![\"\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/c\/ce\/Rozlewiska_Biebrzy_wiosn%C4%85.jpg\" "\\"River\\"")
A Sermon on John 20:19-31<\/em><\/p>\nIn Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy, after he\u2019s followed Virgil through hell, after he\u2019s climbed the seven story mountain of purgatory, watching penitents shed the remnants of each of the seven deadly sins as they climb, he arrives at the edge the garden of Eden on the top of the mountain.\u00a0 It\u2019s a journey back to square one.\u00a0 He will go into Eden and then from there into heaven where the beautiful Beatrice will great him.\u00a0 There\u2019s only one thing he must do before he can enter the garden\u2013he has to forget.<\/p>\n
He has to forget his sins, he has to forget the person who lived in sin and death.\u00a0 The garden of Eden is an earthly paradise and the memory of sin would color the whole experience of the garden.\u00a0 To enter Eden while remembering sin would be like coming to a wedding dressed for a funeral.\u00a0 On the border of Eden there is a river called Lethe, it is the river of forgetting and it is through that river that Dante must pass before entering the garden.<\/p>\n
Forgive and forget.\u00a0 That\u2019s the way we wish it could be.\u00a0 And there\u2019s some sense to that. \u00a0 In order to reach real reconciliation, we can\u2019t constantly hold onto the past.\u00a0 If we can\u2019t forget to some degree then we will just keep opening up old wounds, we will never find healing.\u00a0 But even with healing, there will still be scars, there will still be evidence of the past.\u00a0 It cannot be completely buried.\u00a0 Freud, for all of his problems, taught us that.\u00a0 The wounds and memories that we try to bury in ourselves return in other, often terrible ways.\u00a0 We need more than forgetting to heal.<\/p>\n
That brings us to the next river.\u00a0 The end of the journey of purgatory doesn\u2019t just stop with the river of Lethe.\u00a0 After a penitent has forgotten their mortal sin they must drink of the river of Eunoe\u2013the river of positive remembrance that reminds and strengthens them of all of the good things in their life.\u00a0 British theologian John Milbank calls the two rivers \u201cthe double waters of forgiveness.\u201d\u00a0 True reconciliation and forgiveness requires both rivers he says, we must have forgetting where we let go of our old life and we must have positive re-membering in which we rebuild that life in the light of God\u2019s reconciling grace.\u00a0 Milbank gives Augustine\u2019s Confessions as a supreme example of this, a classic Christian work in which Augustine writes his autobiography as a prayer to God, renarrating his own story in light of God\u2019s grace.<\/p>\n
I thought of the double waters of forgiveness, the rivers of Lethe and Eunoe this week as I tried to work through what is somet
\nhing of a mystery in our gospel reading\u2013the wounds of Jesus.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s strange how Jesus appears after his resurrection. His body is certainly different from our bodies.\u00a0 He appears through walls, in rooms with locked doors.\u00a0 But its clear that he is no ghost.\u00a0 He has a body, he even cooks and eats food in several post-resurrection accounts.\u00a0 The strangest thing about his resurrected body, though, is that despite rising from the dead, doing something incredible and miraculous, Jesus returns with all the wounds of his execution.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s just not how we would tell the story, these days.\u00a0 If we wanted to tell the story of a resurrection, in a hollywood movie we would have Jesus lying in the tomb, his body bloody, his hands and feet with holes in them from the nails, his head cut from the crown of thorns, his side wounded with the Roman soldier\u2019s spear.\u00a0 Then there would be a bright light.\u00a0 Something would start to happen to his body.\u00a0 We would use our whole special effects budget to have CGI of the wounds closing up, Jesus\u2019 body going back to normal just before his eyes flutter and he gasps air, resurrected!\u00a0 But that\u2019s not what happened.\u00a0 In both instances of his appearance in todays Gospel reading, the text is clear\u2013he shows them his wounds.<\/p>\n
Perhaps a way into understanding this strange, post resurrection reality could be found in looking at the first letter of Peter which quotes a passage from Isaiah.\u00a0 Peter writes this to the church that was being persecuted:<\/p>\n
When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. \u201cHe himself bore our sins\u201d in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; \u201cby his wounds you have been healed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cBy his wound you have been healed.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps this explains why the resurrected Jesus still has the wounds of the cross, why he wasn\u2019t just restored after the crucifixion like nothing ever happened.\u00a0 Maybe in Jesus\u2019 work of reconciling the world to God, of bringing God\u2019s reign of forgiveness, the wounds of his willingness to suffer and die rather than call for God\u2019s judgement and vengeance are key.\u00a0 These wounds aren\u2019t some shameful bad memory, they aren\u2019t some terrible tragedy that needs forgetting.\u00a0 In the the resurrection Christ has drunk from the river of Eunoe, he has changed the memory of what happened at Golgatha into something good, a story of redemption rather than defeat and death.\u00a0 To live with the wounds of crucifixion in his post-resurrection may be the mark that God has accomplished that last wish on the cross\u2013Father forgive them.<\/p>\n
And the best news is that through this forgiveness, through this reconciliation, Christ has made it possible for us to live resurrected lives with our own wounds.\u00a0 We can\u2019t just enter Eden as though nothing ever happened.\u00a0 Most of us by the time we\u2019ve\u00a0 come to accept God\u2019s grace already have some scars and wounds.\u00a0 Christ is showing us in his wounds that even the worst that the world can bring to us, the deepest damage it can do, can be a part of our resurrected body.\u00a0 We have to forget our old life, we have to go down into the tomb of our baptism, but when resurrection comes we come back with our memories in tact\u2013re-membered as part of a new story.<\/p>\n
So what are the wounds that you have?\u00a0 What are the scars that you need to put into a different story?\u00a0 When Christ comes and says, touch my wounds he is telling us he has done the work of bringing us to a new and better life, our memories retold, our future restored.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Sermon on John 20:19-31 In Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy, after he\u2019s followed Virgil through hell, after he\u2019s climbed the seven story mountain of purgatory, watching penitents shed the remnants of each of the seven deadly sins as they climb, he arrives at the edge the garden of Eden on the top of the mountain.\u00a0 It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
Why Christ Still Has His Wounds<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A Sermon on John 20:19-31 In Dante's Divine Comedy, after he's followed Virgil through hell, after he's climbed the seven story mountain of purgatory,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Christ Still Has His Wounds\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A Sermon on John 20:19-31 In Dante's Divine Comedy, after he's followed Virgil through hell, after he's climbed the seven story mountain of purgatory,\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Word + Flesh\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-04-09T20:10:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/c\/ce\/Rozlewiska_Biebrzy_wiosn%C4%85.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ragan Sutterfield\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ragan Sutterfield\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/\",\"name\":\"Why Christ Still Has His Wounds\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2013-04-09T20:10:30+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2013-04-09T20:10:30+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/#\/schema\/person\/9af0d931558adda7ab23572587c98aa3\"},\"description\":\"A Sermon on John 20:19-31 In Dante's Divine Comedy, after he's followed Virgil through hell, after he's climbed the seven story mountain of purgatory,\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/2013\/04\/why-christ-still-has-his-wounds\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Why Christ Still Has His Wounds\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/\",\"name\":\"Word + Flesh\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/#\/schema\/person\/9af0d931558adda7ab23572587c98aa3\",\"name\":\"Ragan Sutterfield\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/soulwod\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/e7fea9423b5f5eea57387f8dffb7f4ff?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/e7fea9423b5f5eea57387f8dffb7f4ff?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Ragan Sutterfield\"},\"description\":\"Ragan Sutterfield is a writer and Episcopal seminarian sojourning from his native Arkansas in Alexandria, Virginia. 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