Hoping for Resurrection:
Life in a Season of Ongoing Death

Third Sunday after Easter • April 26, 2020
Reading: John 20:19-29 (NRSV)
Dr. John J. Thatamanil, guest preacher

Are you haunted by it? I know I am. I am haunted by the open wounds on the body of the Resurrected Christ. Well, haunted may not be quite the right word. Maybe “claimed” or “captured” are better words. I just know that every Easter season, I find myself returning to those wounds. I find that I cannot escape this question: Couldn’t the God who raised the crucified, dead and buried Jesus have brought him forth from the tomb in perfect and unblemished wholeness? I don’t know how to answer that speculative question; all I know is that that is not the way John tells his Gospel story.

Christian proclamation throughout the ages has often sought to herald the Resurrection as God’s decisive victory over sin, death, and the devil. But what kind of “victory” leaves in place a body with open wounds? Listen to these verses from John’s Gospel about Thomas showing up a week late to be with the gathered disciples.

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Savior and my God!”

Wait, what? Jesus’s resurrected body can appear in a closed room with doors shut, and yet, nonetheless, the extraordinary body remains broken open? I don’t know about you, but if I wanted to tell a story about winning, so much winning that you’d get sick of winning, believe me, I wouldn’t tell the Easter story with a resurrected Lord who has an open hole in his side into which Thomas can insert his hand.

The way John’s Gospel tells the story suggests that even God incarnate does not survive the world God created unscathed. Life in time and history, life as a finite and vulnerable creature, leaves its marks even upon the incarnate body of God. Is that what St. Paul meant when he said, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength?” It seems that John’s story of God’s victory over death is a reminder of divine weakness rather than a story of God’s overpowering and triumphant omnipotence. Maybe the Gospel has never been about absolute and total victories. Maybe the desire for such decisive victories is a mark of worldly wisdom rather than of divine foolishness. And thank God for divine foolishness!

Friends, may I invite you to ponder something? Call to mind to the resurrections you have experienced in your own lives. I know you have experienced resurrections or you would not be here. You are after all precious children of the Living God who is constantly leading us all out from our many graves. Think back to some of those moments in your life in which you were granted new life, moments in which you were brought through the valley of the shadow of death and given a new beginning. Maybe your resurrection came on the far side of a battle with depression, addiction, abuse, or the painful loss of a loved one through a ruptured relationship? What were your resurrections like? If you ask me that question, I will tell you in all honesty that my resurrections from the traumas of painful loss have left me with open wounds. No, the wounds are not an open sore. But I am still haunted by the pain of my wounding. My resurrections mean that God constantly gives me the courage to bear my open wounds, but I can tell you no clean and tidy story in which I have come into an unblemished life free from every trace of the losses I have suffered. If you catch me telling such a neat and simple story, you can be sure I am prevaricating. That, by the way, is just a fancy word for lying.

So, thank God then for the beautiful honesty of John’s resurrection narrative. Thank God our Resurrected Jesus isn’t cleaned up pretty and made completely whole because I don’t think that I could believe in that kind of resurrection. And thank God for the courage and wisdom of our beloved brother Thomas. We saddle him with that moniker “doubting Thomas,” but surely he was right and wise to say, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Thomas goes before us and says, Oh, wounded Messiah, only you can I love. Only you can I trust. Only in you can I find my companion, “a fellow sufferer who understands.”

When Jesus invites us to put our hands in his side, he also grants us permission to just stop, stop pretending that everything is alright with us. If even God Incarnate has not been made whole after resurrection, then, we too can be honest and vulnerable and say to each other, “See the mark of the nails on my hand. See, I too carry with me an open wound or two.”

Oh, my beloved siblings in faith! How good it is to be part of a beloved community that does not need to pretend, a community of candor, a democracy of the broken and beloved. And how lovely that our worst wounds have not closed us in on ourselves into postures of defense isolation and self-protection but that our open wounds keeps our bodies and our hearts open to each other and to the pains of the world’s woundedness!

