First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
3 April 2005
You Wanna See Somethin' Permanent?
How many of you remember that classic scene from Jaws, when Quint, Brodie and Hooper are sitting around a table in the dank cabin of Quint's boat, the Orca. They are taking a break from hunting down the fearsome shark, swilling a few drinks, and they start to compare their scars. Brodie, the chief of police, is minding his own business, tending to some scrape on his arm he got earlier that day. Quint, undoubtedly the manliest and most street wise of the three, notices what Brodie is up to and says, "Chief. Don't you worry about it, cheif. It won't be permanent. You wanna see something permanent? Bababoom? Hey, Hoop? You wanna feel somethin' permanent? Just put your hand underneath my cap. You just feel that little lump? Knockanolum! St. Patty's day. Boston." The dialogue leads into a variety of war stories that correspond to different parts of the men's bodies. Hooper pulls up his sleeve and says to Quint: "I got that beat." He points to a large scar on his arm. "It's a moray eel. Bit right through my wetsuit." After a few more exchanges, the scars begin to cut deeper. It's Hooper's turn again. "I got the creme de la creme. Right here. Hold on. Yeah, you see that?" Brody says, "You're wearing a shirt. How can I see anything?" Hooper replies, "It's right there. Mary Ellen Moffit. She broke my heart."
Some scars, be they physical, psychic or emotional, are surely permanent. We all have a few to either hide or show off. And in today's passage, the disciple Thomas (a.k.a "doubting Thomas") gets himself a first hand look and feel at the permanence of the scars of Christ, scars so deep they would have undoubtedly brought a sobering silence to the drunken conversation on the boat; scars so deep and permanent they survived the very death and resurrection of Christ himself.
In Carvaggio's 16th century masterpiece painting entitled "The Incredulity of Thomas", Thomas is stooping down next to Christ with his finger, a full knuckle deep, embedded inside the bloody tear in Jesus' side. Looking at this image and resisting the urge to look away, one wonders if such a graphic scene isn't a little gratuitous. This is not kid's stuff. Yet somehow Christ doesn't seem to mind. He even encourages Thomas' probing when he says, "Reach out your hand, and put it in my side!" What I want to know is "why?" Granted, this passage is trying to offer hard evidence of the resurrection to the doubting Thomas's in every age, but why all the talk about marks of the nails and putting fingers in the wounds? If all Thomas needed was proof, wouldn't the mere sight of Jesus standing there have been enough for him. Couldn't a simple handshake or a touch of Christ's shoulder have done the trick? Why does he need to see and touch Jesus' wounds? Why bring Jesus' back all scarred up?
To answer these questions, we have to first set aside the traditional and I might add narrow reading of Thomas as a skeptic looking for proof of Christ's resurrection. Thomas gets a bad rap. He was, after all, the only one of the twelve disciples who wasn't hiding away behind locked doors. It could be said that Thomas' faith was the most courageous of the pack if only because he, for whatever reason, did not join the rest in their hiding, and that he would not settle for just seeing Jesus. He demanded "to see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put his finger in the mark of the nails, and put his finger in his side". Can you imagine the chutzpah of this guy? Surely that kind of demand is coming from some place deeper than doubt. He wasn't just looking for evidence that the resurrection happened. He needed to know that the resurrection was real, as real as any human pain and suffering is real. He needed to know that post resurrection Christ hadn't changed too much from his form self! He needed to know that Jesus scars didn't just disappear, but that Jesus was, in death and in life beyond death, still willing to bear the marks of human pain and suffering.
