Body swap

Body Swap

Did any of you watch the science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf when it was on in the nineties? If not, you can still see it on Dave. Or perhaps, like our family, you’ve bought the DVDs. I’d like to tell you about one episode, because it got me thinking about the incarnation and how redemption works.

In case you haven’t seen the programmes, I’d better start with a bit of background information to set the scene. The setting of the series is a gigantic spaceship called Red Dwarf, which left Earth in the late 22nd century. In the first episode, an on-board radiation leak kills everyone except for low-ranking technician Dave Lister, who is in suspended animation at the time, and his pregnant cat, Frankenstein, who is safely sealed in the cargo hold.

Following the accident, the ship's computer, Holly, keeps Lister in stasis until the background radiation dies down – a process that takes three million years. Lister therefore emerges as the last human being in the universe. His former roommate and immediate superior, Arnold Judas Rimmer, is resurrected by Holly as a hologram to keep Lister sane. At the same time, a creature known only as Cat is the last member on board of Felis Sapiens, a race of humanoid felines that evolved in the ship's hold from Lister's cat, Frankenstein, and her kittens, during the 3 million years that Lister was in stasis.

Are you with me so far?

As a hologram, Rimmer is not strictly speaking alive. His mind has been reproduced digitally and a 3-D model of his body made entirely of light is visible to his companions (and to the TV audience!). He cannot, of course touch anything or pick anything up – neither can he eat or drink.

The episode that I want to tell you about is called Body Swap. (you can see a summary of the plot here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyswap). In it, Rimmer discovers a way of transferring his mind into Lister’s body so that Lister becomes a hologram and Rimmer is able to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh within Lister’s body. He persuades Lister to make this swap for a short period of time, promising that he will take care of the body and indeed hand it back in better condition than before – a promise that he does not keep …

This isn’t a new idea. There was a book published back in Victorian times called Vice Versa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Versa_%28novel%29) in which a boy and his father swap places. Father gets to understand that schooldays are not necessarily the best days of your life and son begins to appreciate that being grown up, with the responsibilities that it entails, also has its drawbacks.

Now have a think about this. We often say “If I were you …” when we have some advice for someone else. We are often urged to try to put ourselves in someone else’s place in order to understand them better. What if we really could change places with someone else – and not just by putting ourselves into their circumstances, but becoming them. What if we COULD do a body swap? And why might we want to?

Rimmer wanted to swap so that he could have a better body – a real one that could do things that he couldn’t do as a hologram – but there might be more altruistic reasons. What if it were the other way round – someone with a fully-functioning body offers to swap with someone with a disability?

Actually, that wasn’t my idea. It was Lucy, who thought about it and got me thinking. I know some of you know our family and know that Lucy is like a granddaughter to us – that is my wife and me – but I suppose I’d better fill you in a bit or you may not understand what I’m going to tell you about next.

I expect most of you know about DCI Jonah Porter, who was paralysed when he was shot in the back and managed to come back to his job in the police force, with a little help from his friends. One of those friends is Lucy’s mum and, now that his wife has died, he lives with them. Lucy wasn’t around when Red Dwarf was on first time around, but she’s got hooked and we were all watching it one evening – it was Body Swap, the episode I was telling you about.

Supposing it were possible – would we be willing to swap bodies with a friend whose body no longer worked properly in some way, so as to give them the opportunity to be able-bodied again? Perhaps for a short time we might – probably not permanently. Maybe we should feel relieved that this is only a hypothetical question and not a practical one. This isn’t something that we will ever really be called upon to consider.

“Greater love has no-one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”

… which brings us back to Jesus and the incarnation and how that somehow results in our redemption. The incarnation is a bit like God agreeing to take on our bodies so that we can have a chance to use His – not his earthly body from two thousand years ago, but the heavenly body of the resurrection.

St Pauls tells the Roman Christian to “put on Christ like a garment”. He is urging us to accept a body swap to put off our human nature and take up Christ’s offer for us to inhabit his perfect body instead of our own sinful ones. So now we are no longer talking about swapping physical bodies, but spiritual ones. We are all spiritually disabled and the cure may require a whole-body transplant!

