John 20: 19-31
Second Sunday of Easter/ 15th
April 2012
The
lectionary for the second Sunday of Easter often takes us to this text in John,
to Thomas and his doubts. It’s the Sunday when preachers often explore the
relationship between faith and doubt. Perhaps because we live in a skeptical age,
which thrives on the suspicion of everything and everyone, that we assume what’s
at stake here is the evidence of resurrection.
Thomas needed proof and in our scientifically minded age, certainly more
than his, many want proof of resurrection.
Where’s the evidence? It’s easy to go there with this text. But that’s not where I want to go – at least
not immediately.
Instead, I want to talk about Jesus’
wounds. Three times in these verses there’s a reference to his wounds. When Jesus arrived and said, “Peace be with
you,” he “showed them his hands and his side.”
Jesus leaves. Enter Thomas, having
missed the visitation, says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,
and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not
believe.” A week goes by and Jesus
appears behind locked doors. “Peace be
with you,” he says. And then he says to
Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but
believe.” So, yes, one could say that the
nail marks and spear mark are there as evidence. Jesus wants them to believe – and in John’s Gospel belief is more than just rational,
intellectual assent, it means trust and assurance, it’s very relational.
But what strikes me – and maybe you
don’t see it the same way – what strikes me is that in these resurrected
appearances Jesus still has his wounds.
The resurrected body is still wounded.
It’s not completely healed. We often
associate resurrection with having a new body, not the old body revivified with
all its aches and pains and blemishes and nail marks. Here, the wounds are still fresh and
open. Even after more than a week Jesus
invites Thomas to put his finger in the hole in his side. This is not a
pristine body without blemish, but a wounded body.
That’s what strikes me. It’s remarkable, really. Jesus
offers his wounds to Thomas. He
offers his pain and his suffering to him.
He offers wounds that haven’t healed but are still open. In John’s Gospel everything, every detail,
has meaning; nothing is extraneous. So
what do we make of this encounter? What
does this mean for us theologically? What does this say about the Christian
experience? In other words, what does
this mean for us that the resurrected body still bears the wounds of
crucifixion?
If one travels to Colmar in the
Alsace region of France and goes into the Unterlinden Museum, one will find
there a masterpiece of Renaissance art.
It is a triptych (a three-paneled) painting known as the Isenheim
Altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald (c.1470-1528). It dates from 1515. When I was on sabbatical
several years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Colmar just to see this work that
I’ve admired for years. On the back
panel there is an image of the resurrected Jesus. Having shattered the tomb, throwing the
soldiers to the ground in fear, Jesus is depicted as rising victoriously in the
air. His head is surrounded by an aura of
brilliant light, yellow and orange. His arms are uplifted, his palms
open-faced, as if he’s saying “Peace be with you.” And on his hands are the
nail marks. You can see them very
clearly; it’s as if he’s showing them proudly. The nail marks, the wounds, come
with the resurrection. Even paintings depicting Jesus’ ascension,
weeks after Easter, still include the wounds in his hands and feet and side.
We often hear, “Time heals all
wounds.” Don’t worry about the wounds,
they’ll heal. It’s an old proverb that
goes back centuries, the earliest reference is from Menander (c.342-281 BC), in
around the third or fourth century BC.
But is it really true? Jesus has all the time in the world, I guess,
which means that in time his wounds too would heal. Do the wounds heal? Should they?
Rose Kennedy (1890-1995) was a woman
who knew a lot of pain and grief in her long life. Whether one agrees with the political
leanings of her family or not, she at least deserves compassion as a human
being. Reflecting upon her life, she
said, “It has been said, ‘time heals all wound.’ I do not agree. The wound remains. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity
covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it never goes away.”
There’s a lot of truth in what she
says. This is particularly true when it
comes to grief. Grief is a wound and if
the love is particularly strong the wound never completely heals.
Now, I’m sharing all of this not to
make us depressed or sad, although that’s maybe how you feel right about now. Actually, I’m lifting this up in order to
offer hope and assurance.
You see, I’m grateful that the
wounds remain. The wounds make Jesus who he is.
They’re part of his history and therefore part of his identity. And I’m grateful for the notion that the
wounded resurrected Jesus eventually ascends still bearing his marks of
suffering. He takes his suffering – and all
of ours – with him into the being of God and thus changes the nature of God. It
now becomes easier to perceive what has been God’s way of being all along; we
see in Jesus’ resurrection that God desires to take into Godself the wounds of
Christ. And it becomes clear or clearer
to us that God desires to integrate, incorporate human woundedness into the
very heart of God. Christ’s wounds –
which are also humanity’s wounds – become part of God’s history and
identity. God identifies with and
participates in human woundedness and knows what they feel like.
