A wounded Christ

Sermon given by the Rev. Christine Gowdy-Jaehnig on 18 April 2021

Texts for Year B : Easter 3

Acts 3: 12-19 * Psalm 4 * 1 John 3:1-7 * Luke 24: 36-48

A high school student was researching colleges and preparing to apply to a number of them. One day she turned from her computer and said to her mother in frustration, “College admissions only want to hear stories of scars, not wounds.” I think that this young woman has put her finger on something true and unfortunate. We do prefer battle scars to open wounds. We revel in stories of obstacles overcome and enemies defeated. And, of course, that is what we celebrate during Easter and that is why it is a glorious season. But wounds are not something to be ashamed of and hidden.

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus suddenly appears in the midst of his confused, and freaked out disciples. They have heard Peter’s story and have just heard the Emmaus road story from the foot-sore Cleopas and his companion. But these stories are not enough to reorient the disciples to God’s new reality, which includes resurrection. Jesus immediately does all he can to calm and reassure them that he is neither a ghost nor a demon nor, like Lazarus, a resuscitated corpse. He does this in part by showing them his hands and feet, saying, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.” In John, Jesus even invites the skeptical Thomas to put his finger in the holes in Jesus’ hands and his hand in Jesus’ side. Luke doesn’t mention holes or scars, but it makes sense that it is their presence which proves it is Jesus.

One of the questions the text raised for me is: Did Jesus have wounds or scars? It doesn’t say, but I came to think of them as scars over the week, because wounds healing and becoming scars is a wonderful metaphor for forgiveness. Most of the disciples had let Jesus down: betrayal, denial, abandonment. But Jesus’ first words to them are, “Peace be with you.” Those are words of forgiveness. However, Jesus has not come to reconcile with just his friends; he has a bigger message that needs dissemination: forgiveness for everyone. And this is the primary way we disciples are to live in imitation of Jesus: we are to spread the good news: “[R]epentance and forgiveness is to be proclaimed in his [Jesus’] name to all nations, beginning with Jerusalem… You are witnesses to these things.”

Those scars are important for a number of reasons. They are evidence of Jesus’ torturous death. Now, some Christians might prefer that God paint over the ghastly reminders of what we humans are capable of doing to each other. Theologian and pastor Fred Craddock raised this question: Would we prefer that Jesus had appeared and amazed his disciples with a glorious presence? In a perfect body which clearly proclaimed him to be the Creating Word, the Eternal Christ? Some early Christians did prefer to follow such a transcendent God; one of the Gnostic gospels tells the story of Christ having a pain-free conversation with a disciple miles away while Jesus, the Jewish carpenter, dies on the cross. Christianity could have taken a spiritualized form, worshiping a Christ that is a purely immaterial being who is not wounded –like we are. That would be Christianity without the cross, without suffering for others, and without any engagement with worldly messes and injustices. But these scars tell a different story: they connect the confounding person standing before the disciples with the Jesus whom they had known: the Jesus who had trekked the roads of Galilee squinting in the sun, blessed the bread and told stories, and groaned and died on the cross. They are a powerful witness to the nature of the Christian life, which is the way of self-giving love.

Those scars show that God didn’t flee from evil, God doesn’t turn his back on suffering. However hard we tried to push God away, however nastily we reject God, God stays with us; God’s commitment to be with us is total, even at the price of pain and death. Jesus lived God’s way of love: self-emptying; he refused to use violence to prove his identity and worth. Many people thought, like the thief on the cross, that Jesus was worthless; how could he save others when he couldn’t even save himself? But Christianity doesn’t promise we’ll avoid suffering or have a conflict free life, certainly not a long life, not even a life with comforts. The only thing it does promise is life abundant, union with God, and resurrection. For Jesus is the first fruits, the sample model of humanity’s full and final destiny. So, probably Christianity’s best appeal is that it provides assurance of God’s unconditional love and presence and courage in the face of what rips, crushes, and pierces us.

William Sloane Coffin put it memorably: “Minimum protection, maximum support.” James Hanish wrote of being present with a 31 year old man dying of cancer, who held his new infant child. James wrote, paraphrasing from the letter to the Hebrews: “We faced darkness with the assurance that we have no superhuman High Priest to whom our weaknesses are unintelligible –he himself has shared fully in our experience. It was all I had to offer –and it was enough.”

We all have scars, and I would be surprised if many of us didn’t also have wounds which bleed or ooze anxiety and loneliness, pain and anger, even anguish. But, as James and that dying man knew, suffering is made more bearable when we are among those who understand it. Support groups, where others nod their heads when we tell our stories of struggle and wounding, can be life changing, even life-saving.

I wonder if (at least parts of) the church are too much like those colleges I mentioned at the beginning, wanting to hear stories of sin fought and overcome, mistakes and muddle tidied up, turmoil calmed and organized. It seems our social and Christian ethos flinches and turns away from struggle and failure and wounds. We are afraid we will be judged and found wanting by our church communities; so we bring only our best selves to church and leave the wounds at home. But we pay a price for this. Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in Atlanta is a congregation in which more than half of the members live with mental illness. The director of the church’s Friendship Center, who has bi-polar disease, said, “We have an idea of what church ought to be like and it’s pretty nice and clean and well-ordered and doesn’t look like the world around us. But Holy Comforter looks like the world around us.” The priest said that the church “turns out to be the richest spiritual and theological environment I’ve ever been in … how visibly God is working in their lives, and how strong their faith is, in spite of their Job-like lives.” When we refuse to be honest and vulnerable, we deny ourselves a gift of God.

A welcoming, supporting, and witnessing church can only be so when it remembers that Jesus Christ has seen and experienced it all. Not only that: in his ascension, Jesus carried those scars back to God. One commentator said, “He bore them into the Godhead.” Those scars, the knowledge and memory of our failures, our fear and hate and rejection, are part of God, in a way I don’t fully grasp. Perhaps it means that our wounds, including our self-inflicted ones, are where we can meet God. Jesus invited the disciples to touch his scars/wounds. Perhaps we can imagine Jesus gently touching ours and saying, “I know about this.” The nail scarred Christ meets us in the wounded places in our lives. Through the cross and resurrection, as some one said, “Our hurts now become the home of our greatest hopes.”

Let us pray:

Wounded and yet Glorious God:

Stand in our midst and let us know your forgiving peace,

Give us your courage to face what wounds us;

Give us your love to be unflinchingly present with those who suffer.

This we ask through Jesus Christ, the first born of the dead, Amen.