He Still Has Holes In Him

There is something strange about the resurrected body of Jesus.

It still has holes in it.

Sit with that before making it theological.

Jesus has defeated death.

The stone has moved.

The grave has been emptied.

Death has lost its claim on His body.

The resurrection is not resuscitation. Jesus has not simply returned to the condition He occupied before Calvary. Something has happened to humanity in Him.

And yet when Jesus walks into the room in John 20, He still has wounds.

That should bother us a little.

Why resurrect wrists with holes?

Why bring a pierced side out of the grave?

Surely the God who can raise dead flesh can close a wound.

But Jesus comes through resurrection carrying evidence of what killed Him.

We have misunderstood what glory does with scars.

The disciples are hiding when He comes.

John says the doors were shut because they were afraid.

Think about that room.

These are men who once argued about which of them was greatest. Men who promised loyalty. Men who believed they were ready for whatever was coming.

Then Gethsemane happened.

Then soldiers came.

Then Jesus was taken.

And everybody discovered something about themselves they did not want to know.

They ran.

Peter denied Him.

Their courage collapsed exactly when their courage was required.

Now the doors are locked.

And that is the room Jesus chooses to enter.

He does not knock.

He does not wait for courage to open the door.

He comes into the place fear has locked.

And His first words are peace.

That is astonishing because these men have failed Him.

If anybody in that room has the right to begin with disappointment, it is Jesus.

He could have entered saying, Where were you?

He could have looked at Peter.

He could have named Gethsemane.

Instead He says peace.

Then John records something almost too physical for the moment.

Jesus shows them His hands and His side.

Not a sermon.

Wounds.

The risen Christ makes Himself recognizable by the places where He was pierced.

We often imagine glory as the removal of every indication that suffering ever happened.

Jesus apparently does not.

The wounds remain.

Not bleeding.

Not defeating Him.

Not keeping Him in the tomb.

But remaining.

There is a difference between a wound that is still killing you and a scar that now testifies that death failed.

And some of us have spent years asking Jesus to make us look like nothing ever happened.

We call that healing.

Sometimes it is hiding.

We want resurrection without evidence of crucifixion.

We want God to restore us so completely that nobody can tell where we broke.

But Jesus walks into the room and says, Look at My hands.

The nails did not become imaginary because Sunday came.

Friday actually happened.

His body remembers Calvary without remaining captive to Calvary.

That distinction matters.

Because there are people reading this who are exhausted from trying to become the person they were before the betrayal, the failure, the funeral, the thing they thought God would prevent but did not.

Somewhere along the way you decided healing meant getting back to who you were before the wound.

But Jesus does not come out of the grave looking like Thursday.

He comes out transformed.

Resurrection is not God returning you to who you were before the breaking.

It is a life in which the breaking no longer gets the final word.

Thomas is not there when Jesus first appears.

When the others tell him they have seen the Lord, Thomas refuses borrowed revelation.

Unless I see the mark of the nails.

Unless I put my finger there.

Unless I put my hand into His side.

I will not believe.

But listen carefully to what Thomas actually asks to see.

There is a detail hiding inside his sentence.

The Greek word translated mark is typos.

It can mean a mark, an impression, the shape left behind when something has struck or pressed into something else.

Thomas does not merely ask whether Jesus has hands.

He asks for the evidence left by the nail.

He wants the imprint.

That is strange because the nail is gone.

The cross is gone.

The soldiers are gone.

But the typos remains.

The thing that wounded Jesus is no longer present, but His body still bears the shape of where it was.

Some of you know exactly what that feels like.

The person is not in your life anymore.

The conversation happened years ago.

You do not even think about it every day now.

And then somebody says something at dinner, or you hear a name in a grocery store, and your body does that thing before your mind catches up.

I do not know.

There are places in us that remember faster than we do.

And resurrection does not require you to lie about that.

Thomas thinks the mark might prove this is really Jesus.

Jesus is willing to let it.

We have been hard on Thomas.

Jesus is not.

Eight days later Jesus comes back.

And this is where the story becomes almost unbearable.

Jesus remembers exactly what Thomas said.

He tells him to bring his finger.

Bring his hand.

Touch the place.

Think about what Jesus is offering.

Thomas thinks his doubt has disqualified him from encounter.

Jesus answers doubt by bringing the doubter close to the wound.

He does not hide His side from the man struggling to believe.

He offers it.

There are revelations of Jesus you only receive when He lets you come close to the places where love cost Him something.

Christianity is not the announcement that God watched suffering from a safe distance.

God has wounds.

Not because suffering is ultimate.

Precisely because it is not.

The wounds are carried by a body death could not keep.

And then Jesus does something remarkable.

He sends these frightened people.

As the Father sent Me, I also send you.

These are men standing behind locked doors who ran when Jesus was arrested.

Their bodies are still in the room fear chose for them.

Jesus commissions them anyway.

Then He breathes on them and says, Receive the Holy Spirit.

Do not move past the breathing.

John knows how loaded that image is.

The Bible has seen divine breath before.

In Genesis, God breathes the breath of life into the man and he becomes a living being.

In Ezekiel, breath enters the dead and they stand on their feet.

Now Jesus breathes upon frightened disciples.

The men who could not keep themselves faithful are going to require a life they cannot manufacture.

Jesus does not tell failures to try harder.

He breathes.

Peace for frightened men.

Breath for empty men.

Sending for men who ran.

That is the gospel invading discipleship.

You cannot produce resurrection life through determination.

You receive it.

And notice where they receive it.

Not after they have repaired their reputation.

Not after they have demonstrated they will never run again.

Jesus breathes into a room full of people who recently failed Him.

We would have put them on probation.

Jesus puts His Spirit in them.

And that room starts getting uncomfortably close to ours.

Some of us are spiritually exhausted because we are still trying to prove that Jesus did not make a mistake when He chose us.

So we become polished.

Useful.

Dependable.

But underneath all of that is the fear that somebody might get close enough to see the holes.

So we cover our hands.

Jesus does not.

There is a kind of Christianity obsessed with appearing unwounded.

Jesus ruins it by walking into Easter with scars.

The question is not whether you have been pierced.

Live long enough and something will pierce you.

The question is what owns the wound now.

Is it still permission to remain closed?

Or has Jesus become Lord there too?

Because resurrection does not require pretending Friday never happened.

It means Friday no longer determines what happens next.

Maybe you have been asking God to use you once you no longer look like you have been through anything.

But what if the risen Jesus is not embarrassed by the places where life actually got to you?

That does not mean every wound belongs on a platform.

Some things you do not owe anybody.

But Jesus refuses to let death own the meaning of anything He has resurrected.

There is something in your life you may still be calling proof that God abandoned you.

Bring it into the locked room.

Then look at His hands.

The throne of God is occupied by the Lamb who was slain.

Heaven did not erase Calvary.

It revealed what Calvary actually meant.

The scars are not evidence that death almost won.

They are evidence that love went all the way through death and came out the other side.

The door can stay locked and Jesus can still enter.

You can still bear evidence of the nails without belonging to the cross that made them.

Look at Jesus.

Some wounds become scars.

Some locked rooms become commissioning rooms.

Some frightened people become witnesses.

And sometimes the place you keep covering is the very place where, when surrendered completely to Jesus, somebody finally sees that the Man standing in front of them really did walk out of the grave.

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