April 20, 2021
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter on April 11, 2021 at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 118; 1 John 5:1-6; and John 20:19-31.
Many of us still need to stay locked in at home, like the apostles in today’s gospel, to protect ourselves and our loved ones from infection, and certainly not even the vaccinated among us should be living in the highly communal situation described in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles just yet. Compared to last year, however, most of us are filled with more Easter hope.
On this eighth day of the Easter season, we celebrate as if it is still Easter Sunday itself. We hear a familiar gospel story that begins on that first Easter, but then jumps a week ahead. It’s a story of victory, peace, reconciliation, and empowerment by the Holy Spirit. It’s also a story that invites to reflect on the themes of the interplay between faith and doubt. (Click here for a homily I gave about doubt two years ago.) But this year, I’m struck by something else. Both today’s passage from the Gospel of John and next Sunday’s passage from the Gospel of Luke make it clear: even though Jesus was the Christ, our Lord and our God, after the resurrection of his glorious body, his wounds remained.
On this Divine Mercy Sunday, we will begin by blessing this water and celebrating God’s abundant mercy.
We are told that with God, all things are possible. We have been taught that in God’s new creation – which Jesus enters in his resurrection – there will be no more pain, no more suffering. But when Jesus invites Thomas to place his hands in the nail marks, it sounds as if his perfected body still bears some things that we would normally consider to be flaws or blemishes. In the Upper Room after his Resurrection, is Jesus suffering pain from standing on feet that had been shattered during his crucifixion? Or are Jesus’ wounds merely cosmetic, to help the disciples recognize who he is? I have absolutely no idea. It’s an intriguing proposition that I hadn’t thought about before this week. I haven’t had a chance to research if the Church has a position on this, so I’m going to try to avoid committing heresy!
Whether or not the resurrected Jesus continued to suffer from his wounds, those wounds still inform our faith in him. The image above the altar isn’t the resurrected Christ, but the crucified Jesus. For us, we suffer from all kinds of “wounds” – personal flaws, damage from sins we’ve committed, harm from sins committed by others against us, and circumstances that aren’t sinful but just make life hard. It’s a disconcerting but fundamental truth for each of us: whether or not we still suffer from our wounds, they continue to inform our identity, to define who we have become.
When I look back on my life thus far, I know that I have grown the most in the hardest years, years when I was forced to claim my priorities, years when I took risks, years when I endured through adversity. When we acknowledge our wounds, they can help us to grow and to transcend our former ways. When we ignore our wounds, they have a way of holding us back and injuring us repeatedly. (I know that this seems pretty dark for a homily in the Easter season, but you have to hang in here with me until the end.)
We’ve all been wounded by the past twelve months. Do we recall this time as a series of unmitigated tragedies? Do we define it as a lost year? Or can we meditate on this as a time that we took risks and learned about our priorities, even if we didn’t flourish? A lot of us are longing for things to get back to “normal,” but I still hold out hope that we’ll move into a new paradigm, a new normal that’s better than the old one. In the name of God Almighty, I earnestly pray that what we’ve endured this past year will not be in vain!
One of the most influential spiritual books that I’ve read is The Wounded Healer by the priest Henri Nouwen. The book’s title comes from a Jewish fable: the Messiah can be found sitting among the wounded, for he is wounded himself. The difference between the Messiah and the others is that the Messiah tends to his own wounds in a such way that he can quickly jump up and tend to others if they need him. In the final chapter of the book, Nouwen argues that – as uncomfortable as it sounds – all of us need to understand ourselves as wounded healers. Forty-nine years ago, Nouwen wrote this paragraph that seems to describe this past year of pandemic:
What are our wounds? They have been spoken about in many ways by many voices. Words such as “alienation,” “separation,” “isolation,” and “loneliness” have been used to name our wounded condition. Maybe the word “loneliness” best expresses our immediate experience and therefore most fittingly enables us to understand our brokenness.
The central premise of The Wounded Healer is that loneliness is the fundamental wound that all human beings carry. It’s not caused by sin. It’s a circumstance that results from God creating each of us with an individual identity that is distinct from the rest of the universe. But Nouwen points out, just as the Grand Canyon is a wound on the earth’s surface that reveals great beauty, acknowledging our fundamental loneliness can make each of us more able to love one another.
That’s a tough concept to swallow, so let’s sit with it: acknowledging our fundamental loneliness can make us more able to love one another. [Pause.] When we deny our loneliness, we expect that something or someone else can fill up the emptiness inside of us. If we think that we can escape our loneliness, we will judge every project and relationship by the merits of what we can receive from it. We may become cynical or bitter. If we accept our loneliness, we can spend our lives compassionately supporting one another in this wound we share, rather than viewing others as a means to escape the wound that we think we alone possess.
When Jesus appeared to the disciples on that Easter Sunday with his wounds still visible, what did the disciples feel? Surely they were astonished that Jesus was resurrected. They were overjoyed that their friend and teacher was alive. Presumably, they felt guilty that they had abandoned their friend in his greatest moment of loneliness. But as Jesus displayed his wounds, saying “Peace be with you… whose sins you forgive and forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained,” another feeling probably would have prevailed. The disciples would have been overwhelmed by God’s divine, limitless mercy. As Nouwen quotes from that Jewish fable, “The master is coming – not tomorrow, but today, not next year, but this year, not after all our misery is passed, but in the middle of it, not in another place but right here, where we are standing.”
Our wounds give us three things: knowledge of ourselves, compassion for others, and a deeper faith. All three are necessary to have communion with our Lord. May we be so overwhelmed by God’s mercy that we feel compelled to share it with others for the remainder of our days. For by his wounds, we are healed.