The other day I was cleaning out my wallet and I found a Band-Aid. Which mostly tells you that I don’t clean out my wallet very often. It had probably been there for ten years, which is about the last time when I was in the business of regularly patching up my children’s abrasions. But finding it brought back a flood of memories about those days when I felt like I had healing superpowers.
You’ve probably had this experience. A small child is utterly distraught over a cut or a scrape, someone shows up with a strip of adhesive latex and covers it over, and the tears immediately stop. Putting on a Band-Aid can be like making the injury disappear altogether. Which raises the question of what exactly had been hurt; was it the trauma that caused the wound, the wound itself, or was it the sight of broken skin and blood?
Of course its possible to be badly hurt and have no visible wound at all. One of my own painful memories of parenting young children comes from a time when I took my son into the doctor’s office for what I thought was a routine checkup and he walked out with a cast on. He had sustained what is sometimes called a dance fracture, an injury to the 5th metatarsal of his left foot. It’s a painful injury, but my son Amos was (and is) a stoic kind of guy and wasn’t talking about it. So the doctor fitted him with a walking cast and he recovered in a few weeks. But to this day I still feel pain when I remember it. Me, with the magical wallet full of Band-Aids, and I hadn’t noticed that my son was hurt. Sometimes it’s the wounds that we can’t see that are the hardest to heal.
Which brings me to Thomas. He is often characterized as a doubter, but frankly, that’s not particularly interesting to me. Let me say for the record: everyone doubts. And that’s no bad thing. Doubt is the handmaiden to faith, author Nora Gallagher has written. It keeps it honest. So instead of his honest doubt—for which you’ll notice got Thomas exactly the reassurance he wanted—what really intrigues me is his brazen insistence on seeing the blood and guts. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,” he said, “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Why the fixation on Jesus’ wounds? In what way did they help Thomas resolve his doubts? Surely the wounds were not proof of who Jesus was: there is no indication in this story that he was unrecognizable or might be mistaken for a gardener, as was the case in some other post-resurrection appearances. Nor were the wounds proof Jesus’ resurrection. Everyone knew that he had been killed, and he was standing right there in front of them, for goodness sake. As best I can tell, the wounds were signs that Jesus was… woundable. Which is way of knowing that he was truly human.
A lot of ink has been spilled over Thomas over the years. And a lot of paint, too. Some of you may have seen representations of this story; perhaps most famously Carravagio’s luminous “Incredulity of Thomas,” in which three disciples lean into the exposed side of Jesus while Thomas pushes his finger right into an open wound. The image is uniquely beautiful and disturbing, but its hardly the only one of its kind. In fact, there were so many medieval and renaissance representations of the open wounds of Christ—sometimes with Thomas present, sometimes not—that they actually are their own genre of painting called ostentatio vulnurum. Which translates as the showing of the wounds.
This way of representing Christ resurrected isn’t so popular in 21st century American protestant churches, however. Maybe because our 24 hour news cycle already saturates us with more than enough images of woundedness. If it bleeds, it leads, as they say. Or maybe because we’d rather bandage the hurt we see and hope to magically make it better. Ostentatio vulnerum is not our preferred way of communicating Christian faith, in pictures or otherwise.
But maybe it should be. Jean Vanier, a Catholic theologian and humanitarian who invested most of his life ministering with people with developmental disabilities, wrote “Coming to terms with life means embracing the essence of our humanity, which is vulnerable. Life implies death. Loving one another implies the possibility of humiliation or rejection. This is reality. But to live in fear is not to live at all. And so we must be vulnerable so that we are free from fear, free to love.”
From the covering of our nakedness in Eden to dressing up for church this very morning, we humans will go to great lengths to avoid ostentatio vulnurum, the showing of our wounds and our oh-so-human vulnerability. And I’d be the first to admit that its scary to reveal my vulnerability. I had to think hard about whether I wanted to tell that story about Amos’ dance fracture. Believe it or not, 15 years later I still feel bad about letting that injury go untreated, and about the possibility that I was a negligent parent.
To admit that we are imperfect—and in some cases badly wounded and capable of wounding others—raises deep existential fears for us. Will we be judged and found wanting? Will we be rejected? We can hide our vulnerability to a point, but fear of being seen for who we truly are can become a kind of prison for us. And some kinds of wounds don’t heal properly if they are covered up.
But the good news of the Gospel is that there is more power in honest wounded-ness than in the pretense of false wholeness. What Thomas’ encounter with Jesus teaches us is that love of God through Jesus Christ will transform vulnerability into ministry, if we are willing to go there with each other. Vulnerability is what took Jesus to the cross. And it didn’t magically disappear afterwards, because the Resurrection was not a Band-Aid covering the fear of death, but rather God’s definitive statement that death had no power. Vulnerability is what Jesus showed Thomas, and the whole doubting lot of disciples were empowered because of it.
Vulnerability is an act of radical faith, and the best gift we can give each other. So whatever doubts we may have brought here with us this morning, may we risk asking for the reassurance we really need, like Thomas did. Whatever wounds we may be bearing on our bodies or souls, let us risk showing them to each other like Jesus did. And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Who came into the world vulnerable for our sakes, and who was wounded in order that we be made whole.
