The wounds of love

As a student chaplain some twenty years ago, I had the experience of witnessing an autopsy.  The pastoral care department at the hospital felt it a good experience for chaplains, who frequently deal with families of very recently deceased persons, to experience the post-mortem so they would be able to reassure families for which it might be legally necessary.  I am afraid the experience had the opposite effect on me.  I did not find it a reassuring educational exercise.

As the pathologist made the first incision it occurred to me that this is not like surgery.  These cuts, these wounds will not heal.  I understand that the person does not feel these wounds but wounds they are - marks and marring of a person’s body.  We don’t have a body, we are a body and a soul and a spirit.  Our physical bodies are a big part of who we are.

I do not believe that our bodies are “just a shell” and that it is our spirits or souls that live on forever incorporeally.  That is a Gnostic notion which essentially says the body, the material is not as important as the spiritual.  Ultimately it is seen as a prison from which we escape.  There is nothing further from Christian thought.  Jesus was God incarnate – in the flesh.  Our rescue he accomplished “in his body on the tree.” (I Peter 2:24)  Our salvation was not a spiritual transaction in heaven but a material transaction on the earth.  When he rose from the dead it was not a “spiritual” resurrection but a physical one – as will ours be.  Jesus still has a body.  We will too.

But I did not come to this thought by reflecting on autopsies.  I started somewhere else – some other wounds that will never heal.  And I feel quite different about them.  From the well-known hymn:

Crown him the Lord of love

Behold his hands and side

Rich wounds yet visible above

In beauty glorified

No angel in the sky

Can fully bear that sight

But downward bends his burning eye

At mysteries so bright

Rich wounds yet visible above.  At his resurrection Jesus appears to his disciples not healed but still bearing the wounds – the holes in his hands, feet and side.  This is the very thing that convinces Thomas that he is truly raised.

But they are not just unhealed they are also in beauty glorified.  It is Holy Week and we are walking the path to Good Friday, which seems anything but good.  Scourging, whipping, wounding.  Bleeding.  Dying.  But it is by his ugly, but now glorious, wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)  The cross of Jesus saves us and redeems even suffering and death for us.  His wounds are radiant with his glory.  I think ours will be too.

We are often distressed, surprised or angered by suffering.  And rightly so.  But Jesus changes his suffering (and ours) by his obedience.  Oscar Wilde wrote a short children’s book entitled The Selfish Giant in which said giant’s heart is turned to flesh from stone by a small child in his garden.  Later in the story the child returns to the giant.  The giant sees that the child has been hurt on his hands and feet.   The giant is distressed, surprised and angered by this outrage.  And here is how the story ends:

'Who hath dared to wound thee?' cried the Giant; 'tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.'

     'Nay!' answered the child; 'but these are the wounds of Love.'

     'Who art thou?' said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

     And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.'

A perfect graveyard of buried hopes

I was reading Romans 5 this morning (as it was the appointed epistle reading in the lectionary) and was reminded of Paul's skill as a poet.  Now one has to take a broad view of poetry to understand him thus. Not like my eighth grade teacher who gave me a failing grade on the poem I wrote (an ode to the beauty of the river that winds its way through my home town) because not every line rhymed, only every other line.  Her lack of appreciation for what might legitimately be called poetry was eclipsed only by her inaccurate teaching of history.   She was the one who taught me and literally generations of rural Nova Scotians that Abraham Lincoln was the first black President of the United States.  Alas, all educators are not created equal.

But back to a broad interpretation of poetry in thinking of Paul.  While his strength seems to be discursive reason and systematic theology, the poet rises in him from time to time.  "If I speak in the tongues of men and angels..." starts perhaps the most beautiful poetic passage he wrote (I Corinthians 13.)  I hasten to note that nothing rhymes here (at least in English).  I have not verified the Greek but I am suspicious that it does not unfold in rhyming couplets.  Paul, it seems, was a pioneer of free verse - a first century e. e. cummings.

The passage in Romans 5 that rises to the poetic is familiar:

"Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." (Romans 5:3-5 NIV)

Inspirational, isn't it? Makes one think of rising above the challenges of life and living in the hope that does not disappoint. A beautiful idea. But what about when hope does disappoint? Anne Shirley, heroine of Green Gables, has a couple of things to say about this and I trust it is not blasphemous for her to appear to contradict Holy Writ. Both are from Anne of Green Gables.

"It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically but it's not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?"

Ever so true. The idea is poetic and romantic, but the reality seems rather less so.

And as to hope that does not disappoint:

"My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes. That's a sentence I read in a book once, and I say it over to comfort myself whenever I'm disappointed in anything."

It seems to me that sufferings and afflictions do produce perseverance and perseverance character and character hope. Except when they don't. Suffering will produce these things or they will produce bitterness, pettiness, miserliness, cruelty and despair. At least this is what I have observed - as perhaps Anne Shirley did. So what makes the difference? Why is the fruit of suffering so different?

I think it comes back to Paul again. Hope does not disappoint us, because God's love is "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us" to quote the King James Version. Suffering alone does not produce good fruit. Suffering with the love of God given to us by the Holy Spirit produces good fruit. What transforms us is not our gritting of teeth and grinning and bearing it, but rather the Real Presence of God in us through the Holy Spirit.

And here again we encounter a really nice idea - the love of God shed abroad in our hearts. But I fear that to many of us it is just that - a really nice, poetic idea. Now some poets are inclined to tell us pretty lies. But Paul isn't one of them. When he talks about the love of God in the Holy Spirit abroad in our hearts he means it as something very real - not just a lovely theological construct. That means it is something that we know to be beautiful AND true. His reality (the Holy Spirit's, not Paul's) in our hearts is to be known and experienced.

Now some are cautious of any talk of the experience of God as we are inclined, idolatrously, to confuse the experience of him with God himself. And it is therefore very easy, and perhaps safe to live in the intellectual world of the beautiful idea. But that is not what Paul is talking about or what he intends. The presence of the Holy Spirit, given to us, is what makes the difference in our lives (and our hope) - his presence known and, at least from time to time, experienced. He is not just a nice idea, but Real God in a real world of both joys and sufferings.

As I read Romans 5 this morning I was reminded not to settle for just the poetic idea but to live the hope of the real thing - a hope which does not disappoint.

Back to Anne of Green Gables. Anne talks a great talk about graveyards of buried hopes and being in the depths of despair. But if you read the book and ignore her words, instead looking at her perseverance and character, you will see that her sufferings have indeed produced an irrepressible hope - and a hope that brings life and redemption to those around her.