“Scars” - April 8, 2018

John 20:19-31

  

Every year, on the Sunday after Easter, the same reading comes around about Thomas saying that the only way he’ll believe that the other disciples have really seen Jesus is if he not only sees him, too, but sees the scars of the crucifixion on his body.  Maybe Thomas wanted physical confirmation that this was not some kind of impostor putting himself forward.  Maybe he wanted to know that the other disciples hadn’t had some kind of mass delusion brought about by wishful thinking or mental exhaustion.  Maybe he wanted to know they hadn’t seen a ghost.  However, I’d like to think that maybe there was more to it than any of those impulses.

I once came across a quotation from Allan Boesak, who was a prominent anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1970’s and 1980’s that has stuck with me.  He said, “When we go before Him, God will ask, ‘Where are your wounds?’  And we will say, ‘I have no wounds.’  And God will ask, ‘Was nothing worth fighting for?’”

The book of Isaiah [53:46] tells us about what could be expected of the Messiah.  He would have wounds to show.  He would have found something worth fighting for.  It says,

“Surely he has borne our infirmities
   and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
   struck down by God, and afflicted. 
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
   crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
   and by his bruises we are healed. 
All we like sheep have gone astray;
   we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
   the iniquity of us all.”

Thomas’s comment, “Let me see his wounds, and I’ll believe it’s him,” carries a kind of plea for assurance.  If those wounds are there, it means he has seen us as worth fighting for, and there is hope even for those that everybody else gives up on.

            A man named Marshall Shelley tells a story about sticking with people because Jesus has stuck with us.  He writes,

“The worship team was making its way off the stage, and Pastor Mike was making his way up, when he noticed movement off to the side of the auditorium.  A woman he had never seen before, with flaming red hair, suddenly stood to her feet, eyes shut, face to the sky, hands in the air.  At the top of her lungs, she started uttering unintelligible syllables …

The whole church was shocked into complete silence.  Pastor Mike was as stunned as everyone else.

‘This was a 135-year-old Baptist church where this sort of thing had never been done,’ Mike said later.  ‘Other than the woman belting it out, you could have heard a pin drop.  The look on most of the faces of the congregation was pure terror.  A few were looking at me as if they thought this was something staged for effect, a creative sermon intro.  But it wasn’t.’ …

When he got to her, Mike gently laid his hand on her shoulder to let her know he was there.

With that, she switched and began to speak in English, but still with a voice that carried to every corner of the room: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the Ancient of Days, the Lion of Judah.  I have created the world, the firmament above and the earth below.  Mighty are the works of my hands, and marvelous is that which is made, great in glory and in majesty.’

…As he watched her speak, he noticed that sitting next to her was a man who seemed very uncomfortable, who was touching her arm trying to coax her down.

At that point the woman said, ‘I love my daughter with a great love, and though she has been in mental hospitals, even now my favor rests upon her. …’

Mike bent down to quietly ask the man, ‘Is she speaking about herself right now?’  The man nodded.  So Mike asked, ‘What is her name?’  He responded, ‘Darlene.’ …

With that, Pastor Mike turned to the rapt faces in the congregation and with the benefit of the microphone said gently, ‘Church, this is Darlene, and she is our guest today.  I think that we should pause right now and pray for her.’”[1]

So that’s what they did, and when he said, “Amen,” she jumped back onto the same track as everyone else, and the service proceeded as previously planned.

            Now, in the book I took this from, there’s a dramatic twist, which is that a couple of weeks later, Mike got a call from Darlene, who was in a hospital getting some help and some rest.  A few months after that, Mike was greeting people after church and a visitor very shyly asked if he recognized her, which he hadn’t until that point.  He gave her a hug, and she eventually became one of the leaders in that church, with only the two of them knowing she was the same person.

            That’s the happy ending, but I wonder about her father, who was sitting there with her the Sunday of her meltdown.  I would be reasonably certain that he had done a lot of praying for her himself, and that she would not have found the help she needed if it hadn’t been for him.  I would be surprised if his faithfulness toward her didn’t both help her to keep faith and also leave him with considerable wounds and scars of his own. 

The people who are not always quite as front-and-center, the people who are the Thomases or the Matthews rather than the Peters and the Pauls, or Salome, who doesn’t get much mention at all, but who was right there when it was time to do the sad, hard, necessary work of cleaning and embalming Jesus’ corpse.  They often end up with scars and wounds of their own, and none of the attention.  They may be parents or friends who have answered the phone in the middle of the night, who have stayed beside someone at an emergency room, who have listened helplessly to painful stories, who have been the shoulder that is cried on.  They’ve paid the bail and they’ve arranged the therapy sessions.  They’ve had to say, “No,” when their hearts wanted to say, “Yes.”  They’ve had to say, “Yes,” when they wanted to say, “No.”  Those are people who will not need to show God their wounds.  He can see them on their hearts.

They also need the reassurance written out in Jesus’ scars and wounds, the ones that Thomas saw, those that come from the deepest cruelties and deepest suffering of all.  They need to see not only that there is something worth fighting for, but that the fight can be won, if not by them (which they usually learn the hard way), but by Jesus, who has been there and back again.

“Although the doors were shut, Jesus came 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.’”  [John 20:26b-27]

The good news is not Jesus’ death, but his death and resurrection taken together.  He doesn’t come through it unscathed, anymore than anybody else.  But when we see that he has come through it, then we know that by his grace we will, too.

            Jesus said to Thomas,

“Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” [John 20:29]

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[1] Marshall Shelley, Ministering to Problem People in Your Church: What to Do with Well-Intentioned Dragons (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2013), 91-93.