The Wound

Seven hundred years before the nails were driven, Isaiah stood and looked down the long corridor of time and described a man he had never seen, wounded and bruised and beaten, and he understood, by the Spirit, that the wounds were not the man’s own. He was wounded for our transgressions, the prophet says, he was bruised for our iniquities. The wounds belonged to us. The transgressions were ours, and the wounds that our transgressions deserved fell instead upon him. This is the heart of the whole gospel set down in a single verse of an ancient scroll, that one was wounded in the place of the guilty, and that by his wounding the guilty are made whole.

We must sit with the strangeness of the exchange, for we grow so used to the words that we stop hearing them. The chastisement of our peace was upon him. The punishment that purchases our peace was laid on him. Every part of the verse is an exchange, his wound for our transgression, his bruise for our iniquity, his chastisement for our peace, and at the end, his stripes for our healing. He took what was ours, that we might take what was his. He received the blows we had earned, and we receive the wholeness he did not need. All we like sheep had gone astray, Isaiah goes on, we had turned every one to his own way, and the LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all.

THE WOUND THAT HEALS

And here is the deepest paradox of the verse, that a wound should heal. Wounds do not heal; wounds harm, wounds kill. Yet the prophet says, with his stripes we are healed, and the apostle Peter takes up the very words, by whose stripes ye were healed. The stripe is the mark left by the lash, the welt raised on torn flesh, and it is offered to us as medicine. How can a wound be a cure? Only in this way, that it was borne by another, and borne in our place. His wound is our healing precisely because it was ours to bear and he bore it. The medicine is not the wounding itself but the substitution, the love that stepped between us and the blow and took it in the body.

So the cross is a strange hospital, where the healing flows not from the physician’s health but from his wounds. Men mocked him with that very truth, not knowing what they said. Physician, heal thyself, they jeered, and he would not, because he had not come to spare his own body but to heal ours by not sparing it. He could have summoned legions and come down whole and unwounded, and had he done so, not one of us could ever have been healed. He stayed on the tree, and kept the wounds, and by keeping them made them the fountain of our cure. The wounded were healed by his refusing to heal himself.

OUR OWN WOUNDS

Now we all carry wounds, and we must be honest about them. There are the wounds we have taken from others, the betrayals and cruelties and losses that mark a life, the injuries done to us that we did not deserve. And there are the wounds we have inflicted on ourselves, the self-made ruin of our own sin, the transgressions that have torn our own peace and the peace of those around us. And our instinct, with both kinds, is to heal ourselves, to bind our own wounds in private, to manage the damage, to hide the injury and pretend to a wholeness we do not have. But there is no self-healing for the deepest wound. The soul cannot suture its own guilt. The sin-wound goes too deep for any bandage we can reach.

This is the hard mercy of the verse, that it takes the whole business of healing out of our hands. We do not heal ourselves. He heals us, and he heals us by his wounds and not by our efforts. He healeth the broken in heart, the psalmist sings, and bindeth up their wounds, and the binding is his work and not ours. The physician does the suturing. Our part is not to manufacture a cure but to bring the wound to the One whose wounds are the medicine, to stop hiding it and hand it over, torn and shameful as it is, to the hands that were themselves torn for us.

BRINGING THE WOUND TO THE WOUNDS

For the risen Christ did not leave his wounds behind in the tomb. When he came to the doubting disciple he did not show him a healed and seamless body but held out the pierced hands and the opened side. Reach hither thy finger, he said, and behold my hands, and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side. He kept the wounds through death and out the other side of it, glorified now but still visible, the eternal evidence that our healing cost him his body. And so the way to be healed is to bring our wounds to his, to lay our torn place against the place where he was torn for us, and to let the pierced hands do their binding work.

This is true even of the wounds others have dealt us, the injuries we did not deserve. For those wounds too find their answer at the cross, where the One who was wounded in the house of his friends absorbed every cruelty and turned it, by his blood, into the ground of forgiveness. They shall look upon me, the prophet says, whom they have pierced, and in the looking is healing, both for the wound we have suffered and the wound we have caused. He made peace, the apostle says, through the blood of his cross, and there is no wound of ours, given or taken, that his wound cannot reach and heal.

HE CARRIED OUR SORROWS

The prophet does not speak only of our transgressions and iniquities, the guilt that needed atoning, though that is the deepest wound of all. He speaks also of griefs and sorrows. Surely he hath borne our griefs, he says, and carried our sorrows, and he calls the servant a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. The wounds Christ took into himself were not only the legal weight of our sin but the whole crushing burden of a broken world’s sorrow, the grief and the mourning and the heaviness that press upon the human heart. He did not stand at a clean distance from our misery and pronounce forgiveness from afar. He entered it, took it into his own body and soul, and carried it as his own.

This means his healing reaches further than the guilty conscience, deep as that reaches. It reaches the wounded mind and the grieving heart, for those too he bore. There is no sorrow you can bring him that he has not already carried, no grief so heavy that he did not stoop under its full weight in Gethsemane, where his soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. The man of sorrows is not repelled by your sorrow. He is acquainted with grief, on close and personal terms with it, and he draws near to the grieving as one who knows the country from the inside. The wounds that heal the guilty heal the sorrowful too, for he carried both to the tree.

So when you come to him wounded, do not think you must sort your wounds first, bringing only the respectable guilt and hiding the raw grief as though it were unfit for him. Bring it all. Bring the sin that shames you and the sorrow that has no words, the transgression and the heartbreak alike, for he bore them both, and there is healing in his stripes for every kind of wound a soul can carry. He is not a physician for one disease only. He is the healer of the whole broken man.

THE HEALED BECOME HEALERS

And there is a further mercy still, that the wound he heals in us does not vanish without a trace, but becomes, in his hands, a well of compassion for others. The God of all comfort, the apostle says, comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. The comfort is given to be given again. The one who has been healed by his wounds becomes, in his turn, a wounded healer, able to bind up others precisely because he knows from the inside both the wound and the cure.

This is how God redeems even our injuries, not merely by healing them but by making the healed place a source of mercy toward the still-wounded. The man who has wept and been comforted weeps with those who weep, and his comfort is not the hollow word of one who has never suffered but the hard-won gift of one who has been there and been carried out. Nothing is wasted in the economy of the cross. The very wounds that the enemy meant for our destruction, God takes up and turns, through the wounds of his Son, into instruments of healing for others. The scar becomes a testimony, and the testimony becomes medicine in the mouth of the healed.

So do not spend your strength trying to heal yourself, binding in secret what will not close, hiding the injury and calling the hiding health. Bring the wound to the wounds. Bring the guilt to the pierced hands, the shame to the opened side, the old injury to the One who was wounded for transgressions that were yours and not his. He kept his wounds so that you could be healed by them, and he has never turned away a soul that came to him broken and asked to be made whole. With his stripes we are healed, the prophet says, and the healing is not a thing you must achieve but a thing you must receive, laid open before the only Physician whose own wounds are the cure.