"He is risen from the dead and He is Lord"
(Matt 28:6, Confession from Romans 10:9)
"Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe."
(John 20:27)
It is Easter Sunday morning.
On this glorious, astonishing day of miraculous and eternal moments, a day filled with holy joy,
our Savior, Lord, God, directs our inner eye to look on the miracles held in His Sacred Risen Body, to meditate on the five deep canyons where we hide when we are in our darkness and pain and fear and sinfulness. His Sacred Risen Body is the Same Sacred Body that will rush to embrace us when we are finally called Home, His arms open wide, utter joy on His Face.
He is our Promised Land.
"Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe."
Pope Benedict XVI described that moment of encounter between Christ Jesus and His apostles... us ... in the barricaded room when our "wounded God " stands among us and His Wounds are laid bare. His "wounds of love", the wounds He longed for when He took on "the passion of man" , made evident in the Shroud of Turin, in the "Icon written in blood."
These Wounds make visible the unquenchable love of God for each of us. These "Risen Wounds" reveal the essence of God, His Divine Vulnerability, that will be made present on His Sacred Body for all time.
We may continue to ponder for the rest of our lives how and why our souls are so deeply moved by the fathomless depths in the Pope's description: His 'Risen Wounds."
On this day of the Risen Lord, when the torrents of God's Mercy are flooding into souls of all time, perhaps we may be inspired to take that phrase to prayer : Risen Wounds.
Spirit Lord may grace us with a question ... why would the Savior retain the Wounds from the nails on His Sacred Body if His Flesh, after 3 days, had otherwise completely healed from lashings, thorns, punches, blows, bruises.
In the words, Risen Wounds, Pope Benedict was drawing on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas who had helped us to begin to understand that the Savior's Wounds, retained in His Glorified Body, are Wounds that would remain visible until the end of time and beyond.
St. Thomas described them as wounds of dignity, not deformity, beacons of hope, signs of victory won through humility and self-surrender, evidence of a love filled with mercy, gifted to His Father in self-emptying obedience (Summa Theologiae).
Christ Jesus will never not have these Sacred Wounds, visible to all souls for all eternity.
And St. John of the Cross draws us deeply into each wound to locate our souls in those places of healing, redemption:
St. John helps us to locate our broken selves, our 'violated ' soul, our fragile and finite humanity as we hide in the 'clefts' of these Sacred Risen Wounds. There, with our permission, Spirit Lord begins to purify us, consumes our egoism, and we find mercy, restoration, healing, redemption, always encloaked in Love.
“O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the cliff,
let me see your face,
let me hear your voice”
(Song of Songs 2:14).
The Rock, our Divine Savior, pleads with us in a great longing, to enter into His Risen Wounds, especially the 'secret place ' of the Wound in His Side where He yearns to 'see our face, hear our voice.'
At the Last Supper, Jesus pronounced,
"This is my body....This is my blood.".
St. John Paul II teaches us that in the Lord's use of the present tense, "IS", He brought about a "mysterious 'oneness in time' between the Triduum , the Last Supper, Passion, and Resurrection, and the passage of the centuries".
The Pope is teaching us that at every Holy Communion, every Holy Eucharist for all time when a priest consecrates the bread and wine, Jesus Lord becomes Present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.
We step forward, in awe and trembling, to receive His Sacred Body. This is the same Sacred Body that holds the Risen Wounds. All time meets in Him, Divine Time and God's human time. And hosts of Angelic Beings bow low before us because we now carry on our tongue or in our hand the Lord of Hosts : because we have become His living Tabernacle, His enfleshed Ark of the Covenant.
If we manage to navigate our way back to our pews, we may be graced to realize that God's
Divine Vulnerability is now subject to ourselves. We now hold in our being the One Who bears the Wounds of Love, our Wounded God who is the Icon written in Blood, Who now "sees our face and hears our voice."
The One Whose wounds of love, Whose Sacred Body holds the "clefts" where we hide, is now hidden within us, truly Present with Father and Holy Spirit, humbly asking for us to gaze on Him with our "feeble love that enthralls" Him.
"Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe."
Our glorious, Risen Lord, ever-loving, ever-present, ever-pleading, ever-longing, ever-waiting, ever-forgiving, ever-redeeming, ever-imprisoned in our being ...
"To live by love is closely to enfold
the Uncreated Word - Voice of my Lord!
And with Thee, in my heart of hearts, to hold
the Spirit sending forth His flame adored.
Thus, loving Thee, the Father too is mine :
My feeble heart hath drawn Him from above,
O Trinity, the Prisoner Divine!
Oh, my poor love."
(St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face)
HE IS ALIVE.