Why Christians Need to be Hole
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
I remember a line used by my catechism teachers when I was a kid that made reference to the holes made in Jesus’ hands and side. My teachers told me that this was used to prove to his disciples that it really was him after the resurrection, or more specifically, prove that the Lord really did die.
My teachers were onto something. There really was something really important about the resurrected Christ bearing, even in his ascended form, the scars of his ordeal on earth. However, It was only after reading James Alison’s Raising Abel (I have written about Alison’s book in a previous post) that the full implications of Christ bearing the holes of his crucifixion came to light .
In that book, Alison makes reference to a line from one of the 14th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich’s many quotations (compiled in her Revelations of Divine Love ). There, Julian suggests that, in heaven, a person’s sins are not obliterated from the person, leaving no trace behind. Rather, their “tokens”, as Julian calls their sins, become transformed.
It is not so much that sin per se can be in heaven, since sin is a negation of one’s being and so has no ability to be present in the presence of God who is the source of all being. However, Julian says that God’s designs transforms what was a source of shame into a source of glory. These tokens point to the glory of the person bearing the scars of sin, but they ultimately point to the glory of God.
In other words, says Alison, the scars of humankind’s sin – the holes of Jesus’ crucifixion – are not so much reminders of past sins. They become trophies of present glory.
By wearing the holes, Jesus also takes up the processes that put those holes there in the first place - sin and its resultant violence - and transforms them into a demonstration of the lengths to which God will go - and the unthinkable directions He would take - for the sake of His fidelity to His creation. Instead of erasing sin and its endgame, which is death (See Romans 6:20), God chose to enter into sin and its endgame and, in it, conquer both.
Put another way, God did not choose to conquer sin and death by obliterating it with a wave of a hand or a word. By immersing Himself into the mire of death, he then subverted it from within its own logic. In the logic of sin, it is necessary to have violence and victims to make things happen. As St Augustine said in one of his sermons, Jesus was victor not because he avoided the necessity of violence, but because he became a victim of that necessity and inverted its meaning. By that entering into that necessity borne of sin, Jesus imputed into our sin-stained world the great paradox where shame and death become overcoded by victory and life.
In a way, this gives a very personal edge to the end of one of Julian’s reflections when she says
By this honour, our courteous Lord shows for them here, in part, something similar to what is done for them in fullness there, for there the token of sin is transformed into glory
It is personal because it gives a voice to our experiences of suffering, our very personal contact with the many fruits of sin – our own and those of the whole world.
Rather that wish for these to go away, both Julian and Alison remind us that the Christian is called to do something else. Not simply to “offer it up” like a good passive Catholic, but to actively seek with the Lord the way in which this particular suffering is being taken up into the redemptive processes of the Body of Christ, the Body that bears the holes of shame and sin and turns them into a visceral, scandalous sign of making princes from the poor of the dungheap.
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