(Please note the names mentioned in this sermon are pseudonyms)
Today, we have this story of Jesus physically appearing to his disciples after his resurrection. On Jesus’ first appearance, Thomas was absent, and we just read in the story that he had insisted on seeing Jesus’ wounds if he were to believe what his fellow disciples had witnessed.
A week later, Jesus once again appears to the disciples, with Thomas too present. Jesus, having known Thomas's reservation, shows him his wounds and invites him to feel them. John’s Gospel avoids saying whether Thomas physically examined Jesus’ wounded hands before declaring: “My Lord and my God!”
Jesus asserted the superiority of those who have faith without physical evidence. Nonetheless, because he was willing to show Thomas his wounds and let him feel them, I believe that Thomas did feel Jesus’ wounds. (Many Biblical scholars subscribe to this belief).
Whether Thomas touched the wounds or not, the fact that Jesus was willing to show his wounds to Thomas makes us ask: “Why wasn’t Jesus' pain and woundedness finished when he died on Good Friday?” My experience thirty-three years ago in NZ has helped me reflect on and answer this question. I want to share this experience with you.
The experience relates to a lovely young woman God brought to my life in the parish I served thirty-three years ago. I was an Assistant Priest at the time. This gorgeous girl's name was Assumpta.
When I met Assumpta, she was twenty-four years old and in the prime of her life. She had completed a fashion course and worked as a fashion industry model. She was one of the prettiest girls I had met. Her father was Irish, and her mother was Greek. She had Dark hair, olive skin, and deep green eyes with long eyelashes. She had the perfect figure to be a model. She was eight months into her modelling career.
One day, she called me panicked and asked whether I would see her urgently at the church office. We arranged to meet in the afternoon when she contacted me. After talking for a while, I felt she was pretty uneasy about what she had come to tell me. After talking for a while, she picked up her courage. She told me, "Father, this is not the kind of a thing you may get to hear from your average parishioner, but I have no one to tell what I have discovered. I cannot tell my parents just now, or Mark” – her fiancée she was due to marry later that year. The engagement ceremony of Mark and Assumpta was the first formal event I witnessed, and I was blessed after I’d been ordained a priest three days ago.
Assumpta started to cry uncontrollably and said: “Father, I had discovered an unusual lump in the side of my left breast three weeks ago. I first ignored it because I had worn a very tight bra for a modelling event and thought it was caused by it. But it didn’t go away, and I had to see my doctor, who referred me to a specialist. Two days ago, I took a mammogram, and it has been confirmed that I have stage two breast cancer.” She started sobbing and said: “I am twenty-five, working as a model and engaged to a man to marry soon; what is my future? Will prayer heal me? Will you anoint me for healing, and will you come and be with me when I have to tell my parents and Mark about this?”
I said, “Assumpta, of course, I will pray for you, anoint you, be with you when you break the news to your parents and Mark, and journey with you, shouldering whatever Jesus wants me to bear for you with him.” After talking for a long time, we agreed to see the parents and Mark as early as possible and share her news.
We did that, and in great agony and pain, Assumpta resigned from her modelling job and started treatment. She had two invasive surgeries, which didn’t prove successful, and after eighteen months, a mastectomy. Considering her age and the extent to which the cancer had spread, to ensure her survival, both her breasts were removed.
The day Assumpta informed the company of her illness, her contract was terminated. In addition to the last nominal and casual salary the company paid her (NZ$1,250 for a month), she was paid NZ$175 for a women’s undergarment she’d modelled for.
No matter how successful the surgeries were to remove the life-threatening cancer, which were successful, her body was never to be “normal” again. No matter how good the surgeons and the plastic surgeons were, her body was never as it was before the mastectomy. For her, the pain and struggle didn’t last just a few hours or days, and then it was over. It was a very long and painful struggle. It was so painful for her and for all those who loved her to see her disfiguring as a result of aggressive chemotherapy. I sat through five consecutive fortnightly chemo-therapy sessions to support her. The lustre of her beautiful face receded after the first week of chemotherapy. And, I wept privately each time I’d seen her over those fortnights for seeing someone so beautiful withering away and reducing into a mere skeleton.
On the day of the last chemo session, she told me that she’d learned from a model friend that the company she’d worked for had made enormous profits from the barwear she had modelled for before being fired. That was also the day Assumpta asked me to tell Mark he had her blessing to give up on her and fall in love with someone else.
As a young priest going through this illness Assumpta had suffered, I’d silently witnessed the truth of the human experience. So, I remember telling myself as loudly as I could: “Here is the truth; this is how it is for humanity. This is the experience of humanity I’d been called to minister to in God’s Name!”
It’s true. There are some experiences in life we never get over, problems that we never completely
overcome, deep scares of those experiences that never heal, and situations in which things will never be the same. Assumpta never got over what happened to her. Neither did she ever forget it.
