This sermon was preached on April 16th, 2023 at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek. The text is the Thomas pericope, beginning at John 20.19 and following. Click here to listen along—sermons were meant to be heard!

At the heart of the Christian mystery is the idea that God becomes a human with a body. The Consciousness that spoke the Universe into being becomes a body of human flesh, a body made of the same stuff ours is made of, a body that can touch, taste, hear, dance, move, weep, ache, crave, sweat, sleep, bleed. It is in our bodies that we sense our way in this world. It is in our bodies that we come to know pain and pleasure, sorrow and rejoicing, grit and grace. It is in our bodies, my friends, that we come to know God, and that God comes to know us.

The bestselling author Cole Arthur Riley writes about our tendency as spiritual people to forget our bodies, “We were never meant to dismember our selfhoods. My face is my soul is my blood is my glory. When we neglect the physical, it inevitably suffocates the image of a God who ate, slept, cried, bled, grew, and healed. And whether or not the origin of that neglect is hatred, it will indeed end in hatred” (This Here Flesh, 60).

Our own flesh is the parchment on which the heart of the Christian message has been written. Christ lived and died and rose with a human body, as one of us. Christ becomes manifest again in us, as us. And as we walk our spiritual journey, it is in our bodies of flesh and mind and spirit that this whole story unfolds. That’s the very mystery Paul has his finger on when he writes to the Christians in Galatia, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

I don’t want to get lost in the metaphysical weeds; ask me at coffee hour if you want to go there. But perhaps we could say it another way, “Embodying God’s Love” is not just a cute corporate mission statement that we put into a catchy jingle. It’s literally the heart of the Christian mystery, a mystery to which we are all called, the mystery that is made manifest in Christ’s death in a body, resurrection in a body, ascension in a body and outpouring of the Holy Spirit into our bodies, which is what the whole Easter season is about.

When we look at the stories that our tradition has told year after year during the Easter season, you can’t get away from the question of bodies, and the experiences we have in them. The Sunday after Easter is always remembered as Thomas’ touching encounter with his risen Teacher, in the flesh! Now, the text doesn’t say whether he actually touches Jesus’ side or not. But the storyteller is taking us in that direction anyway. Most paintings of this scene fill in details that we’re already thinking anyway.

When we’re in the realm of touch, we’re in the realm of wounding. Which means we’re also in the realm of vulnerability—after all, the word “vulnerable” literally means “wound-able”—and there is no dimension of our embodiment perhaps so vulnerable as touch. If we pay attention to it, we can easily recognize the intimate, immediate exchange that unfolds between our sense of touch and those tender places, sore memories, and old, throbbing wounds that we all carry in our inner body in this life.

If you’ve been around church for a while you’ve probably heard the way we, in our confidence, grill Thomas for his doubt. After all, “blessed are they who have not seen, but who have come to believe!” And there’s a tendency to hear Thomas’ statement as skeptical, dismissive, recalcitrant. His cries of, “unless I see him, touch him, smell him, I will not believe,” ring in our ears with all the cross-armed huffiness of an exasperated teenager or a jilted lover. 

But I wonder if our readiness to hear Thomas’ words in that way betrays more about us than it does Thomas, trained as we are to laud those who hold on to their faith in spite of a complete lack of supporting evidence. I wonder if it betrays our culture’s tendency to paper over the reality of other’s pain, our unwillingness to touch and be touched by the depths of other’s suffering. I wonder if it betrays our own resistance to bear another’s wounds as our own.

Just put yourself in his situation: his entire world has just imploded. The teacher whom he left everything to follow, the teacher who promised him that he already knew where he was going, the teacher who loved him, the teacher whom he loved, has been betrayed by another student, another friend, and was brutally murdered by the state while an angry mob cheered it on. Think of how painful an experience that was for Thomas, for all of them. 

Think of all the times we ourselves have experienced a sudden, tragic loss. For some of us that touch of pain might still be present and fresh. We know how that pain cries out to be touched, tended, and held by a community. Could you imagine how much more painful it would be if everyone around you saying that the opposite of your experience was true? If people implied that your pain was no longer valid? If they could no longer touch what you are experiencing? Could you imagine the frustration, the disbelief, the salt in the wound, the twist of the knife? Could you imagine how you would cry out for your wounds to be seen?