The problem with Easter for so many Christians and non-Christians alike, and maybe Thomas too, is not just the implausibility of someone dying and rising again. That IS hard to believe. Even harder to get our minds and hearts around is the finality and the triumph of the uniquely Christian proclamation that comes with it. God has conquered death itself! Life is victorious over death! The strife is o'er! ALL things are made new! A simple "Oh really?" uttered from the mouth of a Holocaust survivor could easily muffle more than few of our joyous Easter Halleluiah's. How do we hold our Easter faith in God's triumph over death in the face of the all too permanent scars of suffering in human history? Well...Thomas found that we may not have too. Only when Thomas is convinced of the reality of Jesus' lasting scars, does he breathe a sigh of relief and say: "My Lord and My God...You are the one! You are the one, whose love is so deep that you have carried the scars of our human pain even through death! You are the one with compassion enough to understand that some scars ARE permanent! Because you bear the marks of a survivor, a survivor of the crucifixion no less, I can say to any 'oh really?'... 'Yes, really!!!' The good news is real. Life has triumphed over death. Though our sins are forgiven, our suffering is not forgotten... 'Yes, really' ...You are my savior, my wounded healer, my God." Perhaps this was the proof for which Thomas was searching—not proof of Jesus' identity as the risen Messiah, but proof of Jesus' solidarity with, and ability to relate to, the pain and suffering and wounds of humanity—a solidarity which did not die on the cross. Thomas was rightfully doubtful of a risen Savior that has risen above the suffering of humanity, as if with a new and unblemished body and a fresh white garment to boot. In assuring himself that the risen Christ still bears the wounds, Thomas affirms for himself and for us that the Easter story goes hand in hand, or hand in side, if you will, with the story of Good Friday. You can't have one without the other. The American author Naomi Wolf has written that "Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria".1 Thomas wanted to make sure that by touching the source of Jesus' pain, that everyone knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that pain is real, both before and after the resurrection.
Now...here's the rub of all of this for us, the application if you will. When we realize that the wounds of Christ are our wounds, that Christ died to share in our suffering and to give us the knowledge that God knows our suffering, we realize that there is a whole world full of wounds to reach out and touch. This passage makes it clear that the risen Christ lives on and continues to share our suffering, and that he wants us to live on and continue to share his. Christ says to Thomas and to us, "Reach out and put a finger in my side". Know the reality of the pain and suffering of humanity! Then and only then will you know that I am your Savior and that nothing will separate you from the love of God, not even your deepest, ugliest scar. Augustine said of the martyrs who died in Christ's name, that their scars would last in the afterlife too, as and I quote "marks of honor" that would "add lustre to their appearance, and a spiritual, if not a bodily beauty".2 Can we even begin to imagine our own scars adding some spiritual, or maybe even physical, beauty to our lives? Or are most of us too afraid to reach a full knuckle deep into our pain of another. James Baldwin once wrote that "The inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive."
Imagine that touching someone's scars, literally feeling someone's pain, is to know the beauty of another person; and it is to know how to be alive. Think for a moment of where you're scars are. Physical scars. Emotional scars. Spiritual scars even. The existential ones may come to mind first. A loss loved one, or a broken heart. Mary Ellen Moffit, right? For me her name was Rebecca Snedeker. These are permanent scars. The don't go away. Or maybe it was an experience of trauma and abuse that will never fully heal. Even the living Christ would not dare take that pain away nor try to say "Hey, I came to back to life for you. Get over it, would you?" He might reach out his hand to us though and offer whatever healing he could. Here at First Church, it's been my observation that we do pretty well when it comes to offering each other a gentle touch in moments of existential crises. But there are other wounds, of a more socio-economic nature, that may cut as deeply into our psyches that we might just as well cover up. There are some scars that we're afraid to touch, perhaps because they are scars we can do something about so long as we're not afraid to claim our power.
We've started having conversations lately where we've been trying to share with each other some of the scars and sometimes open wounds of what it means to live and work and have families in this area. We've been talking about the kind of pressures that keep us up at night. If you're in credit card or some other financial debt right now, chances are you're hurting. If you have no savings, and you're looking down the road to retirement, chances are you're feeling really anxious. If you're a parent working crazy hours and your boss doesn't what flex-time is, chances are you're really frustrated. If you're one of the 460,000 people who can't afford your health insurance right now, chances are you're really scared. If you can't find the childcare or eldercare resources you need in order to stay sane with all the other demands on your time, you're hurting. I'd love to have a show of hands right now of how many scars or open wounds I just touched even by mentioning these things. I won't, at least not this Sunday. But I ask you, why are so many reluctant to talk about and share these scars in this community, this church community. Is it shame? Is it pride? Is it a faulty assumption that work, money and family matters are private matters? Is it an equally faulty assumption that work and economic pressures are hard only on the urban poor and not on middle-class and even upper middle class individuals and families who live in suburban areas. Or is it the sense that there's nothing we can do to fix these problems so why bother whining. True, there's not much we can do alone. There's not much we can do as a congregation, except maybe to offer some temporary assistance here and there. There is something we can do if we work together with other congregations.