How can you tell the difference between a resurrection wound and an unhealed wound? A resurrection wound binds us to each other. An unhealed wound drives us into alienation and keeps us separated from each other.

A resurrected Christ who still bears his wounds is the only believable savior in this difficult season of ongoing death and loss. An account of Jesus who is no longer broken open to the world would be a trivializing vision that fails to acknowledge the cost of life in a world replete with violence and wounding. For those on the underside of this COVID crisis, a Christ without the marks of his crucifixion would be unrecognizable. Resurrection gives us strength to bear our wounds but does not erase them. 

Christian communities have always affirmed faith in resurrection despite enduring loss and bereavement. For communities on the margins, especially communities subjected to oppression and enslavement, faith in resurrection has never been a Pollyannaish refusal of suffering and death. The Christian symbol of resurrection admits of many readings, but any magical interpretation that minimizes pain could neither console nor encourage.

The wounds of the resurrected Christ do more than offer us consolation. They most certainly give us the strength and courage to name, honor, and attend to our own wounds, wounds that do not magically disappear with the coming of new life. But Christ’s wounded body is also an urgent call, a summons to prophetic attention. Those wounds offer consolation but they also command us to urgent action. Christians cannot claim to follow the crucified Lord while ignoring contemporary crucifixions or worse still perpetuating them. His still broken body compels us to put an end to wounds still inflicted by racism, poverty, and unequal access to health care.

Tragically, those wounds are unevenly distributed. As we are learning from the exorbitant death rates among African-Americans, Latinx communities, and immigrants nationwide in the midst of this COVID crisis, the ongoing legacy of systematic racism is crucifying some while others shelter in relative safety. To use the language of the liberation theologian, Ignacio Ellacuria, some among us are “the crucified peoples of history” while others continue to profit from crucifying structures. The wounds on the body of Christ confront us with a disturbing and distressing question. Where do you, where do I stand? Are we, in the safety of our first world privilege, complicit with the crucifying structures and forces of history? If so, Christ’s wounds shout out to us, “Stop putting me back on the Cross for I am always to be found in the bodies of the vulnerable! Stop your complacency with the death-dealing work of those who care more about the economy than keeping the elderly and the immunocompromised alive. Stop surrendering to the status quo which demands human sacrifice for the sake of the market! His wounds cry out to us go and crucify no more!

Whatever new life will look like in the coming months and years, a genuine Easter hope will refuse a complacent longing for “a return to normal.” Who wants normalcy when it has resulted in global failure at every level of common life, in politics, ecology, economics, and healthcare? Only those who continue to profit from those broken systems.

To be tutored by the Christian resurrection story is to see through the hollow impulse to cling to an obsolete world. Genuine resurrection is no zombie resuscitation where old patterns return only to lumber along undead. The deadliest of those patterns is the refusal to acknowledge our complex and precarious rootedness in the nature. A virus, one hundred and twenty nanometers in diameter, has brought human civilization to a grinding halt. It mocks our pretense that we can somehow survive while ignoring the natural word and without a care for the fragile ecosystems that keep us alive. The wounded earth also awaits resurrection.

Call me a doubter, but like Thomas, I too doubt any talk of Easter hope that dismisses the wounds of this historical moment. Nor will I believe in resurrection if I see no signs of a new world that is kinder more just, and more resilient. No zombie normalcy for me, thank you! Can such a new world emerge from this crisis? I believe so. That confidence is what it means to have faith not just in Jesus’s resurrection but also in ours.

Benediction:

Dear Siblings in Christ, Children of the Most Holy, may our wounded savior grant you courage and strength to bear your wounds not to hide them. May the Spirit of the Resurrected One empower us to find joy, create beauty, sing and love each other into consolation and healing. May Christ’s wounds put an end to worldly longing for clean and absolute victories. May Christ’s resurrection wounds bind us in solidarity to each other. Be filled with the Holy Spirit and go forth into the world to take down the crucified peoples of the world from their crosses. Amen!

(c) 2020 John J. Thatamanail
All rights reserved.

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