John 20:24-29

“Jesus Touches Thomas” by Chelsea Page

This past week May Lee took me and Rola to get a massage. It was a fantastic opportunity to rub out and relax from all the kinks and hard work of getting ready for Easter. If there are any of you who have never had a full-body massage I recommend you put it on your bucket list pronto. That kind of touch is incredibly healing.

So as I lay there in the darkened room tending to my body’s feelings, I thought about this gospel passage and I wondered, Was the resurrected Jesus really still hurting? Yes, he’s got these wounds, but are they real? After all, it’s Easter. This is the time when we learn what it means to live a risen life, a resurrected life, when pain is transformed, or at least we learn to rise above it.

It is truly startling in this gospel story to see that the glorious resurrected Jesus is not some glowing spiritual vision, but rather a bloody, traumatized BODY. “Put your finger here,” he says to Thomas. “Put out your hand, and place it in my side.” I hear this and wince, thinking of my own wounds and how it has hurt to have them touched. Why not just show his wounds and stop at that? Wouldn’t that be enough to prove it was really him, the guy from the cross? Why all this touching? I think Jesus offered his wounds to be touched, to prove that they are real.

Friends, our wounds are real. Our wounds matter. Many of us find ourselves in this first week of Easter still hurting for various reasons; I know for me, the best I can get in my spiritual life is joy MIXED with pain. This does NOT mean we are not fully capable of living into Easter right here and now. Jesus wants us to know that our wounds can co-exist with resurrection. Otherwise we might look at them and think we have failed to receive new life. In reality, limitation or suffering is no sign of failure, but rather a symptom of life fully lived.

Jesus also says, “Blessed are you who believe without seeing.” It’s like he’s telling the disciples, “Believe in what you haven’t yet fully seen.” More healing is around the corner. After all, it’s only been a few days since he came back to life, and his wounds haven’t yet had time to heal. This human life that Jesus shares with us is animated by the energy of healing and the drive for recovery. That means resurrection is a process we can believe in.

Friends, Easter is actually less about joy than it is about hope. Easter gives us the ability to believe in ourselves and others despite our present woundings. Thomas learned compassion by touching Jesus’s wounds first-hand. Compassionate hope enabled the first Christians in the book of Acts to live together with one heart and mind, being tender and gentle with one another’s wounds. As we share in this first resurrection story of Easter, may we also learn and practice compassion with ourselves and others.