Hence Thomas’ pain finds voice through gritted teeth: “Unless I see the marks of the nails on his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Unless I touch his wounds, I will not believe a word you have to say to me. Thomas’ doubt is the voice of his own wounds crying out to be seen, touched, tended, held by his community, validated even in the midst of their own rejoicing. The edge in his tone and the heat in his face as he shouts at them is not a petulant outburst at his beliefs being challenged but rather a desperate plea for his friends to see his wounds. To touch the gashes over his heart. 

And because of that, I suspect that there might be a direct connection between Thomas’ willingness to be vulnerable in this way and the exchange he has with Christ a week later. What if that very honesty is what opens Thomas up to the Presence the next time Jesus shows up? For Thomas to recognize the Presence of the one who bore the marks of Thomas’ pain and wounding and sorrow as though it were his own? What if that honesty, what if that willingness to bare his heart, to give voice to his truth, is what it takes for the Resurrection to become real to him?

What might happen in listening to the cries of others’ deep pain and deep longing, we allow ourselves to be touched by their pain? As we allow our deep pain to be touched in exchange? 

Two weekends ago we gathered in this space for our Good Friday service. In the dark stillness of this room on Friday evening, flickering candles surrounded a cross in the center of the room. As the evening light grew dimmer, we held vigil around it, in our bodies; our hands clasped around the delicate stems of carnations, our throats and chests vibrating as we offered our songs of lament, our bodies growing stiff and numb as we sat in our gentle vigil, our hearts throbbing as we placed a finger on the sorrows of Christ and the sorrows we carry in our own being.

But after the service, something very interesting happened. We Midwesterners don’t tend to be very touchy-feely people. So as folks were coming out of the sanctuary, I was standing a little ways out of the room, ready to shake hands with everyone who was departing. But the first person in line—I don’t remember who it was—grabbed my hand and pulled me into a hug. And they held on for a good couple of seconds. And then the next person did the same thing. By the third person I was kind of expecting where this was going, and sure enough, I got pulled into another hug. And another. And then another. Everyone got hugs. 

And at a certain point I wasn’t sure if I was giving the hug or receiving the hug. In touching the sorrows we bear so deeply with one another and with Christ, our bodies became one greater body. It was as though our bodies bore Jesus in his Good Friday sorrow as we bore one another’s sorrows. It was an exchange of love, embodied as Presence, in a way that words alone can never quite touch. We belonged to and for one another in that holy moment. 

This exchange manifests a power, a presence, a Life that shows up as a deepened sense of community and belonging, a deeper sense of mutuality and reciprocity, a subtle knitting of rifts in our world’s fabric. A Life that blossoms in that space of honesty and vulnerability that opens our eyes to our common humanity and interdependence. A Life that meets us even as we are in freefall. A Life that holds us even as our lives are imploding around us. A Life we call Christ.

“Touch my wounds,” Jesus says a week and change after bearing our own Good Friday sorrows in his body. “Touch my wounds,” Jesus says, as he pulls his tunic aside to expose the marks of his own suffering. “Let your wounds meet my wounds. Let your pain meet my pain. Let your despair meet mine, and you will know we are one humanity, one flesh, one life, one body of pain and promise. As I live in you, you will live in me.”

And Jesus’ invitation to Thomas is an invitation to all of us. For Christ is present in this world today, in our midst, and it is in our very bodies that he lives now—our wounds are his wounds, our pain is his pain, our suffering is his suffering, our hope is his hope, our life is his life. 

And still he bids us to touch his wounds as we embody his love. He invites us to encounter his suffering in all suffering. He invites us to see in the suffering of others our own reflected back. He calls us to touch his wounds whether they’re on front page news or carried around for decades in secrecy and fear of those who would silence or invalidate our stories. The Risen Christ calls us to experience his wounds with courage, with compassion, with tenderness, and in some cases, with literal, loving, gentle—and most importantly, consensual and welcomed—touch in our touch-starved world.

There might be something stupendous to discover of Christ’s risen, healing presence in this exchange when we embody Christ’s love in this way. There might be wounds that we carry which might find their healing only in this mutuality, this vulnerability, this openness. There might be truth, goodness, and beauty that we can only recognize by touch. And that might just be medicine for all of us who are starved for a kind of touch that protects, restores, and cultivates our faith in humanity, who long for touch that eases pain and comforts sorrow, who long for God to touch our wounds with God’s own. Amen.