This sermon was preached on the 27th of April 2025, The Second Sunday of Easter, in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda-Lesmurdie.
Texts:
The risen Jesus bore wounds. Wounds in his hands; wounds in his feet; a wound in his side; and for a very long time, that surprised me.
If the Bible didn’t tell us what we just heard, then I would have pictured the risen Jesus as healed entirely – pristine and perfect. His hands healed, his feet healed, the wound in his side healed. The marks of minor childhood injuries, scars on knees and feet, all healed. Even the callouses upon his hands from working his trade, healed.
I have my wounds. I have wounds, physical, mental, and spiritual. To be human is to be wounded. With time, some wounds heal, and fade away. Eventually, they are forgotten. But other wounds stay with us. They become knit into our very being. And it hurts, it hurts most keenly when someone pokes one of them, even if they didn’t mean to, even if they didn’t know the wound was there.
This community, gathered together today, has its wounds. In the time I’ve ministered here, you have told me of many of them. Some of our wounds are fresh: I have experienced them alongside you.
I have wounds, you have wounds, our community has wounds. And so does our society. Surely we yearn for these wounds to be healed.
And yet, our Saviour stood before the disciples wounded. Indeed, Jesus held up his wounds to eyes of the disciples. Jesus even invited Thomas to test them with his hands.
Surely to be resurrected is to be healed, and healed in the deepest and most profound way? So why did the risen Jesus still bear the marks of cruel Roman nails?
The risen Jesus is the ultimate disclosure of who God is to humanity – to all of us. In the risen Jesus we see who God is, and we learn what we might be: what humanity was made to be.
And so of course the risen Jesus bears wounds. Jesus bears wounds because the eternal nature of Christ is not to be above, or apart, but among us, alongside us, with us in eternal solidarity.
The God of our imagining, of our vainglory, would have taken himself down from the Cross, as the jeering passers-by urged. That God would have healed himself, and then imposed himself upon us. But that’s not God. That’s a tyrant; a terrible reflection of humanity at its worst.
The true God, our God, chose another path. A path that no human being could have imagined on their own. Jesus went to the Cross and took upon himself the worst that humanity can do. He took upon himself a cruel death, the sum of human sin, the totality of the violence we do to one another, of the violence we do to God.
He was wounded, just as we are wounded. His wounds were knit into his person, just as our wounds are knit into us.
Jesus took death and sin upon himself, and he died. And then God, Holy and Triune, replied with resurrection. God replied not with vengeance, but with eternal life.
We have been freed from sin. Death has been put to flight.
And so, let us cry alleluia!
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
The wounds of Jesus do not proclaim the cruelty of Roman soldiers, nor the cruelty of humanity. They proclaim charity, and love. The charity and love of God who remains steadfast always in their love for us, even when we turn our backs. The charity and love of God, who came among us not to be served but to serve; to give his life as a ransom for us.
You have your wounds. By God’s grace, let your wounds also proclaim charity and love.
Our deepest wounds find their origin in the sin of the previous generation, and the generation before that, and so on, and so on, all the way back to Adam. Our deepest wounds find their origin in cycles of trauma and violence and retribution that have crashed through the generations.
But Christ has freed us from that.
We have nothing to fear, and so we are free to forgive. We are free to turn the other cheek. We are free to love.
And if we do that – if, by God’s grace, we dare to do that, then our wounds change as well. They will not be erased, but they will be changed in significance.
Saint Augustine, speaking of the wounds of those who gave their lives for Christ, speculated that the wounds upon their risen bodies in the Kingdom, “[would] not be a deformity, but a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body."
The risen, wounded Jesus is the ultimate model for who we are to be. And so, part of living a life of discipleship is becoming comfortable with our own wounds, contemplating them, and understanding how they affect our behaviour.
We may need help from professionals, from doctors, counsellors, and spiritual advisers, in doing this. There’s no shame in that. We should get the help we need, so that our wounds do not continue to hurt us, and so our wounds do not cause us to harm our fellow people.
Remember the words of Jesus, spoken once he knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father.
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)
Embrace the hope of the Risen Christ.
Love God, and love one another.