The Womb-Wound

Into the Wound

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

According to Genesis, the first human being—the archetypal human being—was named Adam, which means “earthling” or “earth-critter.” And Adam’s job was to be God’s steward upon the earth: to care for and to govern all that God had made. Adam shared a oneness with Creation, made from the earth, after all. And he used this oneness to steward the Garden of Eden; not just the plants but the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the monsters of the deep.

Adam loved Creation, had a kinship with Creation, but was also set apart. For while his body had been formed from earth, his spirit, his breath, his life had been breathed into him by God. And this made him unique: uniquely blessed, and uniquely responsible. He was an animal, yes, but an animal with reason, with imagination, with awareness, abstraction, and free will—in short, a person, possessing moral agency.

Because of this, no other creature could quite be his equal, his partner. He stood below the angels yet above the beasts. And it was lonely there as the bridge between two worlds. So according to the story, God opened up Adam’s side and removed a rib. At least, that’s how we usually translate it. That word for rib can also mean side, as though the Adam, the earth-critter, were split in half. One half became male and the other half female. Thus was Adam truly now a man, and Eve his wife.

But she was no passive partner, mind you. Eve was to be Adam’s helpmate—a word that, far from implying submission, Scripture most often applies to God. Together, Adam and Eve were the earth-critter and mother of the living, life begetting life. And this indeed is what makes us human: we are both spirit and animal, male and female, children of earth and mothers of the living. And so no matter how one interprets the early chapters of Genesis, they truly are our “Beginning,” for they tell us both who and whose we are.

When Jesus appears to the Apostles in our Gospel reading this morning, on that second Sunday following the Resurrection, it is no accident that Thomas enters literally into Jesus’ side. Recall that at the Crucifixion, Jesus’ side was opened by the thrust of a soldier’s spear. And we are told that blood and water burst forth. From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have interpreted this as the Sacraments flowing from His side: the waters of Baptism; the Blood of the New Covenant. His wounded side became the womb from which we are all of us reborn.

In the Beginning, the division of Adam’s body, the opening of his side, allowed for the creation of the entire human race. Here now is Christ, God incarnate, risen again from the dead as the New Adam, the New Man, the New Human Being. And again from His opened side is drawn His Bride—flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones—which is none other than the Church. As Eve is both the body and the bride of Adam, so are we, the Church, both the Body and the Bride of Christ. We are the New Creation. We are the New Humanity. We are Jesus’ Resurrection broken open and gushing forth for the salvation of the entire world.

And He breathes out His Holy Spirit into us; as in the beginning He breathed life into Adam; as for Ezekiel He breathed life into the valley of dry bones. And like those bones, like the red clay from which Adam was formed, we are animated with new, eternal, divine life: a life that outlives death; a life that drowns and floods and washes away all of sin and death and hell.

All of which is to say that the Resurrection does not end on that first Easter Sunday. Our Lord’s Rising from the Tomb is no once-and-done affair. It is true that He has died, never to die again, and has Risen deathless and eternal in the heavens. But the Resurrection continues, and it continues in us.

You and I and all of us are the Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ. We are given His Spirit, His Body, and His Blood in the Sacraments. We are given His living, eternal Word in the Scriptures and in right preaching. We are given wholly His inheritance as sons and daughters of God. And so we are given His mission, His power, His grace—to go and teach and heal and raise up the dead, promising impossible promises, forgiving unforgivable sins.

We are Christ now. We are the Resurrection. Jesus has no feet on earth but yours. He has no hands with which to heal save those we hold before us. Your tongue is His tongue now, your voice His voice, your body the Temple of His Spirit. How then ought we to live? How shall we use this awesome power? How will we live out our wondrous and terrible responsibility as people of the New Covenant, the New Creation, the New Humanity? When people look at us, do they still see Jesus?

I’ll be honest. As your pastor, I don’t much want you to be concerned about the end of the world. I am assured that Jesus has all that well in hand, whenever He may choose to come again in glory and set the world at last aright. Moreover, I don’t want you to be terribly concerned about your own salvation either. God does not break promises, and He has promised Himself in no uncertain terms to you. Life will be hard, and there are crosses aplenty to bear, as I’m sure you well know. But God is with us. And He will have the final word.

Rather, I want Christianity to be concerned with our neighbor in his need: with the hungry, the sick, the poor, and the hated; with the abused, the oppressed, and the imprisoned. And not just with these harmless neighbors, mind you, but with our enemies as well: the killer and the violent, the bomber and the shooter, the revilers of our faith. This is whom we’re tasked to love. This is whom we need to forgive and to heal and indeed to save. For if it seems scandalous to pronounce the forgiveness even of our own murderers—did not Christ first do the same for us from the Cross?

It was the love of Christ that so amazed the ancient Romans. In a society riven with hatreds, where blood alone defined kinship and tribe, the love that Christians showed to one another, that they showered upon the poor and the orphan and the widow, and ladled indiscriminately even upon their enemies, caused a worldly, weary, grasping, pagan, materialistic urban Empire to marvel: “Look at how they love one another! Here indeed is a new kind of man!”

Is that how they see us today? Is that how Christians are yet known amongst our neighbors, our societies, and our enemies—as a people so defined by love that we barely seem human anymore, becoming in Christ more humane than humanity? Or are we now just one more focus group, one more voting bloc, one more tribe scrambling for advantage in a world that loves things and sells people?

It is Jesus who saves the lost and raises the dead. If we hope to play any role, however humble, in the salvation of humankind, we must show to them Jesus and none other. As Christians, we are sinners, one and all. Yet as the Body of Christ—as flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones—we are the Resurrection and the Life.

It is in His scars that we can know Him. It is through His wounds we are reborn. And as we emerge anew from out His open side, may we like Thomas boldly confess: “My Lord and my God!”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.