Scripture Sunday: Touch and See

by Ashtyn Adams

Luke 24:36b-48 (NRSV)
36b While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." 37 They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38 He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." 40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41 While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate in their presence. 44 Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you--that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things.

The fact that Jesus bears scars in his resurrected body is a scandal to both our religious and cultural sensibilities. As Christians, if we remember the importance of our bodies in any posthumous existence, we often think about the materiality of resurrection as a clean-slate event, receiving a sort of heroic, able body free of any associated pain or limit of the past: what happens here has no implications for what happens later, somewhere out there. It is the kind of divorced thinking we likewise map onto the world with the language of new creation, relieving ourselves of any responsibility to current equitable environmental practices in the expectation that God will swoop in and take care of the damage. As Americans, we also inherit an impulse that would deem scars ugly and undesirable, requiring some sort of intervention or cover-up. Both of these are gnostic impulses of denial, but also understandable. We do not want death, pain, and shame to have the final say. And they don’t. However, escapism is not what transforms our wounds, it is not what will save us. Rather, as Jesus shows us, we are invited into the resurrected life by looking and touching his fleshy wounds. He does not let his disciples turn away in evasion but prompts them to engage all of their senses and enter into relationship with the memory and consequences of experienced violence and death. In the Anthropocene, as the Earth bears the wounds and will wear the scars of human-driven environmental degradation, we must resist the temptation to look away, increasing our proximity to creation and abiding in a deeper relationship with it.

This dramatic and somewhat comical scene in Luke is also depicted in John with "doubting Thomas." However, there is a reversal of sorts, where Thomas is the one who demands to touch and see the wounds of Christ as evidence of the resurrection. In Luke though, I don’t think Jesus’ invitation to touch his scars is necessarily about proof or belief, at least not solely. I have thought about my own experience with scars, I have one that stretches from the center of my head down to my right ear from brain surgery in 2014. When I was in recovery, I hated my scar being touched. Not only was it uncomfortable, but I was hyper-aware of my vulnerability. The only people I let touch it were the doctors I trusted and my mom. Even now, ten years later, there is an aspect of exposure and intimacy to it. My partner is the only one who sees it, the only one who will play with my hair and stroke my head. Thinking about my own experience is what shocks me when I think about Jesus opening himself up to his friends, to us, without reserve. God not only lays himself bare to us, but is revealed as someone who relies on an all too unnoticed web of mutuality. Jesus having the ones he loved most touch the remnants of his brokenness ultimately must have been a needed and desired moment of healing for himself too.

What we see here is an incredibly relational anthropology. The disciples attend to Jesus’ wounds and then offer him sustenance, a meal to share. This model of communion is the lens through which we must approach God’s beloved creation. The Earth is in a parallel heightened state of vulnerability, and as a created thing, it bears a trace of its Creator (the logoi of the logos). Our response to creation's woundedness cannot be different from our response to God’s woundedness– in fact, they are one and the same (Matthew 25). If we properly saw the wounds of the Earth as the wounds of Christ, we might care for the damage with softness of touch, and find a way to feed it in love. In such acts of attention, comfort, and healing, we are drawn into union with the divine, where scars are not erased, but transformed into spaces of communal shalom. May we be witnesses to this kind of life for all of creation, and search for the One who is found in the cracks and scars of hurting things. ​

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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