I always dreaded taking a shower after playing baseball. It wasn’t because I didn’t desire to get all the dirt and sweat off my body. I was fine with being clean. It was the fact that when I played baseball it was rare for me to leave a game unbloodied. Either my knees, my elbows, or my side would have wounds from sliding or diving for ground balls. A shower is painful on open wounds.
Trauma doesn’t like being touched.
That’s why I’m really taken aback by these words of Jesus to the unfortunately monikered Doubting Thomas: “Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.’”
“…place it in my side.” Are you kidding me?!?!?
There has been much made about whether or not Thomas actually did touch Jesus’ body. The text doesn’t tell us that he did. In fact, there is a pretty decent argument made that his belief without touching is an integral part of what is happening here. The point would be that Jesus knew Thomas’ heart, knew his ache, and offered to fulfill that need. This very fact is enough for the doubting Thomas to believe.
This text has also inspired copious amounts of ink on the relationship between doubt and belief. Should Thomas be rebuked? Is he a model for us all? How does Jesus respond to such doubt? Is he rebuking Thomas or is he inviting him into faith? Such questions are important but I think they cause us to miss one really important part of the story. Trauma.
“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
This is trauma talking. It’s disappointment. It’s the pain of dashed hopes. “You idiots can believe what you want, but I’m not about to trust again unless I can see with my own eyes and feel with my own hands.I won’t be fooled again. I’m not hoping back on this little merry-go-round.”
Thomas asks for the impossible. And he sits with it for eight days. Eight days where the other disciples are filled with hope and possibility. Eight days where all of his questions and all of his pain rise to overwhelm his bitter palate. Eight days, not for his wounds to heal but eight days for them to fester. Thomas hurts to the touch.
Then Jesus appears. His hands still bearing the marks of trauma. Barely closed. His body split open. His wounds still raw. It’s certainly not a sanitary scene. It maybe an overstatement at this point to say that it’s a bloody mess. But that’s actually where trauma is the most pernicious. It’s often not in the moment itself, it’s in the eight days later. It’s when scabs are starting to form. It’s when others around us are moving on to a new normal but we still bear the pain in our bodies.
For Jesus this isn’t merely the marks of a spear piercing his side. This isn’t only the physical wound of having a nail driven through your hand. These wounds, this trauma, holds with it a message. His body would remember the mocking crown of thorns. That hole in hand is a symbol of rejection—crucified as a would be King. The whole world assuming that He is an imposter. His own beloved disciples having abandoned him. His side absorbing the blow of Thomas’ doubt.
And what does Jesus do?
Touch my trauma.
The son of God wounded. Betrayed. Shamed. Mocked. Scorned. All of those horrendous things we read of in Deuteronomy 28. The cursedness of being hanged upon a tree. Crucified outside the city. He bore it all. And now he invites Thomas to touch the wound.
Something about this heals Thomas’ own doubt—his own trauma—his own cynicism. All the bitterness seems to be washed away in that one moment as hot tears fall down upon his cheeks and he realizes that the resurrection is true. It’s so true that you can touch it. But now he doesn’t need to touch it.
I don’t know if he actually touched the wound or not. But that’s kind of the point. There is something in this where Jesus became more human than any of us have ever been. And he took upon himself more pain, more trauma, more shame, more of all the yuck and muck and grime of being human. And somehow in this moment when he says, “touch my trauma” it’s healing. We don’t have to touch the gaping side with our own fingers because the presence of those holy wounds does something within us. By inviting us into the trauma of His own resurrected body we taste not only our sorrow but also His resurrection and our own.
Jesus isn’t inviting Thomas only into the purulent, the blood, the germs, the savagery of the thing. He’s also inviting Thomas into the healing. He’s inviting him to touch a resurrected wound. This truth transforms all of our trauma. Gaping wounds are not the climax of the story when the resurrected son of God comes to town.
When Jesus is telling us to “touch his trauma” he’s inviting us to do so with our own wounded fingers. He doesn’t tell Thomas to wash his hands, put on sterilized gloves, and touch him from a distance. He invites him to really feel. Examine the wound with your own dirt covered appendages. Take your trauma to My trauma.
In all of this Jesus is not only owning his own wounds but somehow those of Thomas as well. Here, and only here, in this wounded side of Jesus will we find ultimate rest and healing for our own trauma. This invitation of Jesus tells me that His trauma invites our own trauma. He’s big enough for our dirty hands to touch His wounds. And he calls us into His wounds with our own.
—
I’m indebted to my buddy, Matt, for inspiring these thoughts.