If we’re honest, there’s a part of
us that doesn’t like this emphasis upon wounds.
The truth is, we’re all
wounded – all of us – some more than others. There’s an old proverb that I take
very seriously: “Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”[1] The most wounded people I know are usually denial
about their state. Many just want the
wounds to heal, which often means to go away, to be rid of them, be over and
done with them, so they can get back to a normal life like everyone else. Let me just say that this is an
illusion: there’s no such thing as
normal or abnormal life. There is just life. For some this life includes wounds
that are too deep, too painful for words.
Some have very deep wounds, which are very painful – you know what they
are, I don’t have to name them. And some
don’t just have wounds; the wounds
have them, turning them into victims,
causing individuals to become stuck in their pain and the grief.
I would say that Jesus is not a
victim to his wounds, they don’t have him; but he has his wounds. And in some strange, bizarre,
counter-intuitive way we wouldn’t want it any other way, would we? Would we
want to remove his wounds from him? If
we removed them, made them go away, who would he be? If we removed these characteristics of his life,
he wouldn’t be who he is. If he was the
truly, authentically human one (that’s what is meant by references to him as
the Son of Man), and this was true for him, why wouldn’t it be the same for the
rest of us on our way to becoming human? Isn’t this what Jesus’ life-journey has
taught and is teaching us: we don’t have to be a victim of our wounds, but that
in a bizarre and wonderful, grace-filled manner there is a way to honor our
wounds, to claim them, accept them, even cherish them and value them, maybe as
a badge of honor, because suffering through them has made us and continues to
make us into the people we are meant to be by God’s grace.
I’m not saying we should run out and get wounded or become martyrs in
order to be blessed. That’s not what I’m
saying.
What I am saying is that, from my
experience, the wound, when accepted with
grace and received with compassion, can become a gift. It can even become a means of grace; that is, an occasion to learn and discover and
experience through it something of God’s grace active in our lives.
This is what Franciscan priest Richard
Rohr is getting at when he says there’s always
a wounding in our lives. Being faithful to our calling, like Jesus, will
inevitably lead toward a wound. The walk with Jesus might actually expose a
wound we have denied or run from. When we are seriously growing in the faith
and walking in the way of Christ we will eventually discover what is known as
the “spirituality of imperfection” or the “way of the wound.”[2] When embraced by God’s grace the wound can
become the secret key that allows us to discover who we really are and what we
were created to be and do.[3] It becomes sacred and holy because through
the wound we discover who God is toward us.
It makes us who we are. We see it
in Jesus. We also see it in Paul, in his
“thorn in the flesh,” a wound, which he asked God to remove several times. God never did (2 Corinthians 12: 1-10). Yet, that thorn led him toward wisdom, to
discover and be able to say with pride, “Whenever I am weak, then I am strong”
(2 Cor. 12: 10). He heard Jesus, the
wounded savior, say to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made
perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12: 9).
There is a kind of power that is also perfected in being wounded, because
the wound changes us and it can transform us, by God’s grace, into growing
deeper.
This truth is deep – very deep; it’s
archetypal. It’s everywhere in stories, ancient and new. Start with Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, who,
after his journey, arrived home and was recognized by his wife only by the familiar
scar on his thigh. In Greek mythology we
have Chiron, the centaur, who uses the pain of his wound to heal others, and Prometheus,
the fire-stealer, wounded by the eagle removing his liver each day. We have Gulliver on his travels, wounded in
his knee. Cain is marked as a sign of
his guilt, but also as a sign of God’s protection (Genesis 4). Jacob limps away wounded after wrestling with
God all night, forever changing the scope of history (Genesis 32). Thank God
for that wound! Think of the Legend of
the Holy Grail and the story of the Fisher King. The King is the keeper of the
grail of Christ and is sustained by it, but he has a wound that will not heal. And in our day, Harry Potter has a wound, a
scar, a mark that sets him a part and defines his life. He would not be “‘the boy who lived’ come to
die” without that scar.[4]
Our wounds matter.
