On the eastern wall of St Peter’s is a mosaic depiction of the Transfiguration of Christ, installed by my nineteenth century predecessor George Howard Wilkinson. It survives to this day in what is now the sacristy, and I see it whenever I vest for the Eucharist. In it, Christ, arms outstretched, resplendent in glorious gold and white, hovers a few feet above the holy mountain-top. The scene is suffused with divine light. It is an arresting image.
Its didactic purpose is clear. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. He has a human nature, evident in his human form; and he has a divine nature, evident in the glory that emanates from him. The glorious transfigured Christ of the mosaic foreshadows the glorious risen Christ of this morning. He is a human being, and is recognizable as such. Yet he is a human being who is unconfined by the limits of time and space.
But there is a difference between the glorious transfigured Jesus and the glorious risen Jesus. It is that the outstretched hands of the mosaic are whole and unblemished, whereas the hands that are proffered to us this morning are not. They bear the marks of the nails which pinned him to the cross. The risen Jesus is wounded.
Why? If Jesus is as our creeds proclaim him to be; if he is as the mosaic depicts; if he is the human face of almighty God, who was revealed in glory on the mountain top then why does he submit to the nails? Why the wounds?
All the classic theologies of the cross answer this by making a link between the wounds of Jesus and the sin of humanity. At one extreme the wounds are seen as a necessary price. Our sin merits death; Christ dies in our place; Christ’s wounds are the cost of our redemption. At the other extreme the wounds are said to work upon our consciences. They call to us, compelling us to repent of the sin that has inflicted them upon him. Both extremes, and all the variations in between, reveal an understanding of the human condition – of human
nature – as essentially sinful. It is our sinfulness that is addressed by the cross of Christ.
I would like to suggest another understanding of the human condition, another understanding of human nature. This not to supplant the understanding that we term original sin, but to offer an alternative to it. We might call it ‘original woundedness’. The wounds of Christ are linked to the wounds of humanity; it is our woundedness that is addressed by the cross of Christ. Before we learn to be sinful men and women we are wounded men and women; often grievously wounded.
I probably need to stop right there. Wounded? Us? It hardly seems likely. We inhabit one of the greatest cities on God’s earth at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era. Compared with the generation which fashioned the mosaic on the east wall we enjoy lives of remarkable ease and simplicity. We are a confident generation, an articulate generation. In what conceivable sense are we wounded? Sinful we can admit to; sin we understand; sin we can deal with; because, to some extent, sin we’re in control of. We commit it, we identify it, we repent of it.
But wounds are different. Wounds we do not control; wounds we do not choose; for wounds have been inflicted upon us. Perhaps in our tenderest years, perhaps much later; perhaps through neglect, perhaps because of tragedy, perhaps as a result of experiential poverty of a thousand different kinds. Perhaps we are not believed in, we are unsupported, we are rarely heard, or scarcely known. Perhaps our wounds assert themselves in unhappy relationships and in unrealized ambitions, in addiction and in fear, in disappointment and in loss. From our wounds flow the sins of rage and lust, of envy and of hatred. For what does a wound do? It disfigures our beauty; it causes us pain; and from it flows our lifeblood. If I am right; if we are essentially wounded, then our loveliness is hidden, our pain is desperate, and our life – our real life, not the one we build to conceal the wounds, our eternal life – is ebbing away from us.
The twentieth century priest and prophet Henri Nouwen wrote these words: ‘the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there’. So to wounded humanity comes a wounded leader. The Christ of the mountain top, trailing clouds of glory, shares little with wounded men and women. His feet don’t even touch the ground - quite literally, in the St Peter’s mosaic. The Christ of the cross shares everything with wounded men and women. Like us, his beauty is disfigured; like us, he is in pain; and, like us, the life flows out of him as surely as does the blood.
This sharing is reassuring. We are not alone. Our wounds are known and understood. But this sharing cannot be the end of the story. For sharing is a Good Friday experience. This is Easter Day, and he is risen.
He is risen indeed, but he is wounded. Still his body bears the marks. A wounded leader comes to us, but he does not come to wipe away every last trace of our wounds. He comes to redeem them. He comes to show us that they are an inexorable part of our humanity. He comes to show us that concealing them, ignoring them, running away from them, will only lead us deeper into them and deeper into their consequences. He comes to show us a different path: the path of resurrection, the via vitae. He comes to show us that our woundedness can make us a source of life and love for others. He comes to show us that our woundedness can turn us towards our brothers and sisters. He comes to show us that our woundedness can open our hearts to them in compassion. He comes to show us that our woundedness can enlarge our empathy and equip us to attend to others. He comes to show us that in our woundedness lies our resurrection.
He comes so that our scars might blaze with beauty, so that our pain might be changed to salvific love, so that the flow of life from us might be staunched, and so that we might begin to live as he lives.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrestled with the wounds of isolation, fatigue and depression in his last, Dublin, years: yet, contemplating the resurrection of his wounded Lord, he could write these lines:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
He is risen; we are risen. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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