When I was sixteen, I broke my finger playing football in the backyard. My step-brother threw the pass to my dad and I reached out to block it only to have the football jam my finger and break off a piece of the bone below the knuckle.
It was very painful.
I had to see a hand specialist and was fitted for a special splint called a figure-eight splint that would allow me to still move the finger while it healed.
It’s been almost twenty years and while I can say that the finger is fully healed, sometimes I hit it wrong. Someone bumps into it or I ram it up against a doorframe and the finger explodes in pain. In the space of five or ten seconds, I feel both the current pain, and layered underneath it the memory of the initial pain all those years ago.
In those few seconds, I wonder if I’ve broken the finger again. I wonder if it’s still damaged. Fear replaces pain. Fear and worry and then I break out into a sweat.
But the pain passes almost as quickly as it came. I flex the finger and there’s nothing, not even a twinge as a reminder.
The same sort of thing happens with emotional pain too. Years pass and we are far removed from the initial hurt, but then something happens. Someone says something to us. Something happens at work, at home, at church and suddenly a nerve is struck and the pain returns, sometimes taking our breath away.
Fear creeps in behind the pain and adrenaline floods the brain.
And then we’re nothing but a rabbit in the woods, ears perked, heart racing, ready to bolt in a second.
Isn’t it amazing that as complicated as human beings are, that when it comes to fear and pain, we’re really no different from any animal.
This week we celebrate Holy Week, the days leading up to Easter. Holy Week is a study of fear and pain, from Jesus’s plea to God in Gethsemane “to take this cup away from me,” to Judas’s betrayal. From Peter’s denial, to Jesus’s isolation on the cross “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus suffers. His disciples suffer. His mother suffers. Can you imagine really his mother’s pain, watching her son dying on the cross? Even newly-raised-from-the-dead Lazarus is on the run as the chief priests consider killing him because he is an example of what the divine Jesus is capable of doing.
Jesus dies and the earth itself is not immune the pain of that loss, splitting open in that moment that he takes his last breath.
I cannot even begin to fathom the despair, the grief, the hopelessness, the helplessness that must have settled in on all those who loved Jesus.
I cannot imagine a darker time.
How does one survive that kind pain?
Some ran. Some, like Mary Magdalene, stayed, keeping a vigil at the tomb.
I can’t imagine there could have been any healing for any of them. The pain was too deep.
But then on the third day Jesus rose from the dead.
And with him, hope was reborn.
What I think is interesting to note, though, is that Jesus rising from the dead did not erase anyone’s pain. It allowed for healing, but it didn’t erase the pain completely.
I think of Jesus showing Thomas his wounds. Though dead and now alive, even Jesus still carried the scars of what was done to him.
Healing takes time and even when the healing is complete, scars still remain.
Again, Jesus was healed from death, yet still carried the holes from where he was nailed to the cross.
Healing takes time. We need to remember that.
And reminders of that pain don’t need to send us scurrying under the nearest bush like some frightened animal.
When we are healed, we are healed and nothing can take that away from us.
The reminders, the twinges of pain, the scars shouldn’t scare us. We should embrace them and bear them because they are not signs of weakness, but signs of strength, signs of what we lived through and what we survived.
And there is no greater example of that than the risen Jesus.
