It is a beautiful Sunday morning here in my corner of this wounded world. The sun is shining. It's warm enough to eat breakfast outside, at least while wearing a wool sweater. I'm wearing my hand-knit purple sweater with a pink turtleneck underneath, I'm a veritable hyacinth or May tulip sitting outside in the breeze. The forsythia blooms along the side of my house survived two nights of wet snow this week. The early red tulips, the small kind that hunker their blooms down close to the sturdy green leaves, also made it through the storms and are full-on open as the sun climbs to the top of the sky. I've heard the birds and seen the bunny. My neighbor sits outside on her patio next door. The occasional biker or runner streams silently past in the street.
And yet it is a wounded world. God's wounded world.
I spent some time with the story of "Doubting Thomas" this week, in order to make an online Sunday School video. Growing up, in the Lutheran Sunday School and grade school of my childhood, the telling of this story always shamed Thomas for his doubt. Doubt was a bad thing, born of fear and a too-shallow understanding of who Jesus was. Jesus' words at the end of the story, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed," were an opportunity to congratulate ourselves for our own faith, which didn't require the physical presence of our Savior entering through a locked door on cue.
It will not surprise you that I am trying to think about this story in other ways today. And what's at issue isn't the question of doubt. Let's just all accept that doubt can be a very good thing -- a prompt to explore, to be curious, to question, test, grow, even challenge God to show up. Or to learn how to live with uncertainty, because this is the life skill we need now.
The children's Bible story book I used for Sunday School calls this story "Thomas Wonders."
"What?" Thomas says to the ten disciples who were in the locked room on the first Easter evening, when Thomas was absent. "Whaaaat? You saw Jesus?"
Honestly, why would Thomas trust the other ten -- cowering ex-fishermen, soon-to-be ex-disciples of an itinerant failed rebel against Rome? These men — and let's assume there were women in the room, too —were traumatized. What would come of their fright?
When Jesus appears again, eight days later, Thomas is there. And he gets what he asked for -- he touches the wounded hands, the wounded side of Jesus. Back in the Sunday School leaflet, or second-grade religion class at St. John School, this part of the story was the proof. Proof that this really was Jesus, the one who had been crucified. So believing in him was the logical thing to do.
It's interesting that in the story -- this part of the larger, mythical telling of Jesus' resurrection -- it's the wounds, the humanity that are the proof. Not a halo or a radiance, or even the power of coming through a locked door -- none of the things that might make the witnesses say, "Ooooo! God!" No, it's in the evidence of human suffering and pain that the disciples recognize Jesus. It's an important enough point to make that the gospel writer's account (and the oral tradition that preceded it perhaps) has this happen twice -- first to the ten, then to Thomas with the others present.
Christ walks, wounded, in a wounded world.
Much as I am thankful for the peace and beauty of this morning -- the bright red cardinal in the branches of the budding tree, birdsong mixed with the sound of conversation from next door as my neighbor chats cheerfully over FaceTime with family -- I remind myself that God is not just found in the beauty of nature. God is with us even as we ask "Whaat?"
In the wonders of how we're all wired temperamentally, I think there's science that shows some of us are better at certainty, some of us are more restless. But for all of us in this time of pandemic, may we, like Thomas, seek and find the grace to recognize Jesus in the wounded places.
Sunday School video is here for the curious. Touch the wounds tonight in your own hands as you pray.
