Oh, It’s Still There…

Surprised, I looked closer at my knee. Yes, there it was, after all these years: the scar still with the cinders that Dad was not able to clean out when I fell off my bike onto the unpaved road I grew up on. Not that he couldn’t have cleaned them out; I was crying and screaming so hard that my tenderhearted Dad couldn’t bear for me to continue to be in pain.
When I think back to that event seventy years ago, I do not remember the pain. I remember the love that Dad had for me, so much so that it hurt him to see me hurting. That scar is a permanent reminder of a painful experience that has been overridden by the demonstration of love a father has for his child.

We all have them, some more than others. Physical scars are signs of surgeries, injuries, and accidents. Scars, unseen but felt, can also have emotional origins: loss, abuse, loneliness, worthlessness, and so many more. We can create our own source of scars by holding on to resentments and envy. When we do notice them, we remember the cause.

Yet scars are also signs of healing. While they may bring back feelings of pain or shame, from conflict, abuse, or fear, they are also signs of hope that whatever inflicted the scar has itself disappeared. Some even bring back memories of tenderness and love—a scar from giving birth, from donating a kidney. Looking again at the cinder-filled scar on my knee, I think of the tenderness and love of my dad.

Scars are usually not something we intentionally seek. How strange it may seem to us, then, that Jesus willingly took on the punishment that created his scars, exemplifying the physical and emotional pain at the hands of the government and religious institutions of the day, even the pain of abandonment he felt at being “forsaken.” Yet he understood our pain, the pain of sin and the necessity of becoming our atoning sacrifice so that we could be brought back into a right relationship with his Father.

The scars remained on his resurrected body. When Thomas questioned that the man standing before him was Jesus, the risen Lord, Jesus used the scars to testify to his victory over death, the reality of his resurrected body bearing evidence of God’s love and power to give life to all who believe.

I am thankful that Jesus then said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John 20: 29 NRSV). I may not have yet seen the risen Lord physically, yet in meditation I have gazed on the nail-scarred hands and pierced feet of Jesus. Nothing has humbled me or caused me to recognize my sin more. Not only do I see in them the tenderheartedness and love that my dad showed me when I was five, but I also see forgiveness beyond my understanding; I see restoration to a fullness of life; I see victory over death that provides not only hope but assurance of the future.

Nineteenth-century hymn writer Matthew Bridges sums it up in the hymn                                                                          “Crown Him with Many Crowns”:
                                            Crown him the Lord of love!
                                             Behold his hands and side
                                            Rich wounds, yet visible above,
                                                   In beauty glorified.

It may not be a bad thing to be reminded from time to time… the scars of Jesus are still there.