What is a wound?
Some wounds are the result of loss, as Frederick Bauerschmidt suggests, “[t]he Wound is a negative space, defined by emptiness.” (83). The dent, the cut, the hole, the puncture. These are wounds in the negative sense. The pierced side of Jesus is such a wound, a space carved-out in what was once whole and sound (Jn. 19:34).
But wounds can also be a painful positivity: the welt, the boil, the blister, the raised bruise, the ribboned scar. Nothing is gone, nothing is missing, for this manner of wound arises not from the absence of bodily substance but from the presence of bodily affliction. Such are the raised welts upon the body of Christ (Matthew 26:67, 27:30; cf. Is. 53:5) and the swelling around the places where the thorns os hif crown entered the flesh.
Wounds are the things that are, by both absence and presence, a departure from the way things ought to be. They are a reconfiguration of the body into a new shape defined by the wound.
This may seem like a Good Friday reflection, but it isn’t. For something terrible about wounds encounters us in Easter: the Risen Christ still bears the wounds he received in his Passion (Jn. 20). They become glorious marks of his victory (Rev. 5:6). The saints too, in classical hagiography, bear in heaven the marks of their suffering—the badges of their “fellowship with Christ” as St. Paul regards it (Phil. 3:10).
Of course, the Lord is not a sadist. Christianity must never be allowed to be construed into a hollow darkness where pain is the only currency. At the same time, however, it is precisely in the erasure of pain from the lexicon of redemption that allows pain to become meaningless. Ours is a society consumed with/by what Byung-Chul Han identifies as an unbearable “positivity” in which everything painful needs be avoided and all memories of it erased.
Wounds, we seem to believe, only heal when they are forgotten and removed.
The Church, however, has long seen that the greatest (if also paradoxical) response to pain is to gather it into the work of redemption. The negative wounds of Christ (his Side) become a font of faith for Thomas, and the scars on his back, bent out of shape by the Passion, become the shape of promise. This scarred back is forever inscribed with the truth that he who lays down his life shall not lose it but gain it.
The Moravians are famous for their rich devotional life orchestrated around the image of the wounds of Christ. This was not pain for pain’s sake, but rather the belief that pain could be made sense of in the light of the Gloria Pleurae —the glorious wounds of Jesus. The phenomenal missionary power released from that devotion found its strength in the claim made by those wounds that that which we suffer for the sake of the Kingdom isn’t meaningless, but participates in the glory of God. We too become bodies inscribed by hope and victory. The eternal rest of the Kingdom lies not in the erasure of all that we have suffered, but the hallowing of our wounds. O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata…