How God deals with woundedness

Editor’s Note: The following homily was preached by Father Kevin Mohan, pastor of the Parish of Saint Monica, Atlantic City, on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 16. As the Catholic Church begins the Easter season, Father Mohan reflects on John 20:19-31, of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection and Thomas’ disbelief of the account.

God likes to deal with wounds. You and I might prefer to ignore them or be in denial about wounds. But God likes to deal with them. Saint Augustine says when a person goes to see a doctor, if he’s got something really wrong with him, it would be very foolish to hide that serious injury and tell the doctor, ‘Look I’ve got a hangnail on my pinky; treat me for this.’ [Meanwhile] there’s a gaping wound that he’s trying to hide from his doctor, the very person who could help. How foolish that would be, says Saint Augustine.

So, too, are we foolish if we, coming before God, try to hide our wounds from Him. When we look at the cross, or even if we look around the church and see the images of the Passion of Our Lord, we see that his body endured many wounds. From the crown of thorns that pierced his brow … the bruising and hemorrhaging that, no doubt, characterized his shoulders or his back … his knees skinned … the scourging at the pillar. All the implements of cruel Roman torture and humiliating death. In the Resurrection, we see what God does with those wounds.

He does two different things with those wounds. We have no indication that our Lord was still bleeding from being pierced with a crown of thorns. Those wounds seem to have been closed over. Nor did he draw anyone’s attention to the wounds on his back or his knees. Some wounds, God heals. Some wounds, God closes up and makes new. Like it never happened. And that’s a beautiful thing.

The other thing that he does with wounds is to glorify them … not to close them up, but to leave them as an opening, a place of great receptivity, a new possibility of intimacy with God and with each other. When God deals with wounds in this way, wounds can even become a source of faith. Isn’t that the interaction that we saw between our Lord and Saint Thomas?

Our Lord says, ‘These wounds are open to you. Because I want you, first of all, to see what God brought me through with profound fidelity. I want you to look at these wounds and see that God did not give up on me. He vindicated me. He brought me through my Passion. He saw me through what they did to me, and now I’m alive again. And these wounds are not deadly anymore. They’re glorified.’

Sometimes God closes up a wound. Sometimes he glorifies a wound. … So as we look upon the cross and we see the suffering the love of Jesus revealed in the woundedness of his body, look at that image with eyes of faith. If we can look at the Cross of Jesus, and the wounds of Jesus in this way, can we let God teach us to look in the same way at our own wounds? To come to him with the confidence that Jesus teaches us we can have in God, with the trust that a wise, sick person has when going to meet his physician?

Realize that our wounds are not the end of our story, but that if we follow Jesus through his Passion, through his Cross, through his Death, he will lead us into the resurrection. Even our wounds will become glorified, a source of faith and the life that Jesus came to share with us.”