Today’s Gospel story begins with fear and confusion. The disciples worry that they are seeing a ghost. Jesus asks them: “Why are you frightened?” and he does something wild. Jesus points to his wounds. He shows his friends his wounded hands and feet.
This morning, I want to notice with you, that Jesus is risen with wounds. The resurrected Christ is not an image of so-called perfection. Rather, Jesus’ disciples know him by his brokenness. We heard echoes of this revelation last week as Jesus spoke to Thomas, “put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” In Jesus’ day, as in ours, surely, people were obsessed with bodily perfection. Young, strong, healthy bodies were idealized. And yet, Jesus is risen and wounded.
Jesus’ wounds are shocking. We believe that the resurrection is the beginning of the new creation. Jesus’ body has not simply been reanimated, but re-made. God has raised Jesus from the dead. Couldn’t God have healed his hands and feet? Yet Jesus rises with his wounds. Jesus carries his painful experience forward.
This appearance of a broken and yet risen Christ has been portrayed so often Christian iconography and art that it has a latin name: “Ostentio Vulnerum.” Literally this translates as the “showing of wounds.” I can’t help but take the cognates into modern English. Jesus appearing to his disciples, showing his hands, his feet, it is a display of ostentatious vulnerability.
Vulnerability and Brene Brown
I can’t spend time with the idea of vulnerability without turning to the scholar Brené Brown, who I like to point out is an Episcopalian. If you’ve not yet come across Brown’s work, I recommend her to you. She is a faculty member at the University of Houston’s school of Social work. She also publishes books, records podcasts, speaks across the country, and hangs out with Oprah and Richard Rohr. She is famous, and yet surprisingly she got famous by talking about shame.
Brown writes that our world builds up a certain picture of strength. We often perceive strength as perfection. Many of us carry an image around of someone who has no flaws, who does not know weakness, who has never failed. We strive to be that person, and we all fall short. Most of us carry an image of perfectionism around with us, and most of us judge ourselves as wanting, never living up to the image. Brown’s research debunks this strategy for living. Having studied how people work, she tells us: You’ll never live up to your image of perfection. Everyone fails. Everyone hurts. Everyone has wounds. What matters is what you do with your wounds.
In fact, Brown says, “The foundation of courage is vulnerability, the ability to navigate uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. It takes courage to open ourselves up…” We don’t find strength by ignoring our weakness, by shoving it aside. We only find strength when we are able to be ostentatious with our vulnerability, when we are able to know, embrace and share our wounds.
For Christians, wounds have meaning, vulnerability can help us to know who we are. This experience of the wounded and risen Christ has the power to transform.
The Wounded HEaler
When I was a young high school student, struggling to come to terms with my sexual orientation and the bullying I faced because of my perceived orientation, I read a book by the theologian and priest Henri Nouwen entitled “The Wounded Healer.” Nouwen argues that it is only from our wounds, from our own experience of loss, of pain, of suffering, that we are able to minister to others. If we shut part of our story away, we make ourselves less available to meet others in their pain. As a high-schooler, this gave a sense of meaning to the fear and pain I was facing. It also helped me to start to trust a handful of friends to share what I was going through. Thankfully, those friends met me with understanding and often shared their own sense of isolation, their own vulnerabilities and wounds.
We are made for vulnerability. We are made for love. We can only truly encounter one another when we are able to say, “I too have suffered.” We are only able to love another’s imperfections when we have given up on our own quest for perfectionism. We are only able to know God’s love when we accept that God loves our whole story, our whole self, even those parts we would wish to hide away.
The perfectionism with which we wrestle, can have really painful repercussions. This week two volunteers from our Cathedral were attacked outside St. John’s thrift shop downtown, by a man shouting homophobic slurs. They will be okay, their injuries are not life-threatening, but such an attack brings fear into the community. The violence that comes with hate, especially hate against the LGBTQ+ often comes from deeply personal fear. When we think of LGBTQ+ people, when churches teach, that LGBTQ+ people are “less than,” the results are often violent denial. I’ve reached out to Dean Kristi. There are plans for some sort of response, and as soon as we know the details, we will share them. We will pray for the volunteers, the Cathedral, and all for whom this violence hits close to home. Know you are not alone. Know that nothing will stop us from proclaiming the love of God for all in this place. No hate. No fear. No violence is greater than God’s love for LGBTQ+ people, God’s love for us all.