I’ve been reading Jeanette
Winterson’s extremely poignant memoir of growing up in Manchester, in the North
of England, in the 1960s, Why Be Happy
When You Could Be Normal? In it she
reflects upon the wounds in her life and the nature of the wound in literature. “…wounding seems to be a clue or a key to
being human. There is value here as well as agony. What we notice in [literature] is the
nearness of the wound to the gift: the
one who is wounded is marked out – literally and symbolically – by the wound. The wound is a sign of difference.”[5]
Winterson knows this well. Jeannette was adopted, raised by parents who
never really loved her properly. Her father tried to love her. Her adopted mother really didn’t love
her. She often told Jeanette that “the
Devil led her to the wrong crib” in the orphanage. Jeanette refers to her biological mother as mother.
She refers to her adopted mother as Mrs.
Winterson, to stress the distance and estrangement in their
relationship. Mrs. Winterson was gun
toting, cigarette hiding, Bible-thumping Pentecostal fundamentalist. She punished Jeannette by locking her out of
the house – over night, many times – or locking her in the coal basement under
the house. She was also severely
mentally ill and depressed and never received the kind of care she needed.
Mrs. Winterson allowed only six
books in the house, including the Bible, because she was suspicious of books,
fearful. “The trouble with a book,” she
said, “is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.” Jeannette was not allowed to read fiction.
Mrs. Winterson did enjoy reading murder mysteries, primarily because you know
what to expect, a body shows up some place.
Mrs. Winterson read the Bible, the King James Bible, aloud every night
for years. She started with Genesis and read continuously each night to
Revelation – reveling in the gory images of the apocalypse – and then she
started over again with Genesis 1.
Jeannette grew up with an ear for language. She went to the library as a
refuge and began reading on her own, starting with the A’s: Jane Austen.
She also brought murder mysteries home for mother to read. In the E-section
she came across a title, Murder in the
Cathedral, by a certain T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), not knowing who he was, and
brought it home, also not knowing it wasn’t a murder mystery. Before leaving the library she opened to the
first page; when she read these words they broke her heart and caused her to
cry: “There is one moment,/ But know
that another/ Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.”
Jeanette eventually got a job and
saved her money to buy books. She
carefully wrapped each one in plastic and hid them under her mattress so that
they wouldn’t be found. In time her
mattress started to rise from the number of small, paper-books she was keeping
there. One night, while Jeanette was asleep,
Mrs. Winterson came in with a flashlight (as she usually did) to check on
her. The corner of one book, by D. H.
Lawrence (1885-1930), was sticking out. Mrs.
Winterson woke her up, lifted up the mattress, opened the bedroom window, and
then proceeded to throw all seventy-two of her books out the window into the
yard. Mrs. Winterson picked up the little paraffin stove used to heat the
bathroom, went into the yard, poured paraffin all over the books and set them
on fire. “I watched them blaze and blaze,” Jeanette writes, “and remember
thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January
night. And books have always been light
and warmth to me.” She relates, “In the
morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.” “I had been
damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed” that night;
however, Jeanette refused to be a victim, “on the other side of the facts was
who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images
for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.” She writes, “…standing over the smouldering
pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that
there was something else I could do” with this pain, this wound. She realized
she could do something. She didn’t need
those books. She said, “I can write my
own.”[6] And so she became a writer.
Trying to prove the historical veracity
of the resurrection is impossible and a waste of time, but maybe – just maybe –
there’s some evidence to the power of the resurrection in our lives when our
wounds somehow, some way become bearers
of God’s grace. How we use our wounds –
how God uses them – might give witness to the power of God at work in us. They just might give some evidence that
Christ is risen – risen indeed.
Image: Matthias Grünewald (c.1470-1528), "Resurrection" panel, Isenheim Altarpiece (1515), Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar, Alsace, France.
[1] Falsely attributed to
Plato (424/423-348/347 BC) and Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-50), it was probably
articulated by the Scottish minister John Watson (1850-1907), through his
pseudonym, Ian Maclaren.
[2] Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011),
xxiv. Here he is referring to Thérèse of
Lisieux (1873-1897) and Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1266)
[3] Rohr, 18-19.
[4] This overview is taken
from Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy
When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press, 2012). In a chapter titled “The
Wound,” she explores the connection between wound, identity and creativity in
religion and literature, 220-221. Cf. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series,
particularly Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows (2007). I’m grateful to my friend,
the Rev. Dr. Derek Browning, minister of Morningside Parish Church, Edinburgh,
Scotland, for drawing my attention to Winterson’s memoir.
[5] Winterson, 221-222.
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