Woundedness Makes It Real

We’re in a weird space now – and frankly, one that might be a let-down. We had a gorgeous Sunday last Sunday, shouting “He is risen, he is risen” and reveling in what is for most Christians the key event of our faith: the resurrection.

And now we’re supposed to sit around for a whole month focusing on it. The problem is, of all Jesus’ different life experiences, resurrection is the one we probably can’t relate to at all. So after all the excitement, where do we go with it?

A birth, we can relate to; a death, sadly and certainly. Teaching, healing, getting in trouble with the authorities – having some people love us and some people hate us. This is all in the realm of human experience.

But resurrection? For two millennia the church hasn’t known what to do with that. It’s kind of a wall we hit. What exactly did it look like? What did it mean? As varied as the Gospels are on the details of his death, they’re even hazier on the resurrection. It wasn’t supposed to be like bringing Lazarus back from the dead – that was sort of going backward, Lazarus un-died, and then later, we assume, had to go on and die a regular human death. Resurrection is about going forward. It’s not un-dying. But what does that mean?

Well, what it’s supposed to mean is a core tenet of Christianity: that is, Jesus’ victory over death.

Victory over death.

Simple words, and they’re all over our prayers and hymns and liturgy. And it seems like a good selling point – seems like we’d be pulling in a lot more people, with advertising like that.

But the fact is, I’m not sure those words are always very effective, “victory over death.” We hear them so much that they probably become like white noise, and truth be told, they probably don’t end up feeling very real to some of us. Those words are left “up there,” and we sort of nod and smile, and then get back to our own gritty lives. A nice Hallmark Easter card, thank you, and now I have to get back to the litter box and the teacher-parent conference and the depressing bills and the pains of the past and the fears of the future. Thank you for sharing, and now I have to go deal with real life.

The only problem with that is, when there’s wording like that that seems too proper and distant, it gets to me. I just can’t let it stay its pretentious self, like we’re all supposed to go along with it. I want to yell ‘stop,’ and yank it down and wrestle it to the ground and look it in the eyes and find out what it is.

So what if we do that to these nice “victory over death” words? What if we yank them down off the pedestal? What if we try to make it real?

Ok, so maybe the Bible is never very clear about resurrection – and maybe the Apostle Paul writes that asking what it looks like is a foolish question anyway. Ok – let’s turn lemons into lemonade. If we’ve got several ideas about it biblically, then let’s claim that: victory over death is complex. And people each have their own way of connecting with it.

And that’s where today’s reading is very useful. We get fear, we get rejoicing, we get teaching, we get disbelief, and we get a whole new level of belief. And a lot of it has to do with the process of one particular person, Thomas, and his way of connecting with it all. Now, he usually gets a bad rap – “doubting Thomas” and all that. But I find Thomas really helpful.

Maybe it’s true, he was just being skeptical, but I doubt it. After all he had been through with this person, Jesus, whom he loved so much, who had affected him so much – I think his doubt had to be more complicated than mere skepticism. I don’t think he doubted because he didn’t want to believe. I think he doubted because he did want to believe.

How often have we found it hard to believe in something precisely because we wanted so much to believe in it? How often have we kept something at a distance, maybe not even consciously, because we wanted it so badly that the cost of being disappointed would have been just way, way too high? How often have we kept joy from exploding in our hearts because it felt like it would annihilate us? We humans can feel crushed by such experiences, you know.

And to me, Thomas is really helpful in all that. He helps me acknowledge that possibility in myself. I’m glad he spoke up. But the Thomas experience goes deeper.

In the end – and we don’t know all Thomas felt and thought in the week between the time he was told about Jesus and the time he actually met him – in the end, what let Thomas let his belief be real? It wasn’t theoretical teaching, and it wasn’t scolding or pressure about doing the right thing. What let Thomas make his belief real – let him make his belief bearable – were Jesus’ wounds. The ones that came from the reality of Jesus’ death. The wounds were what made it real for Thomas.

In other words, something bright and glossy would not have done the trick, it would have been too far from the broken-hearted reality Thomas and the others had just come through – too much of a disconnect. A bright, shiny “victory over death” might have even hurt because it would have meant that the real pain that had just shaped and shaken them all – and we are as shaped by our pain as our joy – was not important enough to stay on the radar.

But that pain, over Jesus’ death, was important. And the resurrection didn’t deny that.

For Thomas, it was that woundedness that made Jesus real. And maybe, maybe it was that woundedness that allowed Thomas to be real, too – because wasn’t it really Thomas’s own wound that was speaking when he held himself back?

Both Jesus and Thomas became more real to each other through their wounds. And the connection of the woundedness became a basis for trust.

Ok, that’s a victory over death I can feel.

It’s also a definition of Christian community that I can get behind.

A wounded God standing in the middle of hurt people who are looking for him – and still nourishing them with peace. Peace be with you, Peace be with you, Peace be with you.

I had a conversation with someone once who asked me if that peace of Christ was physical, of our bodies. And I think he was right on. The peace of God, “which passes all understanding,” was never meant to just politeness, and I don’t even think it was meant to be calm. It’s meant to be the breath of God that gives us our very life and orientation. The disciples must have felt anything but oriented, and suddenly to have Jesus there, not lofty and perfect, but wounded and present in a new way, must have given them a peace that helped them feel like they knew who they were again, or maybe like who they’d been all along.

And maybe that’s the whole point about Jesus, from birth to resurrection. His very birth was met with angels yelling “peace on earth!” and scaring the hell out of the shepherds. I don’t think we were ever supposed to see these angels as cute lapel-pin cherubs singing about a rosy baby. This was the heavenly host, those who fill God’s court, who cover their eyes and feet before God’s fiery throne. These are the ones that “get it.” They know what they’re talking about; they see both sides of the veil. And they just couldn’t keep quiet, because they knew what had happened that night; they knew that divine peace had become physical.

God in real human life. It’s not glossy, it’s wounded. And even though it’s a victory, it’s not about triumphalism – there’s no big fanfare, no flags, no big hand coming out of the sky to point at Pilate and the others and say, “I’m right, you’re wrong.”

This is a quiet transformation that simply left death behind.

But here’s the thing – even though the resurrection was quiet and unclear, it was decisive. Something really changed. These people don’t have to tell us what it looked like; they give witness to the heart of it: that death became old news, and Jesus was still present and still breathing peace.

And if that’s the only thing I ever know about his victory over death, it’s enough.