores is not innovation but the first covenant, Eden’s own liturgy, where Creator and creature shared one hearth.

And you? You who are fasting, praying, stumbling through the Jesus Prayer with a wandering mind—you are being prepared not for escape but for transfiguration. The uncreated light Palamas defended is not reserved for Athonite monks on cloud-wrapped peaks. It streams toward you in every honest prayer, every moment you stop fleeing your own wounds and let them be held. Gregory of Nyssa knew this: “The one who has been purified and has become still will perceive in himself the divine image” (Life of Moses II.255). The image is already there. It was never destroyed—only buried beneath the rubble of self-hatred, fear, and the long habit of treating your body as enemy rather than kin.

Handle me, and see. Christ speaks this to you now. Touch the wounds—His and yours. They are not marks of defeat. They are openings through which light enters. The fish and honeycomb on that resurrection evening were proof that matter is not left behind but gathered up, blessed, eaten, made part of the eternal feast. Irenaeus saw it with blazing clarity: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive” (Against Heresies IV.20.7). Not fully escaped. Not fully spiritualized. Fully alive—body and soul aflame with uncreated light, wounds transfigured into doorways, the whole groaning cosmos finding its voice in your stammered prayer.

The disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Not because He had vanished into heaven—but because heaven, they now understood, had come all the way down into flesh and was never leaving.

Theosis, uncreated light, Palamas, Great Lent, transfiguration, body as temple, Melchizedek priesthood, resurrection, inner work, true tabernacle