3rd Sunday of Easter 2024
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; 1 John 2:1-5; Luke 24:35-48
Last week’s Gospel which, as you will recall, recounted two appearances of the Risen Christ a week apart, stressed His physicality. First, He showed the disciples His hands and side. On His return, He invited Thomas to touch His wounds. Today, He again insists on the physical reality, drawing attention to His wounds and taking food. He has solid flesh, bones, and a digestive system. There is nothing wraith-like about Him.
It is clear from the Gospel accounts that the Risen Christ is not merely spiritual: He is also corporeal. He is body as well as spirit. He is also something else: He is wounded. At least three times, He points to His wounds. Why should that be?
His body, though real, was different from what it had been. It could pass through locked doors. It could appear and disappear, as it did for the disciples on the Emmaus road. It could apparently cover distances previously unattainable. It was still a human body, but enhanced: perhaps we might say perfected.
Why then did it still have wounds? If our bodies suffer injuries such as cuts or gashes, we expect those injuries to heal: to leave nothing but a faint scar. Why then does the risen body of Jesus so clearly display His wounds? Wouldn’t we expect them to have cleared from this enhanced and perfected body? Why do they remain so evident?
Seemingly, it is important (crucial, if you will pardon the pun) that the risen Christ should continue to be the wounded Christ. Why? Partly, I assume, because those wounds retain their healing power. “By His wounds we are healed” the First Letter of St. Peter tells us, and that is an ongoing process. These wounds continue to heal us. This was not something which ended when the body of Jesus was removed from the Cross. The gashes in His hands, feet, and side remain forever, to heal forever, and to remind us whence our healing comes. The risen Christ is not the ubermensch, the superman. He is still Jesus of Nazareth, fully human, and His perfected body is a wounded body.
There are further implications for us. Our physical wounds may heal and fade, but they are still part of us, and our psychological wounds run still deeper. They form part of who we are, and as such are part of our call to be perfect, to be complete, to be thoroughly made. If, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, the Son of God was made perfect by suffering, the same must be true of us who are His body.
Suffering may do lasting damage, but it may also bring lasting benefits, because it gives us compassion, the ability to suffer with others, without which we are, at best do-gooders, at worst cold and uncaring. As Christ is the wounded healer, and continues to be so after His resurrection, so must we be, as members of His risen but still wounded body.
None of us can know or share the full extent of another’s suffering, but because we have been wounded we know what suffering is, and we can bring a degree of healing, if only by the silent accompaniment of the other in their pain. Our healing of others will not be clinical, in either the best or the worst senses of that word; it may be clumsy and stumbling, but in emerging from a wounded heart it will be genuine, it will be fruitful.
This is one reason why Pope Francis is so critical of aloofness on the part of priests. If we, as pastors, do not display the compassion arising from our own woundedness, what we offer will be superficial. The risen Christ shows us the wounds that heal us, and they transform our own wounds into means of healing, whether we be priests, religious, or lay people because they draw their strength from His wounds.