This is also true for us. No matter how much healing we might experience during a time of suffering, as time goes on, some wounds and scars from our sufferings and negative experiences in this life will never disappear. It’s a human reality: some wounds and scars last a long time, and many are permanent.
Not long after Assumpta’s full recovery from the ordeal, she attended a home Bible study group I’d led. To this day, I know that she attended the Bible Study out of a sense of obligation to me because I sat through most of her chemo sessions.
Interestingly, it was also a Bible Study held following Easter that year, when we had the same Gospel reading you had just read today from John’s Gospel. That day, she shared her experience and witnessed the wounds and scars she carried in her body and heart. The whole study group who had supported Assumpta and the family were no strangers to the deep sufferings she’d been through.
As we shared our thoughts, in a profound moment of inspiration, she acclaimed aloud: “I can identify myself both with Lord Jesus and Thomas; Jesus was among his disciples in a wounded body, still carrying the marks of his humanity in his body because they were not healed for his disciples and for everybody else whom he’d died. “Poor Thomas,” she said, “was just checking that out for himself and for us all, so that all of us can truly believe that the Risen Lord still bears the marks of our sin and doubts.”
This is why I believe that Jesus still had wounds when he rose from the dead, visited his disciples two weeks after his resurrection, and invited Thomas to touch and feel them for real.
God did not erase the wounds of the resurrected Christ because, in God’s heart, all our pains are not yet behind us. Only when our pains, wounds, and struggles are in the past for us will they be in the past for God. Jesus overcame death, but he did not leave his humanity behind. He didn’t leave us behind. He didn’t take himself out of our struggle.
Knowing this truth opens the path for us to heal deeply and take that healing to put the struggles, pains and wounds in the past in Jesus. In the faith of your knowledge and faith in Jesus’ resurrection, we are asked to place all the pains, struggles and wounds as a balm for the wounds he still carries for us. As Thomas did, we can only experience the Risen Lord beyond the shadow of any doubt.
Assumpta’s testimony on the evening of the Bible Study brought about a miracle neither she, any member of her family, nor I thought would ever happen. Her spirit-moved testimony to the Risen Lord transformed her to affirm and exclaim with Thomas: “My Lord, and my God!”. Then, over supper after the Bible Study,y she told me: “Father, guess what? I want to marry Mark, whom I know still deeply loves me. And we will be blessed if you would marry us.” I couldn’t hold the tears that my eyes shed when she said those words.
Four months after that Bible Study, just before I was appointed to a parish of my own in Wellington, the last Sacrament I performed in that parish was Assumpta’s and Mark’s wedding.
Assumpta’s life and testimony at the Bible Study gave me the most beautiful epiphany. It is the epiphany, the knowledge or the knowing you and I are invited to have again. That is the knowledge that in appearing to his disciples in his wounded but resurrected body, Jesus had kept his promise to his followers never to abandon and orphan them (John 14:18).
Jesus made good on his promise not to leave us orphaned—not any of us! Jesus knows our struggles, wounds, hurts, and pains. Jesus carries them even in his resurrection body! This is the true victory we celebrate as we participate in the Easter mystery every day of our lives.
Since I have based my reflection on the beautiful gift Assumpta offered me through her life's sufferings, I’d like to say that we are in touch to date. Assumpta and Mark are proud parents of two teenage children. She has not had a remission for the last twenty-five years. Praise God!
Assumpta is now forty-eight years old, weathered into middle age by time and the challenges she had faced over the years to remain cancer-free. But Mark and I think she is more beautiful now than when she was twenty-four. After her mastectomy, she couldn’t model. Today, she is a senior executive of the fashion company that hired her as a model but fired her soon after she became ill twenty-five years ago. Mark and Assumpta’s eldest daughter, Lucille (17), aspires to be a model and fulfil Mum’s dream job.
Mark, who is only three years younger than me, who had told me before Assumpta took ill of his grand dreams of capitalising on Assumpta’s beauty and starting a fashion and design company, took up nursing soon after marrying. For the last seventeen years, Mark has worked as an Oncology nurse. Last September, Mark was appointed the CEO of a hospice of eighty beds in NZ.
The Risen Christ insists we see and touch his wounds because they are signs of love. Those wounds invite us to see deep into God’s Heart and bear in the Risen Jesus.
Jesus visits us even today in our doubts bearing our pains what we are do with our hurts, sufferings, wounds and scars. He visits us not in a perfect body, but with a love and presence that are perfected only in the situations you and I find ourselves in.
Christ is Risen; Halleluiah! He is Risen, Indeed, Halleluiah!
Let us pray:
Eternal Father,
through the resurrection of your Son, help us to face the future with courage and assurance,
knowing that nothing in death or life can ever separate us from your love.
We ask this through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
