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Once a week now, I gird
up my loins and venture out to the grocery store. I put on the armor of a homemade
face mask and old clothes. I remove the rings from my fingers and take up the
shield of hand-sanitizer. Face set in brow-furrowing determination, I make my
way through the aisles like a soldier through a mine field. I eye my fellow
shoppers with suspicion, my ears primed for any stray cough, my eyes alert for beads
of sweat on someone’s fevered forehead. Going to Kroger used to be a boring
task. Now, it’s a stressful battle.
Returning
home, it’s only when I’ve removed food from contaminated bags, frantically Cloroxed
doorknobs and counters, and scrubbed my hands raw … it’s only then that I can
exhale. Only then do I let go of the pent-up fear from my hour away from home. My
tense muscles begin to relax, and I look around with gratitude at the blessed
security of my own four walls. Safe at last. At least until next week.
This
Easter, it doesn’t take much imagination to understand the fear that keeps
Jesus’ disciples locked up in a room. We now know all about how frightening it
is to go about our daily tasks, surrounded by an invisible, unpredictable threat.
We know all about how good it feels to be safe at home, even when it can feel
confining, too. Believe me, I no longer scoff at the fear that drove those first-century
disciples indoors and kept them there, even after Jesus came to them. I no
longer judge their inability to deal with the fear of death, or with the
strange unknown of resurrection.
It
is indeed Good News that we hear today in our Gospel lesson—that neither our isolation nor our fear
can separate us from the presence of God. Jesus enters our locked rooms, and if
we miss him for some reason, he keeps coming back again until we meet. He
appears in the messiness and frustration of our quarantined lives; he appears
in our hospitals; he appears on our computer screens. The scandal is not
that he appears, but that he brings with him his open wounds, the wounds he
shares with humankind, the wounds that he carries with him even into New Life. Jesus
doesn’t just retain the faded scars of his Passion. He still bears his oozing,
gaping flesh. Think about it: Nothing represents vulnerability more than an
open wound. A wound hurts; it bleeds; it screams out the flimsiness of human
flesh, the brokenness of our mortal condition. The Risen Christ remains the Crucified
One, the One who knows our pain from the inside out-- The One who will never turn
away from our brokenness nor abandon us to our pain.
Like
St. John, we often give Thomas a hard time for not believing that Jesus has risen
from the dead. “Doubting Thomas,” we call him. But I don’t think that intellectual
doubt is Thomas’s problem here. Before he meets the risen Jesus, Thomas doesn’t
merely demand to see the wounded Christ, as the other disciples have already
done. He demands to touch his wounds. He demands a chance to thrust his
hand into Jesus’ torn flesh, to feel around inside his pain, to understand it,
to judge it, to have power over it. Thomas thinks that he can get to the bottom
of the pain and fear that have overtaken him since the moment he saw his
Teacher crucified. He wants an answer to the threat of vulnerability that hangs
over him. Take a look at Caravaggio’s famous painting of Thomas.[1] Look at the faces of the
disciples. Can you see yourself?
We
all do it. We read about someone suffering from Covid 19, and we try to poke
around inside of their pain. We want to account for their suffering somehow, in
order to distance ourselves from it:
“Of course, this sick guy wasn’t careful,” we
rationalize.
“That
whole country doesn’t know what they’re doing,” we scoff.
“This
woman wasn’t healthy to start with…
This
one foolishly went to an Easter service,” we judge.
“I’m
not any of these things, so I’ll be fine, right?” we ask, peering into the wide-open
vulnerability of our neighbors.
Some of us hoard toilet paper, as if an abundance
of everyday necessities can take away the empty, vulnerable feelings. Some of us
buy guns, seeking to protect ourselves with the mighty power of Death. Some of us
pour hatred on the wounds that we see, and some of us turn away and refuse even
to look at them.
The vulnerability that Jesus shows us,
however, cannot be rationalized away. Neither can it be killed or denied. It is
filled with a power that has already defeated death and empire and greed. The
wounded Jesus comes to us with the power of God’s own Spirit, the power of compassion.
He comes to usher in the reign of forgiveness and love. Once Thomas sees Jesus,
he no longer needs to rummage around in the wounds. He steps back from Jesus,
overcome by the Love that he sees there. “My Lord and my God,” he stammers.
Take
a look at another painting of a wounded Jesus, this one by a Polish Jesuit painter named
Vyacheslav Okun.[2]
This one is a kind of “Pieta,” a Good Friday painting, before the Resurrection. Here, look at the compassion, the “suffering-with” in the faces and stance of the medical staff that hold Jesus’ disease-ravaged body. Like this Jesus, these doctors and nurses will continue bear the wounds inflicted by the suffering depicted here. But in their response to Gods call to heal, they also been baptized into the divine compassion that brings us into the very heart of God.
Today, the Risen Christ comes into our locked homes. He even stops us in the midst of our frantic grocery-aisle battles: “Peace to you,” he proclaims. “Don’t be afraid. You are about to see something astounding, something unsettling, something of the Living God. The scandal of divine compassion won’t get your lives back to normal. It will bring you even greater change. It will give you New Life, life that goes so deep into the heart of God that it never ends.”
Let
us pray:
“God
of the present moment, God who in Jesus stills the storm and soothes the
frantic heart; bring hope and courage to all who wait or work in uncertainty.
Bring hope that you will make them the equal of whatever lies ahead. Bring them
courage to endure what cannot be avoided, for your will is health and
wholeness; you are God, and we need you. Amen.”[3]
[1]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas-Caravaggio_(1601-2).jpg
[2]
Found at https://fatdormouse.wordpress.com/category/god/
[3]
Prayer adapted from New Zealand Prayer Book, p. 765, found at https://www.episcopalrelief.org/what-we-do/us-disaster-program/faith-based-response-to-epidemics/
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