Later today, a group of us will be gathering with members of about 15 other congregations in the area at Beth El Temple Center in Belmont to share some of what we've been hearing about these pressures in our congregations. We'll be looking ahead and trying to develop a community organizing strategy about how we might take collective action on some these pressures. This effort is being coordinated by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization who is already having an impact in our state. After rounds of small groups meeting in congregations back in 2000, for example, they heard their members sharing the scars left on their families because of the lack of affordable housing. They raised 5 million dollars of their own money and backed a petition drive that helped to persuade the State Legislature to approve the creation of a $100 million Affordable Housing Trust Fund. In May 2004, 1,000 members of GBIO congregations in Roxbury, South Boston, Dorchester, and Mattapan had a meeting with the president of Citizens Bank. Upon feeling the pressure of such a large group, the bank agreed to change its wire-transfer fee structures that were hitting immigrant families especially hard. GBIO recently held closing negotiations with bank officials to provide more-affordable loans, insurance, and banking fees. Leveraging the power of their institutional members and the 10 million dollars they had collectively invested in Citizen's Bank, they were able to acquire premium banking services for individuals who are part of GBIO congregations, even if they only have a buck to open a savings account. All of this action started with conversations like the ones we've been having, one's where people were touching each others scars and working together to offer understanding, healing and change. One more example: Last fall, in a meeting with 500 congregational leaders, GBIO's campaign for a "culture of respect" for residents and caregivers in nursing homes resulted in a formal advisory to over 30 area nursing home administrators issued by the Massachusetts Attorney General, Tom Reilly.
By telling our stories around tables, maybe not in the dank cabin of the Orca, but in the fellowship halls of churches and synagogues, we are building relationships with others. We are not standing alone to address concerns that are of mutual interest. Our collective stories, our collective scars become the basis for imagining change for problems that have a scale beyond the reach of any one person, congregation, or religious denomination. Building relationships, hundreds and thousands at a time, leads to the kind of real power that can effect lasting social and economic change. GBIO is beginning to leverage its considerable power now to address even the open wounds that I know exist in this congregation. Leaders are building a strategy to address personal indebtedness and to support the Healthcare for All campaign. I hope you'll all stay tuned to this exciting work.
In the end, its highly unlikely, if I may do a little doubting myself, that any of us will ever have the opportunity Thomas had, that is, the opportunity to see or touch the risen Christ himself. We may never see the risen Christ in such graphic or bodily detail, nor will we ever be able to put our fingers, knuckle deep, in his wounds. Perhaps this is why, at the end of the day, Jesus tells us that "Blessed are those who have not seen, but believe!" He is exempting himself from the picture. He is telling us "blessed are those who do not need to see me. Blessed are those who don't get hung up on empirical evidence of the resurrection. Blessed are those who will know that God lives by touching and by being touched by one another. You don't need to see me—just take a look at yourselves. Share the stories of you scars whether they are permanent or whether there is maybe something we can together do to offer them healing. "Just take a look around you" Jesus says, "look at all those permanent scars in your own lives and in the world, and I will be there." It is only when we see and touch those tears in the lives our fellow human beings that we too will become believers in the risen Christ, in that hope against hope, in the power of God to transform the world through the very touch of our hands. Amen.
1 Naomi Wolf (b. 1962), U.S. author. The Beauty Myth,"Violence" (1990).
2 St. Augustine, City of God, Book 22, Chapter 19.
© 2005, Daniel Smith