In his letter to the Philippians, St Paul talks about Christ humbling himself by becoming a man.

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

This Being who shared the nature of God became one of us so as to enable us to become as he is – children of God or even, in some sense, one with God. By swapping places with us, Christ enables us to share his place with the Father. We are used to talking about Christ dying for us – and the idea of someone laying down your life for another person is a quite wonderful one – but perhaps it is even more wonderful to think of Christ living for us.

The idea of offering to swap places with someone else in order to give them their freedom was something that the Jews of Jesus’ and Paul’s day would have understood. In our Old Testament reading we heard how Judah was prepared to take the place of his young brother Benjamin, out of love for their father Jacob. Of course, we know that Judah had been complicit in selling Joseph, Jacob’s favourite son, into slavery and he might well have been motivated partly by guilty feelings that he had already brought grief on his father and did not want to have anything more on his conscience, but nevertheless it was a brave thing to do to offer to remain in Egypt while the rest of the family returned home.

There are echoes of this in the doctrine of redemption for mankind through the life and death of Jesus. We are guilty, but Jesus accepts the penalty that we deserve. He stands in for us. He swaps places with us and takes what is coming to us. We are slaves to sin – Christ becomes one of us in order that we can become free to take his place as sons of God.

But, as St Paul knew only too well, often it does not seem as if we have swapped bodies with Christ at all! As he says in his letter to the Romans:

“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

In our minds and hearts we want to accept the body of Christ, but our human nature often rebels and insists that we refuse to swap. We are too fond of our old nature, we’d like God to come in and put a few things right, but we don’t want a complete change. Unfortunately, God isn’t interested in half measures – He wants to make us perfect!

And what would that mean? Well, if Christ shows his commitment to us by offering to swap places with us, should not we be willing to do the same for others? George Orwell wrote about this in his famous novel 1984. Winston Smith, the hero (although he is not really very heroic) and his lover, Julia, are taken prisoner by the Thought Police and subjected to torture.

Winston at first resists and he asks himself, “If I were given the option of taking on more pain in order to release Julia from pain, would I do it?” Eventually he is taken to Room 101, where he faces The Worst Thing in the World and there he discovers that, faced with his ultimate worst fear, he is unable to think of anything other than saving himself.. “Do it to Julia!” he cries.

We are unlikely to be put in the position of being deliberately tortured into betraying our friends, but even in 21st century Britain there are occasions when people are faced with stark choices between safeguarding their own interests and sacrificing themselves for those they love:

• A complete body swap is not possible, but there are increasing numbers of cases where people donate organs or bone marrow from their own bodies in order to save the life of a member of their family or a close friend.

• Parents go without things that they would like to have in order to provide more for their children.

• Grown-up children give up work in order to care for elderly parents.

But it does not have to be a dramatic as this. Every day we have opportunities for sacrificial love, if only we can recognise them. If only we can stop trying to use every situation to our own advantage and think always of how we can make things better for others. If only we can give our bodies over to God to control, instead of clinging on to our own autonomy.

If we are willing to swap with the least and lowest of God’s children, then he will be able to swap with us and we will become little Christs, acquiring the very nature of God himself.

Let us pray.

Father God,

We thank you that you love us so much that you are willing to do whatever it takes to restore our broken spiritual bodies. Help us to accept the offer to exchange our human nature for that of Christ. Keep reminding us every day that we do not need to remain in our sinful human nature, and give us the strength to keep on striving to become more like you, by offering unconditional, sacrificial love to those around us.

Amen

References

1. Red Dwarf, Series III, episode 4, originally broadcast on BBC2 on 5 December 1989, written by Rob Grant and Bob Naylor.

2. Vice Versa: a lesson to fathers, F. Anstey, First published 1882, now available from Wildside Press (12 Aug. 2013) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vice-Versa-A-Lesson-Fathers/dp/1434442217).

3. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, first published 1949 by Secker and Warburg.