Resurrection Scars

3 Easter

Scars. We all have them. Some of them are visible to us and to others; some of them mark our souls and psyches. I’ve got a lot of them. There’s the one on my stomach that I got climbing out of an apple tree; there’s the one on my knuckle that I got playing with my dad’s woodworking tools. I’ve got an appendectomy scar—that’s pretty recent.

But my oldest scar is related to my earliest memory, when I was three years old. I was chasing my sister down the hall; she turned the corner and I didn’t, hitting my forehead right on the corner of the plastered wall. Although it’s barely visible now, it has shaped my life. For it was that event that led to the discovery of my poor eyesight, two childhood surgeries followed, dozens of trips to the eye doctor, and glasses, of course. When I started thinking about scars this week, I was surprised at how faded it is. As large as it looms in my memory, it’s barely noticeable now.

I’m sure you all have similar stories—some of you probably have scars, visible or invisible of wounds or pain that you would rather not remember, mementos of suffering that you’d rather not revisit, of trauma that continues to burden you. 

You may be wondering why I’ve started my sermon talking about scars and pain. It’s Easter season, a beautiful spring day, and who wants to think about suffering and pain now? We’ve had enough of that in recent years, enough of that in Lent and Holy Week. Well, as we turn to today’s gospel reading, I think it’s informative to keep the image of scars in our mind as we think about the Risen Christ.

I love the gospel stories of the appearance of the risen Christ to the disciples. They’re full of drama and fascinating detail and they deserve close attention and reflection. There are some very familiar stories, like the story of Thomas, which was read last week. In fact, if you remember that story, you might have been struck by the similarities between these two stories. 

Both take place on the day of resurrection, both take place with a group of disciples, both take place in the upper room. Both also emphasize the fear of the disciples when the risen Christ appears to them. Both stories deny that Jesus is a ghost. Both stories also involve touching. In John, Thomas demands, though never follows through, to place his hands in Jesus’ wounds. In Luke, Jesus invites the disciples to touch him. In both, Jesus mentions forgiveness of sins. There are differences as well: Thomas isn’t mentioned in the Luke story; and there’s no mention of Jesus eating fish in the John story.

 Among all the details in all of the stories of the appearance of the Risen Christ to the disciples, there’s one that stands out, one detail that’s common to all of them—that the disciples didn’t recognize him. That’s true of Mary Magdalene in the garden; it’s true of these stories, and of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Famously, and as the collect for the day reminds us, the disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus knew Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

This time, however, it wasn’t in the breaking of the bread, or Jesus naming the disciple, as happened with Mary Magdalene. Rather, it was when he showed them the marks of the nails in his hands and feet, when he showed them his scars, that they recognized him as their risen Lord.

There’s a deep theological truth in that fact. The idea of resurrection is hard to understand, hard to get our heads around. We often assume it’s like resuscitation and we’ve got enough models of that in popular culture to shape our thinking—zombies, for example. When we think of our own resurrections, and not that of Christ, our thinking may be even more muddled. 

We may imagine that eternal life has nothing to do with our bodies, that it has to do only with our disembodied souls. But the scriptural tradition, and early Christian theology is quite clear on this point, and it’s worth noting that it’s shared in the Jewish tradition of the day (though not so much in contemporary Judaism)—that the resurrection was about the body as well as the soul—that it affected the whole person, of which our bodies are an integral part.

I point this out because I think it’s important that the body of the Risen Christ bore the marks of his crucifixion, his scars. What I think that means is that in those scars, Jesus bore the marks of his suffering, now transformed by the healing power of God and of resurrection. His suffering wasn’t erased or forgotten but brought along into this new existence.

So too with us. We often think our pain is punishment, our wounds are the just rewards for our misdeeds, even if they were caused by something, or someone, outside of ourselves. And we may think that in a perfect world, in the resurrection, all of that would be done away with. But to what extent are our scars, our wounds part of who we are? Our identity? That’s certainly the case with the scar on my forehead—it reminds me of everything I went through as a child, all of my struggles. It helped make me who I am.

My old friend, Augustine of Hippo, said something quite similar. In the marvelous 22^nd book of the City of God, he offered his thoughts on the resurrection, and on resurrection bodies. It wasn’t that in the resurrection we would have no bodies, or that our bodies would be perfect—there were apparently some who speculated that we would all be raised to be 33 years old, in the prime of life. For Augustine, Jesus’ scars suggested that we would bring with us all of those marks and imperfections with us in the resurrection; but that they would be transformed in some way, so that everything that made us who we are as individuals would be preserved and glorified.

There’s another way to think about this. It’s important to remember that God is present with us now, in our suffering and pain, and that even if we are not healed in this lifetime, in the life to come we will be. That may make the suffering no easier to deal with in the present, but trusting in God’s healing presence in the midst of that suffering is transformative.

That’s true not only of our own individual wounds. It’s also true of the systemic violence and trauma that we experience and inflict. There’s a tendency these days to want to overlook such violence and trauma—whether it’s the history of slavery and racism in our nation or the suffering and violence inflicted on Native Americans. We want to shove it under the rug or ignore it. But there’s no way around it. Being honest about that suffering, being honest about the wounds and scars carried on the bodies of marginalized peoples is the only means of becoming a healed society.

The risen Christ bears marks of all that suffering on his body, his own and ours, and in his glorified scars, we see our healing transformed by the power of God’s grace and love, as we and the whole world are made new through the cross and resurrection. Thanks be to God.