Thought for the week - 12 April 2026

I’m sure at some time or another we have all had a beautiful piece of pottery or ceramic or porcelain which has been dropped and broken. Heartbreaking. Devastating, especially if said item was an heirloom or a piece of nostalgia. We try to get the pieces back together, align them just right, use minimal glue, but strong glue, and hope that the join is invisible. That the item looks as it was before the break. I’ve done that, for sure. A number of times, with, I have to say, little success in hiding the blemish.

But there is a Japanese process, artform, called kintsugi, which seeks to give prominence to the breaks. The pieces are indeed put back together but using resin mixed with gold. This results in the scars of the restored piece being accentuated. If the severed pieces are fixed back together with resin mixed with gold then they can’t help but be visible. But that is the whole point. Not only has the broken piece been mended but it is arguably more precious than before due to the gold. And it now has a story to tell. It has a history.

Our Lord has risen from the dead. He has been crucified but He is back with His disciples in the upper room. He is whole again. His broken body is restored. But – he still has the wounds of His ordeal. He has the holes in His hands and the spear wound in His side. And these are precious because they tell the story of His salvational act on the cross. Even though His body, His resurrected body is His glorified body, the wounds that remain in His hands and His side are a testimony to the act of love in which He died. The wounds that the disciples see indicate that the person of Christ that they see, resurrected to glory, is in fact the same person who died on the cross. And in this way, the wounds also signify that the mystery of the resurrection comes only through the cross.

I’d like to take a small side step here and think a bit more about Jesus’s hands. I read about a Dr Paul Brand who is a hand surgeon and who visited leprosy patients in Vellore, India. While he was speaking to these patients he discussed Jesus’s hands. How at the start they were infant hands, small, helpless, reaching for the comfort of His mum, Mary. Then as a boy, clumsily learning the art of carpentry, learning to write, learning dexterity. And then the adult hands of Jesus the carpenter – likely as not rough, gnarled, scarred with hammer wounds or chisel wounds. And then Dr Brand contemplated the healing hands of Jesus during His ministry. Such tenderness and compassion in those hands, infused with the Holy Spirit so that when he touched the afflicted, they were healed. And finally, Dr Brand, the hand surgeon contemplated Jesus’s crucified hands, hurting at the thought of the nails being driven through the mass of bones, tendons, ligaments, nerves etc that go to make up the hand and wrist. What those healing hands went through for us, sinners like us.

The wounds in Jesus’s hands are beautiful. They tell a story. They have not been healed over; His hands have not been fixed so that the breaks can be concealed. No. They are very much there. The rest of His wounds, the lashings, the bruises, the stripes by which we are healed, have gone. We can surmise this because Mary didn’t recognise Him initially on that first Easter Day. The two disciples on the Road to Emmaus didn’t recognise Him. He was as unblemished as could be seen, except for His hands and His side. And this is not a ghost who appears in that upper room. This is not someone else pretending to be Jesus. This is Him. Right there with His disciples, minus Thomas, of course. This is the body, complete with wounds, which the grave could not contain any longer.

So when, later, Thomas pretty much demands actual physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection, is adamant that he will not believe until he has seen the wounds and put his finger into the holes or his hand into the wound on Jesus’ side, he gets exactly that. He gets to see that proof, whether he actually did put his finger into the nail holes in Jesus’s hands or put his hand into the spear wound in Jesus’s side or not. And when he does see, he exclaims the most robust expression of faith in the gospel ‘My Lord and My God’. He identifies the risen Jesus as the Lord God, as Yahweh. My Lord and My God. Thomas makes the most direct, personal affirmation of Jesus’ divinity, and brings fulfilment of the entire gospel of John, a gospel which focuses on establishing the divinity, as well as humanity, of Jesus, and which begins with the statement ‘The Word was God.’

Thomas knew Jesus. He will have heard, almost certainly, when Jesus had told His disciples that He would die and on the third day, would rise again. But still, he would not believe until he had seen actual physical proof. Today, we do not have the physical Jesus but we do have written testimony of His life, His teachings and His resurrection within the pages of the Bible. But despite what we do have, many simply do not believe. Many find faith difficult because they cannot see or touch Jesus, much like Thomas at first complained. Many doubt, many Christians may doubt at times. And this is not to be condemned because doubting can lead to a stronger faith. It can lead to questions which in turn lead to answers which, if accepted, means that doubt has done good work. The Holy Spirit works in us and through us to allay fears which may arise as a result of doubt. And as Jesus came to Thomas, so He will come today to those who seek Him, truly seek Him with their hearts. Though we cannot see Him, or touch Him, He makes Himself known through the work of the Holy Spirit. Some may see doubting as a flaw, as a weakness. Some may ask God to remove such weaknesses. But that’s not how God works. His power is made perfect in weakness, in our visible weaknesses. So let’s embrace our character flaws, our little foibles. Imagine them highlighted in gold. Let us offer them up to Jesus, who is God, so that He can use us, in all our brokenness, to reveal the glory of the resurrection.