The Wounded One
John 20:19-31
2nd Sunday of Easter
3 April 2005
In the last several weeks, I have spent more time than I would like at
the hospital. This is what happens when you love someone who is
suffering. The problem is, when you go to the hospital you see
sick people. And when you see sick people, you can’t help but be
aware of how vulnerable you yourself are.
You walk in the door, and there goes someone on crutches. There’s
another person being pushed in a wheelchair. There’s someone else
with her arm in a sling and a grimace on her face. There goes a
little child with a bandage on his head.
Once the person you love is settled on a floor, you are quickly
assaulted with other people’s pain. You hear moaning coming from
someone down the hall. You run into someone walking down the
corridor, trying to maintain his dignity while wearing nothing but a
hospital gown and carting his IV drip with him. You smell all
those hospital smells and recognize that certain scent of
sickness. You see someone crying in the hall or on the elevator,
and you wonder if someone they love has died.
You cannot be long in a hospital without being confronted with the
basic, most brutal facts of human existence. We break. We
bleed. We ache. We die. This is what it means to have
a body. This is what it means to be human.
What am I doing saying all these unpleasant things on the Second Sunday
of Easter? Didn’t we get through with Lent already? We
already spent all those weeks meditating on suffering and its meaning,
contemplating our mortality and the brutality of life, confessing out
cruelty and our complicity. Then Easter came and Jesus burst from
the tomb, and we’d like to think about more pleasant things now.
We’d like to say with the Song of Solomon, Lo, the winter is past, the
rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time
of pruning the vines has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard
in our land. We’d like to put dark things behind us and just move
forward into goodness and celebration. What does Easter mean, if
not a whole new life, a life of joy and delight?
Of course Easter means that. At the very heart of Easter is
joy. But joy does not mean that we only find Christ in the
beautiful, delightful things in life. Joy does not mean only good
things happen now.
In case we were to get that mistaken impression, John tells us a story
about what happened after Jesus was raised. It was
nighttime. The empty tomb had been discovered that morning, and
Jesus had appeared to Mary and told her to go and tell the
others. The disciples had gotten the news but were still afraid,
so they locked themselves away.
Then Jesus showed up, and stood in their midst, and said, “Peace be
with you.” That’s nice enough. We’ll take a little of that
– a little bit of Jesus, a little bit of peace.
But then Jesus showed them his wounds. Imagine it. These
are not scars, healed over, evidence of some long-ago
injury. These are fresh wounds – nail-holes, torn flesh,
muscle and sinew ripped and exposed. Was there blood? Was
there oozing? Was the flesh infected, blackened? Could they
see pain in his eyes? Did they wince when they looked at
him? Could they even bear to look at his open wounds?
And why did he still have those wounds anyway? Think of it – God
did the utterly impossible – raised Jesus – but did not do the clearly
possible – heal his hands and his side. Jesus is raised, but he
is not all fixed up. What does this mean about who he is?
That Jesus shows the men his wounds, and later offers for Thomas to
touch them, is not just proof that the risen One is the same One who
was crucified. There is something about those wounds that those
men need to see. So do we.
We spend so much of our lives trying to get ourselves together.
Life can be so hard – terrible, tragic things happen, and sometimes
there is no undoing the damage. So some of us try to control our
circumstances through sheer force, trying to shape our lives to fit the
vision we have of what a good life is supposed to be. Others of
us try to shield ourselves from the worst news of life, turning our
eyes when we see pictures of the victims of the latest earthquake,
shutting our minds off when we hear the latest news from Iraq.
Others go in the opposite direction – watching and reading so much
sensational news that it can hardly seem real. It is more
entertainment than real people’s suffering. Still others of us
know we can’t control anything but our own actions, so what we do is
put on a happy face, even when we’re sad, even when we’re
suffering. We think our pain is somehow wrong, or at least not
very Christian. And so we pretend.
Jesus did not pretend. He still carried in his flesh the marks of
what life in this world had done to him. He held pain in his
hands. This says something about who he means to be for
us.
It means that there is no pain that is foreign to him. It means
that wherever there is suffering or sadness or any kind of misery,
there is Christ. It means he hurts with us and he hurts for
us. It means that suffering is so much a part of the heart of
Christ that even resurrection doesn’t erase it. If we want to
know where God is, how Jesus is present to us, all we have to do is be
attentive to pain – the pain of the world, our own pain too.
Ultimately, Christ will triumph over every sorrow. In the
meantime, he weeps for us and with us.
I recently read the marvelous novel Crossing to Safety, by Wallace
Stegner. It is the story of the long friendship of two married
couples. They come to know each other while both men are teaching
at University of Wisconsin in the 1930s. Life is good. The
men are teaching and publishing, the women are settling down and having
babies. Everything is headed in the right direction. Then
one of the women, Sally, gets polio, and it nearly kills her. She
survives but remains crippled and eventually learns to walk with braces
and crutches. Life does not turn out as the friends had planned,
but they survive.
Many years later, the four friends travel together to Italy. One
beautiful spring day, they go to a little village chapel to see a
famous painting by Piero della Francesca. It’s a painting of the
resurrection that some of you would recognize. The resurrected
Christ is standing over the tomb while the guards lie there like
sleeping drunks on the ground below him.
The narrator, one of the four friends, says,
Until then there had been a good deal of frivolity in us, a springtime
response to the blossoms and the mild, clear air. But Piero’s
Christ knocked it out of us like an elbow to the solar plexus.
That gloomy, stricken face permitted no forgetful high spirits.
It was not the face of a god reclaiming his suspended immortality, but
the face of a man who until a moment ago had been thoroughly and
horribly dead, and still had the smell of death in his clothes and the
terror of death in his mind.1
One of the friends doesn’t like it at all. She thought the artist
should’ve painted only the joy and the wonder of the triumph of life
over death. She was still developing what the narrator calls her
“sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny
ones.” The two men were moved to respect by the painting.
But Sally felt something more.
The narrator says
I noticed that Sally stood a long while on her crutches in front of
that painting propped temporarily against a frame of raw
two-by-fours. She studied it soberly, with something like
recognition or acknowledgement in her eyes, as if those who have been
dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have
only lived.2
She could see the truth in the painting because she knew the frailty and sorrow of life.
Thomas saw the truth of who Jesus was, too. When Jesus invited
him to stick his hand into his wounded side, Thomas cried, “My Lord and
my God!” Thomas, the one who needed to see and touch the pain of
Jesus, Thomas, the one whom we call “doubting,” makes the fullest
confession of faith in all of John’s Gospel. It is, in fact, the
climax of John’s whole story. This is who Jesus is – Lord and God
– and this is how we know him – when we know his pain. His pain
over the brutality of our world, the suffering we inflict, the
suffering we endure, the anguish and misery and grief and fear that
come with being human. He carries all this pain in his own side,
in his own heart. The Wounded One draws near whenever we are honest
about our own pain, whenever we reach out and touch the pain of others
with compassion and love, and whenever we join our pain to the pain of
his suffering love for us all.
Every Sunday we proclaim an impossibility – Christ is risen! He
is risen indeed! Where is our proof? We don’t get
irrefutable facts. We don’t get scientific evidence. What
we get is each other – the wounded, bleeding, broken body of
Christ. What we get is this table – the body of Christ, broken
for us. What we get is to draw near to the suffering of humanity,
because that is where Christ will always be. What we get is the
Wounded One, who even now carries our sorrow in his chest, and reaches
his ruined hand towards ours.
1Wallace Stegner. Crossing to Safety. 261-2. 2Ibid. 262.
