“The Hands of Jesus”

The Second Sunday of Easter

April 3, 2005

Scripture Reading:   John 20:19-31

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

Imagine the hands of Jesus.

First imagine his hands as a newborn in the manger with Mary.  His hands were no more than an inch and a half.  The fingers were small, pink, wrinkled.  They were so delicate yet every nerve, every tendon, every muscle and fiber is laced perfectly together.  They are soft as angels wings.  They were miraculous, not because he was Emmanuel, but because all newborn hands are miraculous.  These hands which had only touch the silky things of the womb, now feel everything as raw reality.  His father’s rough hands feel like gravel.  These wonderful helpless hands of the new born Jesus  instinctive grasp the index finger of Mary’s held out to it. 

Then there are the hands of Jesus the boy.  These hands which let go of Mary’s hand so he can run and play with the other boys.  These hands that would swing off the limbs of trees and house beams.  The hands that made mud pies.  Smudged and dirty the boy would forget to wash them all day long.  The hands were clumsily learning how to handle a stylus and write.   Each letter was a miracle to it, for each letter was in the bible.  The first letter “beit” shaped like a horse shoe.  The letter opened only to God as the boy thought he would be.  “Beit.”  His fingers drew it a second and third time until his muscles could remember it.

Then there was the hands of the Jesus the carpenter.  They were rough and gnarled with broken fingernails and bruses.  They handled the chinsle and hammer and other instruments of his trade thoughtlessly and effortlessly as if an extension of themselves.  These hands would feel the grain of the wood and the God given strength of the fiber.  They would get splinters, sometimes one that festered. 

Then there were the hands of Jesus the healer.  Did they become soft as a new born’s and sensitive to all the world again?  Did they get very warm when they healed so that the paralytic could feel the power penetrate through his limbs as they came alive.  These healing hands that could touch untouchables without drawing back.  These hands that could convert contamination to revelation. 

Then there were the hands of Jesus the rabbi.  Hands that were stained green from plucking flowers and saying the kingdom of God is like one of these.  Hands that loved to pass wine and bread to others.  Anyone that would come.  Here is the bread.  Here is the wine.  Join us his hands would say.  His index finger perhaps even with a splinter in it from his carpentry, would point to a place at the table.  Here is a place saved for you.

Then there is the crucified hands of Jesus.  Hands that had nails driven through the tremendous complex of nerves and tendons and blood vessels and muscles.  These hand made crippled and claw like in the end. 

Imagine Jesus’ hands.  These were the hands that Thomas, the doubting one, wanted to see.  All his friends claimed that they had seen the risen Christ.  Yet, Thomas said that unless he personally saw the nail marks in his hands and put his finger where the nails were…he would not believe it. 

Then it happened.  Jesus did appear.  Jesus showed Thomas his hands.

Thomas reached out his index finger and touched Jesus’ hands.  The same finger that Thomas used to point with as a child showing his mother the flowers, and the sunrise felt the wound.  The finger that he touched his twin’s hair with.   The one that he ran across his lips when listening to Jesus teach.  The finger that wine spilt on when Jesus passed the cup to him.  The finger that he shook in Jesus’ face questioning, “Lord, we don’t now where you are going, so how can we know the way?”  (John 14:5)

This finger reached out and touched  the place where the nails had been driven into Jesus’ hand.  These resurrected hands were alive and pink again, and warm, and healing even the air around them.  Yet they still held the wound of the nails hammered into them.   What did the wound feel like to Thomas?  Was it soft and wet?  Was it still tender? Was it hot like burning coals?   Or did it sparkle like a jewel of salvation? 

There the two men were, standing together with Thomas’ finger touching Jesus’ punctured hand.  There is something very intimate when someone takes the hand of another and holds it and touches it and looks at what it reveals, to understand the present and read the future.  Jesus’ opened his hand to Thomas for he had nothing to hide.  At that moment they were close, physically close.  They were closer than they had ever been.  Thomas holding Jesus’ hand, feeling the wound.  Thomas examining, wondering then understanding.  It was true after all.  He must have looked into Jesus’ eyes, just inches away.  He was so close he only needed to whisper the truth that echoed across the universe, “My Lord, and my God.” 

Let us take the time now to look at our own hands.  Are they holding the bulletin, or sitting in our laps, or perhaps figiting.  What do they look like.  Are they the hands of someone old, with arthritis in the knuckles.  Are they young?  I am surprised by how wrinkly my hands sometimes look, strangely like I remember my Mother’s hands when I was a child.  Do your hands have scars on them.  Where did you get them.  What happened.  What age were you?  Do they have birth marks or freckles that you know like, well, the back of your hand (as the expression goes)?  Are you missing some fingers.  Are your nails cracked or smooth and polished?  What do you see when you see your hands.  What do you notice?  (Get people to mention one or two things.)

