Children will put their fingers anywhere. You have noticed? Children perhaps are the most unconsciously human creatures. Their first concerns are about food, sleeping, and diaper changes. Their being brought into the world is one of the most fleshly and the most spiritually sublime occurrences that human beings can experience. It is fraught with pain, suffering, danger, drama, and the most inspiring joy. You know what I mean when the doctor places your newborn in your arms for the first time or you feed a grandchild on her baptism day.

As we grow up, we learn to discipline are childish fleshliness. Our parents model and teach us table manners, and there is the inevitable potty training. But still fingers go everywhere. A pastor shaking hands after a service will often note that children's fingers have been in interesting places almost immediately before they shake hands. Oh well. That's part of human life.

None of this is a surprise, especially to fathers and mothers. It is not a surprise also to our heavenly Father, who has created us and knows that we are flesh and blood. Adam and Eve were not phantoms nor hyper-spiritualized ghostlike beings. No, they ate and drank, and walked in the cool of the garden with God in the afternoons. We, their children, are no less flesh and blood than they. The second Adam, Christ our Lord, God's Son, comes in flesh and blood to save God's children: "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that He helps, but He helps the offspring of Abraham" (Heb 2:14-16). God's own Son takes our human flesh that He might return it to us in the condition for which it was created, so that we could have perfect fellowship with our God, His Father. In that flesh, our flesh, He suffers, in that flesh He dies according to the Scriptures, in that flesh He is buried, and in that flesh He is raised again according to the Scriptures, in that flesh He appears now to his disciples. There is nothing here of fairy dust and tall tales. There is only the immediacy of the risen Christ come to speak peace to His disciples, to eat with them restoring their fellowship with him, and to display the wounds that now mark His very real flesh and to say to Thomas, "Put your finger here" (Jn 20:27).