Second Sunday of EasterActs 2:14 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3–9
John 20:19–31
I have too many scars.
Some of the most prominent are actually from small scratches. One on my arm is from rubbing carelessly against a branch doing yard work over a decade ago, causing a small but inch-long scrape along my forearm. But my body develops what is called keloid tissue, so that what for others would certainly not have even left a mark becomes an evident reminder of my chronic klutziness – and my body’s tendency to embarrassingly proclaim my history, to tell tales about how I what I have done or had done to me.
As I reflected on these texts, I puzzle over this encounter with the risen Christ and the disciples. I have always thought Thomas gets a rather bum rap; who can blame him for thinking some collective psychosis has overtaken his friends? Hoping in a resurrection seems delusional; to give oneself to it exposes us to ridicule by others or seems to indulge in intellectual dishonesty.
Then I focused on the strange sequence before Thomas’ infamous interaction. Remarkably, the disciples do not recognize Jesus as himself – they do not respond with the delight appropriate to this astonishing appearance – until he shows them his wounds. It is not his face or his eyes that makes him recognizable or reveals his identity. Rather, it is the viewing of his wounds – that very aspect of his life story meant to render him ineffective and gut his witness to God’s peculiar power – that evokes joy in his friends.
Put more specifically, the resurrected Christ is known in his willing woundedness; the joy of the resurrection is not merely the risen body but the scarred body (apparently with a still-gaping hole available for the hand of the skeptical Thomas.) But why the wounds? Why not instant connection with the face or even the eyes of the one they have known and followed? Why not a perfected body, unsullied by recollections of the past?
The easy display of his scars belies the way they have been gained. His was to be a shameful death, a public flagellation and humiliation on a scandalous cross. Tellingly, Jesus gifts them peace – but then must offer it again, once the marks of his hands and feet reveal who he really is, what “Jesus saves” means.
Resurrection hope does not do away with our woundedness, not even with our scars or those wounds still gaping from self-inflicted foolishness or others’ betrayals or inattentiveness. To ignore the wounds of the risen hope means we read the promise of Psalm 16 or Peter’s triumphant speech in order to willfully ignore the tests by which our salvation becomes refined. Too many Christians think faith requires denying the ways our bodies retain signs continued pain: in our memories, in our relational or psychological struggles, in our despair over others’ apathy, in our physical ailments from abuses or violence. We too often preach a resurrection hope for bodies that do not exist, for humans expected to be better than the One who redeems us.
Yet this is a distinction of the Christian life made possible by the risen yet wounded Christ: We open our eyes to see the pain of others, we open our hearts to the sorrow of an earth aching under the weight of our rapacious greed, we confess our culpability in wounding others near and far. Rather than cheap, disembodied resurrection happiness grounded in escape from ways my past inscribes itself in my mind, body, and soul, Christ offers me a peace that takes up the hard reality of injury but guts it of its power.
Meditating on this scarred but triumphant Christ, I wonder at the sudden joy and recognition that the disciples have. Although offering peace when he enters their locked room, apparently he needs to extend it again – after they have now gained knowledge of “who he is” and what that means for lives shattered by need, fragility, and pain. Thus it appears to me that delight in the resurrection necessitates just such an “ah ha!” moment: Christ does not deny the experience of shame, betrayal, loneliness, pain, but rather redeems it. He reconciles it by the power of self-offering love that overwhelms even the most wretched experience. Yet it does not do so by obliterating it as if it never existed. It leaves a wound that yet might become a scar – a scar that need not pull us back into self-doubt, isolating sorrow, or genuine profound regret. Instead, it proclaims the goodness of grace, of forgiveness over all that stands against it, be it violence, arrogance, fear, gluttony, or the like.
I have lived my entire life in Los Angeles. In its secular and Christian forms, my culture encourages me to cover over the keloid tissue my body creates. I feel shame that my wounds proclaim so loudly my failures or my inability to heroically flow through life unscathed and beautiful. Instead, I feel pressure to fix myself, so that my face remains unwrinkled and as nearly “recognizable” and beautiful as possible. But of course there are other sorts of embodied scars and wounds, ones I shamefully bear from those who have injured me, that effect my ability to love and be loved. I consistently feel pressure to claim my salvation in a manner that the bruises of my own past no longer loudly proclaim my own or others transgressions. I desperately desire to deny ways my own past harms (e.g., my heritage of injury, my undisciplined choices, my habit of speaking without attending to others’ fragility or the like) continues to inflict pain on others. In this sense, I do not want the risen Christ of John’s Gospel, but rather a clean slate that wipes away my own fragile, embodied sorrow and sin.
But the hope of which the psalmist sings and which Peter proclaims does not come at so cheap a price. Or, to put it differently, the hope of our salvation comes with a clear-eyed view of sin’s real effects. Thus the presentation of God’s reconciling peace in Christ extends to us in still-wounded hands. We accept forgiveness knowing that we have offended, even as we also see in our own body the marks of others’ viciousness, anger, or neglect.
Resurrection hope does not deny the reality of keloid tissue, of the ways our lives bear marks of a thousand pock marks and blemishes. All of us gather bruises and bruise others. Rather, Christian hope reimagines such scars so that they need not hide them in shame or deny the dull ache even ancient ones still provoke. Instead, they become testimonies of God’s determination to expose the false arrogance of the sin and evil that inflicted them. Taken into the body of the wounded yet triumphant Christ, our own abrasions – whatever their source, whatever their form – also become ways we are known honestly, nakedly, and without shame. For God so loved this wounded world, John claims, that he takes those wounds into himself and thus strips them of disgrace.
Christ offers us his wounds to feel, to touch; by thus exposing his still-broken body to us, we may freely enter into the reality of resurrection hope as we truly are. As Christians we need not fear our imperfections and injuries. Like that small scrape on my left forearm, sometimes our lives amplify small failures or loudly, humiliatingly proclaim effects of others’ harm. Our faith – foolish to some – rests on a God who joins us in such vulnerabilities. By such wounds, we are healed: healed of our need to hide, freed from our shame, and open to the deep peace reconciliation brings.
Ours is not a scar-free, botox-treated resurrection hope. Instead, our joy in the resurrection arises like the disciples when we encounter and touch the wounded Christ who has taken upon himself all manner of violence, doubt, fears, sin, and injury – and breathes upon even us God’s ever-lasting peace.