For June 27th:

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands;…’” John 20:27

“What practical effect does Christ’s identification have on the person who actually suffers? A dramatic example of the effect of this truth was seen in the ministry of Dr. Paul Brand while he was working among leprosy patients in Vellore, India. There he preached a sermon, one of his best known and best loved. At the time, Brand and his workers were among the few in the area who would touch one or closely approach a person with Hansen’s disease—townspeople quarantined them. Brand slipped in late to a patient’s gathering, sitting on the mat at the edge of the open courtyard. The air was heavy with combined odors of crowding bodies, poverty, stale spices, treated bandages.

            The patients insisted on a few words from Dr. Brand, and he reluctantly agreed. He stood for a moment, empty of ideas, looking at the patients before him. His eyes were drawn to their hands, dozens of them, most pulled inward in the familiar “leprosy claw-hand,” some with no fingers, some with few stumps. Many patients sat on their hands or otherwise hid them from view.

            “I am a hand surgeon,” he began, and waited for the translation into Tamil in Hindi. “So when I meet people, I can’t help looking at their hands. The palmist claims he can tell your future by looking at your hands. I can tell your past. For instance, I can tell what your trade has been by the position of the calluses and the condition of the nails. I can tell a lot about your character; I love hands.”

            He paused and looked at the eager faces. “How I would love to have had the chance to meet Christ and study His hands! But knowing what he was like, I can almost picture them, feel them.”

            He paused again, then wondered aloud what it would have been like to meet Christ and study His hands. He traced the hands of Christ, beginning with infancy when his hands were small, helpless, futilely grasping. Then came the hands of the boy Jesus, clumsily holding a brush or stylus, trying to form letters of the alphabet. Then the hands of Christ the carpenter—rough, gnarled with broken fingernails and bruises from working with saw and hammer.

            Then there were the hands of Christ the physician, the healer. Compassion and sensitivity seemed to radiate from them, so much so that when he touched people they could feel something of the divine spirit coming through. Christ touched the blind, the diseased , the needy.

            “Then,” continued Dr. Brand, “there were his crucified hands. It hurts me to think of a nail being driven through the center of my hand, because I know what goes on there, the tremendous complex of tendons and nerves and blood vessels and muscles. It’s impossible to drive a spike through the center without crippling it. The thought of those healing hands being crippled reminds me of what Christ was prepared to endure. In that act he identified himself with all the deformed and crippled human beings in the world. Not only was he able to endure poverty with the poor, weariness with the tired, but—clawed hands with the cripple.”

            The effect on the listening patients, all social outcasts, was electrifying. Jesus—a cripple, with a claw hand like theirs?

            Brand continued. “And then there were his resurrected hands. One of the things I find most astounding is that, though we think of the future life as something perfected, when Christ appeared to his disciples he said, ‘Come look at my hands,’ and he invited Thomas to put his finger into the print of the nail. Why did he want to keep the wounds of his humanity? Wasn’t it because he wanted to carry back with him an eternal reminder of the sufferings of those on earth? He carried the marks of suffering so he could continue to understand the needs of those suffering. He wanted to be forever one with us.”

            As he finished, Paul Brand was again conscious of hands as they were lifted, all over the courtyard, palm to palm in the Indian gesture of respect, Namaste. The hands were the same stumps, the same missing fingers and crooked arches. Yet no one tried to hide them. They were held high, close to the face, in respect for Brand, but also with new pride and dignity. God’s own response to suffering made theirs easier.”

Philip Yancey, Bread and Wine, Readings for Lent and Easter, 2003; Where is God When it Hurts, 1977