John’s gospel says that in the midst of their fear, Jesus appears to the disciples and wishes them peace. He shows them his scars and that’s how they recognize him and experience joy. In the same line Thomas also identifies and exclaims his faith in the risen Lord saying My Lord and My God after seeing the wounded Christ. The Resurrected Lord retained his scarred wounds.

This gives us a way to understand/embrace our wounds also. As we are surmounting the pandemic, families remain scarred and shattered by untimely deaths, careers and studies are still put on hold, jobs are being lost, lives are bruised in several ways and scars still remain. As survivors in small and large ways, we are invited also to an intimacy with the scarred Christ who is eternally marked by the disfigurement/scars of his crucifixion. We, touching his wounds as Thomas wanted to do, are enabled to be in touch with who we are, in spite of however scarred we may be.

Peter Wehner wrote in Why Is Jesus Still Wounded After His Resurrection? “I find the concept deeply moving, that fractures in our lives can be redeemed and leveraged for good. All things, even broken things, can be made new again, and sometimes they can be made even more beautiful. And they need not be hidden, in shadows or in shame. None of this means that people, if they had a choice, would endure the blast furnace of pain and loss, of trauma and shattered lives. It means only that even out of ashes beauty can emerge.

Kintsugi (golden joinery) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Kintsugi is a metaphor for the resurrection because it does not completely erase the wound but transforms brokenness into beauty. And Jesus’ resurrection reminds us of God’s ability to repair us into something new. Some of the scars need to remain, for it just may be that God needs our transformed brokenness as components necessary to bring about the kin-dom we’ve been promised.