We will rise again after we die, not just as spirits or souls but in bodily form. The idea of the resurrection of the body of the last day has been part of Christianity from the very beginning. Jesus is very clear on the point, as was St. Paul and many others in the early Church. But what does it mean that our bodies will rise again? What bodies-- the bodies we had when we died (which seems to be at least partially the case with Jesus, as we read in today's Gospel (Lk 24: 35-48) where His disciples look at His hands and feet, presumably with the wounds in them that Thomas so insisted on seeing)? Will our bodies be perfect, and what does that mean anyway? What will we do with these resurrected bodies and what is the point of having them? The reality is that we know almost-nothing about the resurrection of the body, although we do get some hints. We see that Jesus' resurrected body looks like a regular body, and can be seen and touched. Apparently it feels normal when that happens, or so it would appear from the experience of Mary Magdalene and Thomas, both of whom touched Jesus and neither of whom reported anything odd about the experience. Jesus can eat and drink. We see Him today ask for food, and the disciples on the road to Emmaus ate and drank with Him. But can He possibly be hungry or thirsty in His resurrected body? How could that be? So why does Jesus eat and drink? To prove that He has a "real" body? Or does He do so because those things can be enjoyable social experiences? We also know that Jesus' resurrected body could appear and disappear, and go through walls. We know that Jesus could somehow mask His appearance in His resurrected body so that others could not recognize them until He wanted them to know who He was. So, while our resurrected bodies will be "flesh," they won't be limited in the ways that our bodies are now. But how will that work? OK, we could play this game of questions for a very long time and not run out of them. What we do know is that our bodies matter. They matter enough that God decided that we should have bodies for all eternity. God loves us as bodily beings, and wants to be with us in our bodily form. We might keep in mind the importance God places on our bodies and treat them with the respect they deserve. That includes everything from caring about what we put into them to making sure we do all we can to be healthy to treating them with dignity. And it isn't just our own bodies that matter, of course. Everyone's body matters to God. So how we treat other people's bodies is as important as how we treat our own. The resurrection of the body-- unanswerable questions, and a critical idea.