The Risen Christ has open wounds

Reflection based on these wonderings + [some of] the readings assigned for the Second Sunday of Easter in our Lectionary.


Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.

It’s not the focus of the story, it’s not remarked on, it’s taken for granted, but I can’t stop thinking about it. 

The Risen Christ has open wounds. 

In the Gospel of John, Jesus has triumphed over death and risen from the tomb, but his body still bears the marks of the Cross. He is raised, but somehow...not fully healed. Not whole. Scarred at best, but it seems like Thomas puts his finger in his side....

I’m still not sure what to make of that. Let’s just put it in the back of our minds for a bit, and come back to it. 

We spent Holy Week and Easter trying to stay close to the experience of Jesus and the disciples. We used our imagination and our creativity to live as much as we could inside the story of Jesus’ last days. The horrible vertigo of the days after his death. The ways the disciples held each other, grieved together; the ways that some tried to comfort the others with stories of God’s promises, the ways that some of the others shot back, that they could take that “hopey-changey stuff” and shove it. Sometimes hope is too hard, too vulnerable when you’re just trying to survive. When you’re terrified. When the story you thought you were living in is shattered.

The disciples had expectations for Jesus: they thought he was going to make it all right; some of them thought he was going to become the king; some of them thought he would enter Jerusalem, work his magic, and the Roman occupation would vanish, as quickly as Jesus healed the man blind from birth. 

But Jesus didn’t do that. And he didn’t teleport away when he was betrayed, and put on a show trial, defamed as an enemy of the state, and then executed, horribly, on a cross. How were they to make sense of their grief? How were the supposed to deal with the fact that they’d gotten it all wrong about Jesus? 

And then, just as suddenly as Jesus was arrested, tried, and killed, they heard from Mary Magdalene that Jesus is risen from the dead, and then, that night, he appears among them, and it really was him, alive: they touched his body, they touched the wounds in his hands, the wound in his side where the Centurion speared him. 

How were they to make sense of that?? 

They must have been really confused. How do you even tell that story? 

In the Gospel according to John, John is quite explicit about why he decides to tell the story in the way he does. It’s right there at the end of the passage appointed for today. These things “are written so that you may come to believe [or continue to believe] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” We’ve talked before about this Greek word pistis, often translated as “believe”—but probably meaning something closer to “trust.” John’s telling this story so his community will be encouraged to keep on trusting that Jesus is Lord.

They need that encouragement: we have to remember that John and his community were living 2 or 3 generations after that first Easter morning: 40 or 50 years later, some scholars say more. And as I mentioned on Good Friday, the community around John was under tremendous stress, likely experiencing persecution from the Romans and feeling alienated from their family members who didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. They spent a lot of time locked in their houses, or meeting in secret in locked rooms, just like the disciples did after the death of Jesus…. Which was probably stressful in itself.

And there were members of that community who were saying, “yeah, yeah, we’ve heard the stories about how Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the women of his community, and to his disciples. But we weren’t there. We didn’t see him. When is Jesus going to appear to us, in this locked room, and prove that all this is true?”

And, so, for them, right at the very end of his Gospel, John slips in this story about Thomas. This story doesn’t appear in any of the other Gospels. It’s something specific to John’s recounting of Jesus’ resurrection. On Easter morning, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene. That evening, he appears in the locked room where the disciples were hiding out. And immediately, freely, he shows them his hands and his side, and they all see that it really is him. But Thomas wasn’t there. And so later, the other disciples tell him, “oh, yeah, while you were gone, Jesus appeared to us. Cool, huh? Sorry you missed it.” 

It’s funny, I always remembered this story as a burn on “Doubting Thomas”—the stick-in-the-mud who makes this audacious demand for special proof that the other disciples don’t need: “I’ll only believe if I can stick my finger in his side—nothing less will convince me!” But we can see from the story that he’s not asking for extra: he’s only asking to have the exact same experience the other disciples did. 

But…if the most amazing, hope-restoring, world-shattering thing had happened, and I got left out… I would have pitched a fit too. And so it’s totally understandable to me that Thomas has a little temper tantrum. He just wants to be included.

If we try on that perspective, it then feels kind of unfair when Jesus appears the next week in the same way and scolds him. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” The end of the story doesn’t fit the middle. Why is Thomas being held to a higher standard than the other disciples? 

I wonder if it’s because this story isn’t an accurate depiction of what happened one week after the Resurrection. Maybe it’s a lesson for John’s community, 40 or 50 years later. Nobody in that community had seen Jesus in the flesh. Everybody was in the position of “Doubting Thomas:” they had to believe—to trust—that the Risen Lord was present in the room with them even though they could not see him. Just as we have to trust today that the Risen Christ is here, whether we feel it or not. 

So I wonder what we might see in this story if we let go of John’s emphasis on believing. If we let that be for the people in that community, that context? 

We might see that Jesus comes to the disciples in the place of their fear and disappointment; in their confounding stew of grief and hope. He doesn’t knock; he doesn’t wait to be invited in; he walks right through the locked door and says “Peace be with you.” We might see that when the disciples have recovered from our shock and awe he says it again, to make sure they’ve heard: “Peace be with you.” 

Think about that, when we share the peace of Christ in a little bit. Think about the fact that you might be speaking the peace of the Risen Christ into the locked room of someone’s heart. I think a lot of us aren’t ready to hear a word of peace the first time—so we have to say it again and again to each other, hear it from each other, week after week. 

What else happens in this story? Well, Jesus commissions the disciples: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” and he breathes upon them with the mysterious breath of God, the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “what I’ve been doing so far, you all are going to do that now. I am going to ascend to my Father and your Father, so now it’s up to you, my siblings, my heirs, to proclaim the good news, to feed, to heal, to bless.”

The Resurrection isn’t just a revelation of who Jesus is—it’s a revelation of who we are, as followers of Jesus, as the Church. Friends, we are the Risen Body of Christ. We now do what Jesus did, we now are what Jesus was.

Which, to return to where we started, might mean that we are a body that is risen and redeemed...with wounds that are still open. For those of us tempted to think that being holy means to be set apart, immovable, undefiled, invulnerable—let us really look at the Risen Body of Jesus in that locked room. Reach out and touch his hands, his side. The Resurrection didn’t make him perfect. The Resurrection didn’t even make him whole. His glorious body carried wounds and scars, like we do. 

I wonder if that means that when we baptize people in this place, we are inviting them into the fullness of life that includes joy and transformation and calling; and pain, and hurts that may never heal, and heartache and grief and even death. And we are inviting them into a life that is richer and stranger and runs deeper than even death can reach.

I wonder also if the wounds in the Risen Christ mean that even on the other side of death, God has not outgrown us, or left us behind. Our God is wounded by love, just like we are. I wonder if the Resurrection is not God’s escape from the human condition—it’s a fuller, deeper commitment to it. From the Cross and the tomb, the Risen Christ comes back to be with us in our vulnerability and grief, to share our pain. To sit with us in our anxiety and confusion, in our locked rooms. 

And even there…to give us “inquiring and discerning hearts, the courage to will and persevere, a spirit to know and love the unfathomable mystery that is God, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Amen.