Good Things Come in Small Packages was the song Christy spontaneously sang out to our Josiah moments after he was born and before he was placed in his incubator. “You are welcome here!” we cried out through terrified and tear streaked faces, over and over to him as the doctors rushed him across the room and deliberated whether or not this one pound baby really was welcome and deserving of a fighting chance at life. Seventeen weeks early, his skin was so transparent he was red as a robin and not cute the way a bird or newborn baby is. Our baby bird with eyes fused shut was soon covered in tubes and wires and remained that way for months. These days he’s cute enough, alright. Perhaps all the more so that he carries the battle scars of a survivor of micro-prematurity.
With Easter in mind, the resurrected and glorified body of Jesus must have been something to look at; for the shear wonder and glory of him, yes - but all the more that he chose to keep his wounds. Imagine God himself holding his own ‘weakness’ and areas of vulnerability out to be seen and touched by the weak and vulnerable themselves. By us. He may have been the unblemished and spotless lamb before he was crucified, but not anymore. This is hard to grasp, but one thing the apostles creed basically states is that the Good Shepherd went down to the muck - to hell itself - to lift the lost sheep out of it. He has the scars to prove it. Is that okay with us? Like the temple priests during Passover, do we not approve of the look of a sacrificial lamb with imperfections? We want to say, “Sorry Jesus, but those scars won’t do. Our Messiah is the conquering Lion of Judah and quite impenetrable, thank you very much. Heroes don’t get hurt, have chinks in their armor - holes in their plot - hands, feet and side...humanity.”
Darwin was right. Survival of the fittest is both a primary law of nature and the law of the jungle we are constantly tempted to be governed by; but it is not the law of the Kingdom of God. Presidents, mega-church pastors, pop stars and those at the top of their game are at the top of the ladder in the Jungle. We worship success stories and are drawn to them as moths to flame while ‘losers’ are ushered away from our line of sight. We chew ‘em up for entertainment and spit ‘em out the other end when they fail to meet our immediate gratifications. We don’t like to see or smell what has passed out the other end and fallen through our cracks (pun intended). The lepers are hidden away in their colonies, the dying in hospices (if they are lucky), the elderly in old folks homes, ‘special people’ in their special schools and workplaces and the insane in their asylums. If we who have it together are in first class, the rest are in coach. If they so much as appear infectious, they are placed in the cargo hold.
Meanwhile we count our blessings or do whatever else it takes to maintain our illusions. Among these illusions are (sadly) often enough our false pictures of God as “the man upstairs,” an emotionally distant ‘higher-up’ CEO of the big company with his big, clean manicured hands gripping his big office chair/throne arms behind his big shiny desk on the very top floor of his biggest office building with the biggest, baddest, bestest view of the big city he also happens to own. Doesn’t that sound just like the devil? Speaking of hands, on Easter we imagine the trembling hands of Thomas inspecting the perfectly healed, shiny scars of Jesus’ hands after his resurrected self appeared to him. Have you ever seen (or imagined) a three-day old, unstitched railroad spike of a gash? What John’s firsthand Gospel account actually says is this: “...reach here your hand and put it into my side.” Have you ever actually imagined Thomas reaching his hand into the open spear wound in Jesus’ side? I wonder if he had the nerve or stomach to do so. I didn’t see that version in the illustrated Bible stories of my childhood. If you ask for proof, you might just bite off more than you can chew. Perhaps that is why we are more blessed who haven’t seen and yet believe. Seeing him could (and always should) be more than we can handle.
He was wounded for our transgressions, the psalmist says. The prophet Isaiah said this about him: “For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.” That actually sounds an awful lot like our son Josiah in his early months.
In the early days of his life, I was almost afraid to look him in the face - not because I feared bonding in case he didn’t make it (I did) and seeing his suffering was too much to handle (it was), but because looking on him was the nearest I’ve come - or most likely will come - to looking on the face of the Suffering Servant from Isaiah himself - the face of the wounded God who is found in the face of the vulnerable, broken and bedraggled. The face of holiness isn’t easy to look upon. If we can’t get away from the faces of Jesus, we often choose to confine him to the places reserved for such faces - out of our line of sight.
