The wounds he kept

A reading from the Gospel according to John, chapter 20, verses 19 through 31.

John 20:19–31

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, Peace be with you.

When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his eye.

Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.

Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.

If you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the twin, was not with them when Jesus came.

So the other disciples told him, We have seen the Lord.

But he said to them, Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never be left.

It is later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them.

Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.

Then he said to Thomas, put your finger here and see my hand, and put out your hand and place it in my side.

Not disbelieve, but believe.

Jesus said to him, Have you believed because you have seen me?

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Grace and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Consider for a moment what scars are for.

Scars are evidence of a process.

Usually they are, of course, are coming from a moment when your body was wounded, cut, or broken in some way or another.

And that's when the body goes to work trying to close off what was opened, to bring some measure of healing, maybe even sealing, against the damage that was done.

The tissue knits, the blood clots, all of these things combined.

And before long, sometimes after a great deal of time, depending on the wound, there is a mark left over in your skin.

A story written in your body about something that happened.

And the whole process is meant kind of like this: that it's a sort of inward thing.

It's the body closing itself off, it's the body sealing itself away, it's bringing things back to as close as possible as the way it was before.

And so those wounds, when they are our wounds, they behave this way.

They scar.

But there are other kinds of wounds as well.

In fact, there's a kind of wound that the prophet Isaiah described when he was describing the wounds of Christ.

Wounds that Isaiah said were wounds that would heal and not heal themselves, like our wounds do, but heal others.

That is what a wound can do when it is aimed outward, when it is aimed at another person, at someone's need.

And in our case, as Jesus was wounded, the scriptures tell us that in those wounds we are healed, that in those wounds all of our iniquity, our sin, our transgression, everything wrong and evil and broken about us was laid on him, and in those wounds we were healed.

Different kind of wounds than the ones that we suffer ourselves.

Keep that in mind as you enter this locked room in today's gospel from John.

You know that the disciples had heard a report, something amazing, something strange, something unheard of before, from the women who had visited the tomb that first Easter morning.

And the disciples were full of a mixture of fear and wonder and amazement.

And of course, it seems that by the evening of the first Easter, one of those feelings was holding sway.

It was the fear.

The doors were locked for fear of the Jews.

Now in that moment, Jesus, he just appears.

Behind locked doors, there he is.

I don't think he climbed through a window.

It seems that Jesus, whatever the resurrected body is, it includes something different, this different kind of ability or presence, a mystery to it, and yet here we see that there is no way to lock Jesus out of the room.

And yet there he stands in his body.

But before he does any of the things that we are accustomed to remembering that he did after his resurrection, before he breathed on them, bestowed on them the Holy Spirit, sent them out with a commission to baptize and teach all nations.

Before any of that, this first action occurs behind those locked doors, that he shows them his hands and his side.

Wounds that healed, wounds that aimed outward at them.

And we know, of course, whatever the power of the resurrection was, whatever power raised Jesus from the dead, surely we could reason that that same power, if it could bring dead cells to life again and make dead lungs breathe again, surely that power could have erased the evidence of the crucifixion, could have left the skin unmarked, totally as if nothing had ever happened.

A full and complete kind of restoration, the way we might imagine it, being full and complete.

And yet these scars are still there.

They can see the wounds and the marks in his hands and in his side.

Which tells us that these are not things that the resurrection failed to fix.

These are scars, these are tokens, trophies, even, that testify to something.

Tokens that Jesus kept so that people could see them, people could know them, and people could remember them.

These are not ordinary scars.

An ordinary scar, the ones you might have, the ones I have, they say, here is where I was wounded.

These scars say, here is how I was wounded for you.

For you.

Now Thomas, he wasn't there the first time Jesus appeared in the room.

And Thomas's story is well known.

We hear it each year, we sing it in our hymns.

He even has a name, the doubter.

And so Thomas's story is very well known to us.

He had heard the report from the others.

And while he surely was accustomed to trusting these disciples, this was just too much.

This was more than he was able to accept on their word.

And so he said, Look, unless I see and touch what you saw and touched, then there's no way for me to believe this.

Then a week goes by, and they're in the room again.

Door still locked, fear still in the air, and yet this time Thomas is there, and again Jesus appears, and he comes right to Thomas.

This moment where the for you of these scars starts to become accentuated, that its outline becomes clear to us.

He comes there and he doesn't come to scold, rebuke, grab him by the ears, and drag him out and give him a talking to.

He says, Thomas, behold my hands and my side.

Stop doubting and belief.

And in that moment, Thomas saw something, and I feel as if for him something kind of clicked.

Like when a key won't quite go in the slot or it won't quite land.

And suddenly there it is, suddenly the door is open, and out of Thomas's mouth comes five words that would be difficult to improve upon.

My Lord and my God.

In that moment, it's not just that he's realizing the truth of it all, that surely is part of it.

There has to be some element in our faith that we know that these things happened, and that's part of what is occurring for Thomas.

But I think he's also connecting all the dots, that all the pieces are coming together, and now it's obvious to him that these wounds are for him.

And so he can look at this Jesus and say, This is for me.

You are my Lord, and you are my God.

Jesus had kept those wounds so that people could see them, so that Thomas could touch them, so that there would be testimony to what he had done.

And here Thomas sees them.

Wounds still present on a body that walked out of a grave, and yet here they still are, not erased, but present for him.

