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.'