Think of all the things that these hands have done in your life.  The times they have soothed a crying baby.  The times they dug in a garden.  The times they held the hand of someone else.  The times, they got dry washing dishes, or gasoline spilled on them.  What are your hands skilled at.  Nancy’s hands are skilled at the piano.  Mine type about 500 words a minute…  Do they paint?  Do they know the inside of a car engine well and can feel where things are so you barely have to look? 

Look at you hands.  These hands tell you story.  They tell you past and will be with you in the future.  Let’ take our hands and reach out and touch Jesus’ hand just like Thomas did.  Let’s touch the place where the nail penetrated.  Lets be so close to Jesus at that we can feel his breath on us and can smell whatever resurrected breath smells like, sweet, humid, golden and  it enters our lungs. 

Many of us don’t really want do that however.  Many of us just want to  think about touching Jesus and wait until the time seems right which never really comes.  That is because there is something in us that doesn’t trust the hand and the wound and the resurrection.  We are not sure.  We are content watching it the T.V. of our minds.  You know the part of us that imagines something going on but we are not really participating in it.  The part that stays on the couch safely removed from the live action and armed with a remote to change the channel when it starts to get to us anyway. 

Detatchment is a form of doubt.  We like to think of ourselves as on our own, making our own decisions, always asking the bottom line question, “Does it work for me?”  If  we reach out and touch Jesus, if we engage in the reality of the resurrection, then we are afraid that we will loose our self determination.  It is true.  As Christians we are not autonomous indidivuals; we belong to Christ and are dependent on Christ.  There is a power and reality beyond us, upon whom we rely, in whom we trust and to whom we are accountable.  Moreover, we will not be the same.  We too will changed and formed and reformed until we become better and more complete than we are now.  To touch Jesus we must surrender and that is scary.  We are not sure if we really want to do that.

What we fail to realize is that we have to reach out and touch something anyway.  We never really do go through life completely determining our destiny as much as we like to think so.  It is not so much a matter of do I surrender, but what do I surrender to?  Think of what we do reach out and touch during the day.  The dollar bill which we spend so much time aquiring and fantasizing about.  How many times a day does you hand touch money.  Or your car.  How many times does your hand clasp the steering wheel of your car.  What does that mean about your faith.  Or how many times does you hand take a drink, or even some other drug?    All these things we are surrendering to, putting our lives in the hands of these things.  We do it all the time.  Even the T.V. which we have so much control over, will suddenly show startling and upsetting images.

We don’t really have a choice.  We must reach out and touch something.  We must trust in something.  We cannot be completely on our own and detatched.   The question is what do you want to reach out to?  What are you willing to touch?  Let it be the hand of the resurrected Christ. 

Now you might say, we can’t really reach out and touch the hand of Christ because he is not really here.  But, you can.  Christ is still offering it to us.  Look up at the stain glass window.  Christ is holding up his hand in benediction.  It is a wonderful posture.  It is so many things bound up into one.  It is a wave of sorts, Christ calls to us, “hello.”  It is a peace sign of sorts, Christ comes in peace.  It is a hand that is about to motion to us to follow him, “Come all you who are weary and heavey laden.”  It is a hand that can rest on your head and heal, like it did the paralytic.  It is an open hand, that lets us examine it, for it has nothing to hide.

Christ hand comes to us through the hands of each other in the church.  After Pentecost the church became the body and Christ is the head.  The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body.  So it is with Christ.  For we were all baptized by one Spirit inot one body – whether Jews or Greeks, lsave or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.  (1 Cor. 12:12)  So when we take each other which we will do shortly during the Pastoral prayer well will be holding not only Edrice, or Sara’s, or Aruther’s hands, but we will be holding the hand of Christ.  When we do so feel it, and squeeze it for Christ is here among us. 

Then Christ is here with us in communion.  When we take the bread we are taking Christ’s body broken for us.  When we drink the wine, we are drinking Christ’s blood spilled for us.   We cannot get much closer than that.  Just as Thomas breathed in the breath of the resurrected Christ and looked into his eyes, we taste the resurrected Christ and share at his banquet.  We will hold the bread of Christ in our hands, the ones we were looking at a moment ago, the ones we know so well.  We will tip the cup into our mouths with these same hands.   Here we too can and will reach out and touch Jesus, feel the wound of the nails, and absorb the wonder of it as these foods enter our very blood.  Like Thomas may we cease to doubt and whisper what we have touched and what has touched us, “My Lord and my God.”