After straining your whole being to its breaking point—every nerve tensed, every thought concentrated—the sudden realization of victory explodes with stunning violence. Your mortal frame shakes as it struggles to constrain the exuberant soul that animates it. You then lock eyes with a friend genuinely sharing your joy, as two flames combined into one ferocious blaze. And how can the material body, tasked with making visible the invisible reality of the soul, express such spiritual intensity? Two words: high five.
What could rival a true high five? That crisp contact. That sweet sting. That thundering announcement of a triumph shared between friends.
If merely worldly triumphs are worthy of a high five between friends, then how much more worthy is the ultimate beatific triumph that our Lord Jesus Christ won for us and shares with us as his friends in unspeakable love? When we will have conquered the warfare of this life, by his grace, would it not be fitting to perform the highest of fives with the Divine Friend who accomplished this victory in us?
The fact is, a high five requires a material body. Though Jesus satisfies this requirement in heaven, initially we will not. When we die, the hands that once executed mighty high fives will lie folded gracefully and motionlessly.
Of course, we will be entirely and truly happy in heaven. The vision of God in a loving communion with all the angels and saints will leave nothing to be desired. And yet the manner of that bliss still seems to be lacking something that is essential to the fullness of what it means to be human, namely, a material body with which to discharge devastating high fives.
But Heaven is not the end of the story. This is a key truth of the Christian faith: one day, we will get our actual, real, physical bodies back (CCC 988–1018; ST II-II, q. 4, a. 5).
Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and he ascended with his body into heaven. He reveals to us that the body is not some extraneous add-on, but an essential part of our full humanity, something that God delighted to create. At the Final Judgment, when this world has run its course, God will also raise up our bodies and reunite them to our souls in a new, glorified existence. The spiritual joy of the beatific vision will cascade into our glorified bodies so that we will enjoy the unsurpassed splendors of God, in both body and soul.
Your very hands, once folded peacefully beneath the earth, will once again be vigorously poised up high to the praise of God. And in that eternal moment of sharing God’s perfect victory, we can even enjoy a most glorious high five with our triumphant Savior, our Lord, and our friend.
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Photo by Johnny Caspari on Unsplash
