When I had just graduated from High School, I went on a whirlwind trip to Europe for two weeks…one of those, “visit every country you can in thirteen days” sorts of tours…mostly we just packed and unpacked suitcases. But one memory of this trip stands out prominently. Our first stop was Amsterdam and there we visited the Rijksmuseum, one of the finest museums in Europe…rooms filled with the works of Hals, of Durer, of Van Gogh….but Rembrandt’s works were the ones that captured my imagination the most….his expressive and mysterious use of light…on his subjects’ faces, but mostly on their hands. Some say it is reason and cognition that make us human, but I want to say that our hands figure in as well in no small way.
The Gospel text for the second Sunday of Easter, this coming Sunday, is the story of so-called doubting Thomas. You know the story: the risen Jesus appears to the disciples in the afternoon on the day of the resurrection and sends upon them the Holy Spirit. (Unlike Luke’s account in Acts where the Holy Spirit is imparted at Pentecost, some fifty days after the resurrection) Thomas is not present for some unknown reason, and after hearing the disciples’ account of Jesus’ appearance, declares that the only way he will believe that the Christ is risen is to touch his very wounds by which he is crucified….A week later, we are told in the narrative that Jesus appears again to the disciples and Thomas this time is present…and indeed places his hands into the wounds of the risen Christ….and immediately he believes, and confesses, “my Lord and my God.” What do we make of this story? We know the gospel of John, even more than the other gospels is highly interpretive, highly metaphorical, philosophical and theological as to who this Jesus is (Word Logos, Vine, Shepherd, doorway, etc.)….in other words this isn’t intended as historical narrative, but an impassioned vision of who this raised Christ is, and even as much, a vision of who the raised people who follow him are.
So what is this strange story telling us? First that resurrection is tactile…one knows of it through the hands…our hands the most sensory parts of our bodies….It is through human touch through which our deepest knowledge is transfered….It is through touch that healing occurs (doctors are taught to touch their patients)…God’s light illuminates our minds and our hearts…our faces aglow with the truth, as if in a Rembrandt painting….light from the mysterious source….but it is through our hands that this light makes its way into the world….Our hands the outward and visible signs of God’s love that changes, rebuilds, reconciles, heals, feeds, embraces…our hands the means of our vocation which is to love the world and to celebrate that love.
Look at your hands….the ropey veins bearing their commerce back inward for nurture….the lines of the palms: runes of knowledge the ancients left for us….that scar since age twelve….the myriad signs of the work they have done….a worn elegance really….so much so that the painter glorified them…..a map of the world, our hands, a map of our true humanity….that it is the tactile through which we truly know; our hands enlightened to touch the wounded places of our world…to know by touch the wounded Christ who still offers us his wounds to be healed, the wounded Christ: the shamed, the dispossessed, the thirsty and hungry and the victims of violence and injustice….and there we must offer our hands empowered by the Spirit….the Spirit of God as much in our hands as in our heads and hearts….and to place our hands in the wound of the world is to know God face to face…hand to hand…. “My Lord and my God.”