Evidence of what Jesus has done for Thomas.

So what did he see in those wounds?

I think he saw wounds that testified to something.

Wounds that testify to at least three things.

One, that this happened.

This was not a mirage in his mind or his memory, no collective hallucination from overly religious people.

That this had actually occurred.

Real nails, a real spear, real death, real grave, and real resurrection.

All of this had occurred.

It also testifies that this is meant to be known, not wiped away, not simply set aside, but that the crucifixion is something that carries forward even into new life, that that cross is still at the center of things, that Jesus is the one who died, just as he is the one who is risen, that these two things go together.

And then that third one, the one that melted Thomas, the one that says, These wounds were for you, all the times that the prophets promised, all the times that Jesus explained, what he would do, all of this is for you, for you.

And Thomas here is touching the receipt, you could say, of his own redemption.

And Christians have marveled at this across the many centuries since this event occurred, since this text was written down for us.

And throughout those centuries, Christians have again and again come back to this and concluded that, yes, we keep arriving at the same place, that Jesus did not keep these scars because he couldn't get rid of them or couldn't remove them, but he kept them for you and for me.

He chose to.

That everlasting trophy of his victory.

Something we can look to, something we can see, something that is real to us from our experience and a bridge into the experience that was just as real for Jesus and his disciples, that it testifies to these things.

In fact, this is what takes a kind of circle that encloses Thomas and Jesus and the disciples and every Christian that has ever lived ever since, and encloses also us into this story that Jesus chose to keep these scars.

This is where there's continuity between every generation.

You see, the same John who wrote this is the John who was given the vision we call revelation.

And in that vision, Jesus uh John saw something that was again startling.

He looked, and at the center of the kingdom of heaven, there is a throne, and there is glory, but there is also a lamb, and not a lamb that was fully unblemished, but a lamb who had been slain.

A lamb that people could look at even in heaven and say, That's the one.

It looks like he died.

It looks like he was pierced.

It looks like he was wounded.

There he is.

And so those scars that came from wounds first opened on Good Friday, that Jesus carried into that locked room, the ones that were on his hands as he reached out to bless his disciples, the ones that were on his hands as he cooked them breakfast and talked to them, the scars that surely the eyes of those disciples kept looking down at again and again, every moment they could.

Those are the scars that Jesus also carried to the very throne of heaven.

And there they still are in his side and on his hands.

That's where we will find the connection.

See, you and I were not in that room with Thomas and the others that first Easter.

You and I have not had a moment where we get to look carefully, intently, examining and turning over those hands, looking at the mark in his side.

That is not something that we have gotten to do.

We are the ones that Jesus called here blessed because we have not yet seen and yet have believed.

We have taken the testimony of the word.

And most of the time that's quite a lot for us.

But you also know there are the times where we crave something a bit more, where some part of us truly, genuinely wishes we could have that level of contact with Jesus.

Just one little moment in the darkest of moments to say, yes, this is real.

The wounds happened, and they were for me.

Times we don't want an argument that tells us why it's true.

Times we don't want just a reminder, but some kind of genuine contact.

I think it's worth realizing that we often find ourselves in that place.

And Jesus calls it blessed.

He says there's a certain character to that to count on the testimony of what was delivered and handed down to you, that that is something worth naming and calling.

It's what the second reading today talks so thoroughly about.

You heard that word, testimony, testimony, testimony, again and again and again.

And that's powerful and real.

And yet, even now, God is also drawing us closer and closer into that contact.

Where he takes his word of promise and he makes it into something that, yes, we do experience.

Whether it's the sound of splashing water landing on someone's head, where you know that God is redeeming that little one as a child of God.

And you hear it in your ears, you see it with your eyes.

And some of you may have been baptized as adults and can remember the feel of the water on your head as well.

We also get to taste and see that the Lord is good as he comes to us in something we can taste and touch in his body and blood, together with the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper.

These moments of contact, these moments of touch, as our gracious Lord comes to us and says, Here I am.

But then we also get to know that as we wait and as we watch and as we walk along with this Jesus all the way, Jesus is coming to you when you have been like Thomas, with your fears and your doubts, when you've been holding on to hope against the dark, when there's seemingly nothing between you and the darkness, here he comes in with his word and his presence that is true and real, as I've just described.

And through this he holds on to you as the time goes by.

For Thomas it was eight days, for us it will be a longer period of time.

But remember this that the scars Jesus showed Thomas that he kept, so that Thomas would see and cry out, he is still holding on to those scars for you as well.

And I think this is what the experience will be like that the day will come, as we heard last week, as Job said, that our eyes will see him, that our heart will faint within us.

And we're going to finally get to this moment, and we're going to think, finally, now it's going to click.

The key will finally go in, it will land.

I will finally have the full knowledge of Christ.

Here it is.

We'll see the scars, we'll touch the side, we'll cry out, My Lord and my God.

And I think in that moment we'll realize that the entire time we were waiting for that moment, we had known him already, and he had known us.

That as he came to us in his word, we were knowing him.

As he came to us with the promise and power of baptism, we knew him, and he knew us.

And each time we received his gifts on the altar, we knew him, and he knew us.

There are those scars, as living testimony of what his wounds have done.

Scars that we will one day see, but scars that we do not need to see in order to know him, and to love him, and to know that he holds us in those scarred hands.

Behind our locked doors, the good days, the bad.

Always.

Amen.