The Wounds That Remain
- Luke 24:39–43
- John 20:27
- Isaiah 53:5
Jesus answers fear in an unexpected way. He does not raise His voice. He does not command calm. He offers His body. “Touch me and see,” He says—and then He eats before them. Resurrection is not announced as an idea, but presented as flesh.
Yet the deeper surprise is not that He can be touched. It is that He still carries wounds.
In the ancient imagination, a perfected body was one without blemish, without visible history. Wounds signaled defeat, not glory. Luke deliberately disrupts this expectation. The risen Jesus is not restored to a pre-crucifixion state. He is restored through the crucifixion.
This detail is not incidental. Early Christian testimony insists on bodily resurrection precisely to reject the fantasy that salvation means escaping pain, memory, or material reality. Redemption does not erase history—it redeems it.
N. T. Wright has argued that the resurrection proclaims God’s commitment to the physical world, not an abandonment of it. The risen body is not a replacement, but a renewal—history carried forward, not discarded.
In a sharper register, Flannery O’Connor once observed that grace often comes with a hard edge, because it refuses to let us remain as we are. The wounds remain not because healing failed, but because healing went deeper than surface repair.
Both point toward a victory that does not require forgetting where suffering began.
Jesus calms fear not by displaying perfection, but by showing continuity. The wounds no longer master Him, but they still speak. Resurrection does not say, “Nothing happened.” It says, “What happened no longer has the final word.”
For fearful disciples—and fearful readers—this means we do not need to wait until our lives are flawless to encounter the living Christ.
Livora Gracely 
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