Wounds of love

Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:26b-28)

The painting was impossible to miss. I had seen it before, but so have millions. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas loomed 15 feet across, projected on a screen, on the southeast side of the sanctuary, as I crossed myself and took my seat.

No more needed to be said as far as I was concerned. Virtually the totality of my faith was right there.

Jesus grasped Thomas’ right wrist in his left hand, guiding Thomas’ finger into the hole in his side, pierced by a Roman lance to ensure his death.

Jesus’s eyes are on his side, helping Thomas to touch him, to place his finger between the lips of flesh out of which blood and water flowed as life left him.

His head turned ever-so-slightly to the side, Thomas doesn’t look directly at the wound and certainly not up at Jesus, whose gaze is fixed on Thomas’ right hand, guiding it to his open flesh. No anger creases Jesus’ brow, no reproval purses his lips. His desire in singular. Please. Just touch … and see … the Love that hate cannot kill.

Wounds of love, I thought in the moment. Instantly, my mind traveled thousands of miles away to a moment of watching a mother walk to a feeding station run by an old Irish nun in Baidoa, Somalia. Thousands were dying of starvation and disease at the time, fleeing their homes with little food, dying along the way, burying the children and old ones where they fell, trying to get to a place like this where there was compassion and food—a place where nobody asked whose side you were on because they were on the side of life.

Like so many, this mother denied herself food on the journey, giving what little she had to the children. She was one of the lucky ones. Many more died on the way, pointing their children toward places like this when they could go no further, hoping against hope that their flesh and blood might live to know the grace of laughter once more. I heard their stories … told by their orphaned children.

Stories no different than this are being told across Gaza these days. We see the pictures, too, children cradling younger brothers and sisters while separated from parents, if they are still fortunate enough to have parents.

They bear deep wounds, wounds of love, the wounds of Jesus in present time, blessed incarnations of the Love human brutality cannot kill.

A local reporter interviewed me after that long ago reporting trip to Somalia and Sudan. He stammered and tripped over a question he thought impolitic to ask, wondering if seeing such suffering undermined my faith.

The opposite, I told him. Amid the worst that human beings can do to each other, I had seen Jesus. Yes, in the old nun and many others like her, like, say, those seven blessed souls killed last week while feeding people with World Central Kitchen. They are not only the best of humanity, as Jose Andres, WCK’s founder said. They are the hands of the risen Lord Jesus multiplying loaves and breaking bread.

But more, even more, I had seen the wounds of love in suffering hearts who surrendered life and hope that others might live: Not just survive, but live in the knowledge that there is a very great Love at work in the world, a Love death cannot kill and brutality cannot destroy, a Love who gives everything and holds back nothing, a Love who longs for us to touch and see, trust and know that—in spite of all the ugliness—we live in a world where Love lives and breathes and becomes flesh and blood in the wounded love of our humanity.

Every time I see it, every time I feel it, every time I witness the wounds of Love, I join Thomas, my brother, and together we cry to Jesus, ‘My Lord and my God.’

 David L. Miller