Wearing our scars. . .

Along with the question of why Jesus' body still had the scars of His crucifixion after His resurrection, I often hear the question of what body the person will have in the resurrection.  Will it be the young, vibrant, strong body of early mortal life or the aged, frail, wrinkled body nearer life's end?  It seems to some a terrible disappointment to think that for eternity they would not wear a perfect body -- with perfection usually seen as health, youth, and good looks.

It is important to know that Jesus did not continue to wear His scars because of the inability of the Father to heal them.  The scars remain not as signs of His weakness but of His victory, not of any failure or defeat but of His triumph.  They are the marks not of a past event but of a saving work and He wears them for us just as He bore them for us. If Jesus is not ashamed to wear those scars for the benefit of those who believe in Him and those for whom He suffered, why are we concerned by them (or by our own)?

In addition to this, we know Jesus forever as the crucified One.  This is not because we keep Him on the cross and forget about the resurrection but because of His own proclamation and the Christian kerygma that is manifest in the Church from the beginning.  Think here of St. Paul and his insistence to know only Christ and Him crucified.  It was not in the new tomb of the garden that sin's price was paid and death's back was broken but on the cross.  Death reigns because of sin and where sin is undone, death is done.  Though we might want to erase from our minds the scene of Good Friday, the Church cannot and neither can we as individual members put the cross behind us.  Easter does not put away the cross the way we pack up Christmas but it completes the one saving miracle in which God saved us.

What about the saints?  Think first of the martyrs.  St. Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xxii): “Perhaps in that kingdom we shall see on the bodies of the Martyrs the traces of the wounds which they bore for Christ’s name: because it will not be a deformity, but a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body.”  Hmmm.  Not deformity but dignity -- even beauty?  Have you ever thought of that?  Consider here So they went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name. Acts 5:41.  And if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.  Romans 5:17  Finally, in 1 Peter 4:16 we are reminded that such scars are not our shame but our glory.

When (note I did not say if) we suffer for the sake of Christ and because we are numbered with Him, such scars are not shame to be covered up or wounds to be healed but the honored marks of belonging in a world which does not know Him even though it was created by Him.  Our youth culture, obsessed with fixing us with therapies and makeup and surgeries and such, does not see these marks as anything but problems to be fixed or healed or covered up.  Why do we give into such foolishness?  We do we want to look, act, and sound like teenagers or twenty-somethings our whole life?  Isn't fixing a time in our lives as the best we were or ever would be the same problem as taking only one perspective upon the life of Christ and ignoring the rest?  Jesus will have none of it.  Wear the scars of living in but not of the world as the marks of honor, the signs of our integrity and faith, and the beauty of the crucified One on us, the brothers and sisters for whom He died and in whom we now live.