In some sense, wounds are my life. In my job, I worry about wounds: dressing them, measuring, photographing, counting, trying to prevent, trying to heal them. I’ve seen just about every kind of wound that can be inflicted on a human body—burns, stab wounds, gunshot wounds, surgeries gone bad, bed sores. I have had to work hard over the years to prevent myself from becoming jaded and hardened to wounds. I have learned to stop at the door of a hospital room and breathe and let myself experience how horrible, how appalling, how revolting a wound is. It is not fitting that such things should happen to the body of a human being.
Then there are my own wounds: I really hate bumping my head, especially against something sharp or jagged that leaves a mark. I’m accustomed to being bald but I hate walking around with marks on my head--looking, as I say to myself, scabby and leprous. Because I am diabetic, when I get scratched or cut or burned, I don’t heal very well or very quickly. So the wounds stay and the wounds show.
Worse yet, since my surgery last summer, every time I stand naked in front of my bathroom mirror (which is, probably something you won’t want to picture in your mind), I am confronted by this long slash running down the center of my chest, a red mark reminding me of a time when I was invalid, an invalid. My own scarlet letter.
And all of these are just the wounds that can be found in the outside of the body. There are a whole other class of wounds that afflict the human heart—loves that have gone wrong, beloved who have left or died, failures that have accumulated over the course of life lived in a cold, cruel, sin-sick world.
Our culture teaches us to be ashamed of wounds. We are taught that we are supposed to be forever dewey fresh and young. We go to great ends to remove scars and stretch marks (the signs of life and experience and fertility) from our bodies--special ointments, plastic surgery, pancake makeup. The ultimate example of this is botox—a food poison that is injected into the skin to paralyze facial muscles so that a person cannot express their emotions, lest they make wrinkles.
I, at least, also go to great lengths to conceal the wounds on my heart, having failed at love, failed at life, lest the world see that I am “a man of sorrows and familiar with grief,” and despise and reject me.
In the light of this horror that we have inherited from our culture for wounds, for any marks of experience or wisdom or joy or sorrow, why would Jesus appear on the day of his resurrection with the wounds of the crucifixion still fresh on his palms and feet and side? Nails driven through the hands and feet, a spear jabbed into the side; it is not fitting that such things should happen to the body of a human being,. Why was God so inept at resurrection that the wounds still showed?
The common presumption is that faith is assenting to a set of beliefs, theses that cannot otherwise be proved. Worse yet, we often think that they are contradicted by experience, so that if we are to consider ourselves people of faith, we have be willing to assent to things that are patently false—like the sky is green or the earth is flat or creation happened six thousand years ago. When we can’t do that we presume that we don’t have faith, that we are at best agnostic; we don't really qualify as Christians, as people of faith.
But that is not what faith is. Faith is entrusting oneself completely to what should be true. In the movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there is a point where Indiana has to walk on a completely invisible bridge over a deep chasm; he carefully reaches out with his foot and puts his weight out on what appears to be empty space and walks across the chasm without falling to his death. This putting-the-whole-weight-upon is what faith is really about. It is perfectly possible for one to be both agnostic and faith-filled. “Agnostic” means not knowing; that is what faith is all about—not knowing but trusting anyway.
The great act of faith that Thomas could make after putting his finger in the nail holes and his hand in the spear wound, is believing not only that Jesus was Lord and God, but that his wounds were “holy and glorious.”
Wounds are holy and glorious! How hard that is to accept. I think that we are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as marred or damaged that this idea is nearly “unbelievable,” something to scoff at. How different would we be if we really accepted this notion? Rather than concealing the marks of our encounter with life (what else are wounds, anyway?) we could let them show, peacefully and confidently (confidence means having faith with), like Jesus showed them, holding out his hands for Thomas to touch, to know and experience, to come to faith, to recognize God in our midst.
We tend to title this story from the Gospel “Doubting Thomas.” The Orthodox refer to this episode as “The Touching of Thomas,” or “The Assurance of Thomas.” I find this much more kind, compassionate and understanding.
Rather than characterizing Thomas for his doubt, we should honor him for the gift of this important insight into the mystery of the resurrection: Woundedness and Resurrection are two sides of the same coin, intimately conjoined in the mystery of God’s love for humanity. Our wounds do not contradict God’s grace and love in our lives, they make that love visible and tangible to us and to all who encounter us.
Beneath the beautiful surface of this great candle, below the nails that mar (so to speak) the surface of this candle, there are five grains of incense, the same incense that we burn to remind us of the holiness of God and the holiness of this assembly, grains of incense, the blood of trees, a sweet fragrance that rises pleasantly to God. Our wounds, like the “holy and glorious wounds of Jesus,” are like incense—precious, beautiful, gem-like, fragrant, and holy.