Although he was resurrected from the dead of all things, God chose not to heal and erase the wounds in his very own person. We, like most of the faithful - often pray and ask for healing and most often don’t receive, like St. Paul. Not only for Josiah, but for Christy who has suffered from intense chronic pain, depression and poor sleep for nearly fourteen years. Some cups just taste bitter; but those cups are so often of the greatest worth to our greater good; and if not the salvation of the world, then certainly that of the broken and lonely world around us. Perhaps the greatest miracle isn’t the body healed of all hurts after all, but the heart that continues to glorify and put trust in it’s God while the body or mind walks with a limp: the caged bird that sings the healing song of freedom: “Oh my soul, why are you cast down within me? Put your hope in God...I will yet praise him!” (Psalm 42)
The image of God in heaven with crucifixion wounds still smarting from time to time brings me great comfort. Call me crazy, but as long as there’s one person whose hurts haven’t healed in this world, how could the identifying and empathizing God of love not wince from the pain himself? What if, millennia later, he is to be the last one left in Glory who has yet to be glorified? The last shall be first after all... How else could God identify with the suffering than (in some way) presently suffer himself?
According to scripture, we were all dead in our transgressions. When Christ redeemed our lost souls, he didn’t cover up our past wounds and mistakes or hide them away for shame. We may have tried that act, but he hasn’t. It is true that he physically heals some and not others (a mystery we must try to accept for the present), but he doesn’t stick the rest: the broken, poor, sick, mentally ill and physically handicapped and plain “different” in the back of the church, school or a different bus for shame because they haven’t been “healed” yet and the sight of them is an affront to the particular group or congregation’s bogus ideology or theology. He holds those who can’t hide their gaping wounds and obvious scars out to be seen, empowered to love and be loved as they are, just as he holds his own torn body out to be touched by the doubting Thomas’s of this world, saying “See me. Touch me. Feel me. Believe in me. ‘Put your hand in my side.’ Love me as I am. Let me love you as you are.” God helps those who, like Peter are led where they don’t want to go - the silenced lambs led to the slaughter - those who can’t help themselves.
A world where those broken and stained by the fall aren’t lifted up for God’s light to shine through (the way they are) like precious stained glass - isn’t God’s world. He uses the broken cisterns, bleeding hearts and Weeping Mary’s of this world to water the flowers along the dry garden path. He repurposes the pain - transfiguring golf balls into robins that sprout wings, sing and eventually soar on their own. Why did God heal my son Josiah of some things and not others? Was it his sin or his parent’s fault that he has cerebral palsy? It’s hard to understand how some people can actually believe that crap. I guess in our anguish of heart and constant calls to prayer on Facebook of all things, we and the thousands of others who prayed faithfully for him just didn’t pray or believe hard enough? All together, was our faith smaller than a mustard seed? After all, God gave me his name in a dream and his name even means ‘healed by God’ of all things. For that matter, why did he let him get born so early into a fight for his very life?
All I know is that if God had anything to do with it, we must believe He was in the aftermath more than in the event itself. He was and remains in the miracle of love as we’ve been surrounded and upheld by the prayers and encouragement of thousands - most of whom we’ll never meet. He is also in the miracle of life - imperfect as it is - as we’ve watched this frail spring flower - this tender shoot - pushing his way up as a root through parched ground, rock and the concrete of Dublin 8 - to shine his own beautiful and broken light of life out to a world that longs to and needs to believe in miracles.
I am repeatedly floored by my son Josiah Caleb Rauwolf. He was brought back from the point of death more times than I care to recall. Because of all he’s fought for and worked towards, the floor he plays on, rolls on, farts on and drools upon is holy ground. He and the Resurrected Son of God have a few things in common. They each have wounds that persuade: it is not those untouched by grief, but those acquainted with suffering - the “embarrassing,” small, weak, slow, humble and downright unlucky and unlikely that cause the earth to quake around them, divisions to be rent top to bottom, and mountains of pride and unbelief to be cast into the sea. In short it is they, the meek ones, who will inherit the earth. The mustard seed of faith found through rocky soil and desperate beginnings (or endings) becomes the most unlikely tree of welcome to both birds and sojourners alike who are worn out from their long migration south and just happy to have a safe place to land and rest a while. We are invited through the sacred door of suffering into a world of resurrection and a new life bursting with hope we never dreamed of - for this purpose: to join this ministry of Jesus (who is both the Resurrection and the Life and has the scars to prove it): “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