John Swinton and the Theology of Disability
One of the theologians who best reframes this perfectionism which gives rise to fear is a black Scottish Presbyterian named John Swinton. Swinton’s primary research asks theological questions about disability. Before he was a theologian, Swinton was a nurse working with patients with significant brain injury.
Swinton tells story after story of people with physical and intellectual disabilities who have been excluded from society. He speaks of people who live with profound loneliness, who feel abandoned. That abandonment is not morally neutral. In a society which privileges intellect, which idealizes certain kinds of bodies, alienation comes from stigma. Often our responses to those with disability are shaped by our own insecurities and fear.
Swinton has a clever way of naming this fear. He doesn’t just talk about disabled and able-bodied people. Instead Swinton uses the term “temporarily able-bodied.” He acknowledges that, given enough time, most of us will require assistance for mobility, many of us will face cognitive decline. Those of us who have so-called normal bodies now, have them just for now, we are “temporarily able-bodied.” Deep down, many of us know this, and we’re scared. Our fear causes us to avoid those who are disabled.
John Swinton doesn’t stay in the fear. He pushes us to think about God’s view of disability. He asks “can a person with a disability, particularly an intellectual disability be a disciple of Jesus?” We have built a hyper-intellectualized hyper-cognitive world. We tend to imagine belief to be something which happens within our brains. We assent to a particular set of propositions. But, Swinton asks, “is that what it means to be a disciple? To be a Christian? Do we have to be capable of believing in big ideas? Is that what matters to God?”
In addition to relating alienation of those with disabilities, John Swinton also tells counter-stories. He writes about communities of Christians, often small communities, that have learned to include and to love people with disabilities. Often these stories tell of the revelation of God’s love that can happen when we slow down enough to listen to, to be with, people who experience the world differently. He tells one story of a young man named Danny who lived with Down’s syndrome and a heart condition. Danny has come home to his community after a visit to the cardiologist.
One of his friends asked him where he had been. “To see the doctor,” replied Danny. “And what did the doctor do?” his friend asked. Danny replied, “He looked into my heart.” His friend smiled. “And what did he see there, Danny?” Danny paused and looked intently at his friend. “He saw Jesus,” replied Danny. “And what was Jesus doing?” Danny paused, smiled and looked away. Then he said, “He was resting.” Danny smiled and looked away. For Danny, having Jesus in his heart was not simply a useful way of describing and illustrating the pneumatological indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as those of us who interpret the presence of Jesus according to the machinations of our left brains might tend to do. For Danny, Jesus was literally in his heart and he was resting.
Swinton asks us to consider not just our own bodies, but the whole body of Christ. He asks us to remember that we are bound together, of one body, with those who are disabled. We are one body with downs syndrome, with autism, with dementia, with Alzheimer’s. We are not separate. When we turn away, we sin against our own body. When we embrace, we might catch a glimpse of the wholeness of God.
Risen with Wounds
This Easter season, I invite you to notice all of the beautiful imperfection around you. Notice that God’s new creation includes vulnerability. How many of us spend time and energy hiding our imperfections? How much money and anxiety do we spend masking our bodies, trying to conform to some image of perfection? What would it mean for us to be a people of ostentatious vulnerability?
When Jesus appeared to his disciples, he was not the image of perfection. Jesus’ resurrected body included his vulnerabilities. Christ is both risen and still wounded. The pain was not erased. The inconvenient was not hidden away.
If we are the body of Christ, we are wounded and yet risen, imperfect and yet moving forward. We can only truly know one another when we let down our facades, when we set aside games of perfection and power, when we are ostentatious with our vulnerability. And we will only know the breadth and depth of God’s love for us when we begin to embrace all the broken and yet holy people God has come to love. Jesus is risen with wounds, that we might know that in our woundedness, we too will rise. Alleluia.
Mike Angell 