THE WOUNDS AND THE WATER

Whenever I hear this resurrection story about Jesus and his wounds, I can’t help but wonder whether Jesus eventually got around to asking the obvious question of his disciples: namely, how has your week been?  “How are you transformed in the light of all you have seen and heard through my passion and death? What sort of life will yours be, now that I am no longer with you in the flesh?  How are you making sense of it all, and what plans are you making ready for whatever comes next?  When you walk out those doors and back in to the chaos that is Jerusalem, for those who have been my followers, what do you expect to find?  Where will you go?  What will you do?”  Which really would simply have been a more polite way of posing the rather embarrassing question: “How come it’s been a week now since the world has been upended, and you’re all still sitting here in this locked room?  You’ve gone no place, you’ve engaged nobody but yourselves, and it seems that absolutely nothing has changed either in here or out there.”

By this time, all the apostles except Thomas had seen and rejoiced over the resurrected Lord.  They had received his blessing of peace, and been given the mission to go, to be his agents of forgiveness in the world.  They had been empowered by the breath of God’s Holy Spirit.  They had been strengthened sufficiently for what they’d been invited to do.  And nothing happened.  It had been a week.  Jesus could well have asked, “Why am I still having to pass through locked doors just to get to you?  How long is it going to be until your discovery of me starts actually to mean anything in the way that you live?”

Those wounds of his that figure so prominently in this story are not merely curiosities to be contemplated from a safe arm’s length, as they seem to have been for those disciples.  And the wounds are not simply forensic evidence that, yes, this is the real guy, as they seem to have been for Thomas.  The wounds are far more than that.  They are a commission and a command, and an answer to all of those questions I just mentioned.  We cannot follow this savior without sharing in his wounds, making them our own – which in turn actually requires that we take Jesus with us when we leave the safety of this room.  To remain here as if we would rather claim the identity of disciple without getting into all those ugly, painful, messy wounds is to fail, to fail both to understand Jesus and his life mission, and our necessary part in it now.  He showed them his hands and he showed them his side as a way of saying that here’s what they’d be committed to doing in following him, and they must never forget it. 

Today our Christian church uses the symbol of water to confront us with the very same reality, the waters of Baptism.  Every time we come through the doors of church.  Did you see the Easter Vigil last weekend and how water is so central to all that we do in putting on Christ?  Did you ever wonder why we have this very large pool of blessed water directly between where you and I now are and the doors into church – or more importantly the doors out of church?  The water, like the wounds, it is not merely something to be marveled at or touched for a few moments.  It’s meant to be confronted.  It’s meant to call us anew every time we encounter it to remember and to rededicate ourselves to what our allegiance to Jesus requires of us – all of it, including the wounds.  Yes, there is glory and peace and courage to be found here and then taken outside, but there’s no access to all of that apart from the water, apart from the wounds.

So let us move out from the security of our merely partial embrace of the mission.  Let us see and feel in the waters of our Baptism not only comfort and promise but also responsibility and, yes, occasional danger.  Let us be glad, glad to be formed here again, and glad that we will do so again next weekend to encounter the Lord in Eucharist, but let that not be because we never left here in the first place.  The scars, the wounds, they’re more often to be found “out there,” and when we experience them it may just be because we’re taking our role exactly seriously enough, and doing what has been requested of us by our risen Lord.