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Bleeding HANDS
Hands of Jesus, Part 8
March 21, 2008 – Good Friday
Pastor Bob Sanders
The hands of Jesus. That’s been our theme throughout Lent. On the wall of my study at home hangs a print showing those hands, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at them, trying to picture them as Jesus moved through the stages of his life.
When he entered the world in the form of a newborn baby, what were those hands like? I try to imagine the all-powerful hands that made the heavens and the earth, now tiny and fragile, with miniature fingernails and soft skin that had never known abrasion or roughness.
Sometimes I try to imagine his hands when he was a teenager, when he learned his trade working in his father’s carpenter shop. I can see his hands now becoming muscular and callused.
And then I think of his hands at work in ministry – the hands we’ve been watching throughout this Lenten season. Hands that reach out to heal one person at a time, touching each one at the point of need. Like a leper no one else dares get near. Or a little child no one thought worth his time. Or a woman suffering from a hemorrhage, knowing that by Jewish law touching her will make him unclean. Or washing the dirty feet of his disciples, even Judas. These are the hands of Jesus we’ve been looking at.
Tonight we’ve come to the most important scene in Jesus’ earthly life, and this also involves his hands. In our reading from Mark 15 it simply says “they crucified him.” But you and I need to see that, if we can. We need to hear the sound it made, imagine the pain it caused. See, those hands that had done so much good, healed and blessed so many – those hands were taken, one at a time, and broken, shattered, pierced through with a thick spike. Tonight we can hardly bear to see it, but there they are: bleeding hands.
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Dr. Paul Brand was a renowned medical doctor and a skilled surgeon. He worked with leprosy patients in India and his specialty was the human hand. A few years back he was wrote a book with Phil Yancey called In His Image, and here’s some of what he said:
The portion of human anatomy I have specialized in is that marvelous creation the hand…I have spent my life cutting into hands, delicately, with scalpel blades that slice through one layer of tissue at a time, to expose the intricacies of nerves and blood vessels and tiny bones and tendons and muscles inside…I know what crucifixion must do to a human hand.
Executioners of that day drove their spikes through the wrist, right through the carpal tunnel that houses finger-controlling tendons and the median nerve. It is impossible to force a spike there without crippling the hand into a claw shape. And Jesus had no anesthetic. He allowed those hands to be marred and destroyed.
Jesus’ hands are bleeding.
Not a pretty picture, is it? Perhaps it makes you squirm a bit. The cross was a brutal, bloody business, and that’s what we’re called to look at tonight. But it’s not easy, and it’s no wonder that we always have a much smaller turnout on Good Friday than on Easter Sunday. Most people come to church wanting to feel good, wanting to hear something positive, wanting to be inspired and uplifted. Who wants to be reminded of what happened at Calvary? With all the problems we face, who wants to look at that kind of suffering and death?
I understand. I feel that way too sometimes. But I also find myself wanting more than just upbeat inspirational talks. There are too many hard things that go on in our world and in our lives. And more than something that makes me feel good I want to hear something that helps make sense out of the broken, bleeding world we live in.
And it is a broken, bleeding world, isn’t it? People we love die, some of them before their time, many of them before we’re ready. This week I sent over 50 letters to folks in the congregation who’ve lost a loved one since last Easter. Some get diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s and lose their lives little by little over time. The economy begins to tank and people lose their jobs, their homes, and that’s happened already to several in our church. Around the world we see the brutality of Chinese repression in Tibet. We see deepening mistrust between Palestinians and Israelis. And we see the unending violence in Iraq, as the war hits the five year mark at a cost of some 4,000 American lives and untold trillions of dollars. On the national scene we see marriage vows shattered as big name infidelities are front page news one day, and material for comedy shows the next. And just this past week we’ve seen how lightly healed are the old wounds of racial injustice in this nation.
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What are we to say in a world like this? There has to be something more than a cheery pep talk or sticking our heads in the sand. There has to be something more. And if that something is not soft or gentle or feel-good, so be it.
Jesus’ hands are bleeding.
That says this is a God who understands. The pains we endure on this earth are not meaningless. Our cries have been heard, our sorrows known, our wounds felt. When we survey the wondrous cross we are staring at the supreme event when God demonstrated for all time that he not only knows our pain, he takes on our pain:
See, from His head, His hands, His feet
Sorrow and love flow mingled down;
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
I can’t speak for you, but this God, this crucified God, this is the God I want.
I want the God who sees the injustice and violence and oppression of this world, the God who sees the children caught in the sex trade of Thailand, who sees the AIDS orphans and widows of Zambia, who sees the hungry street kids of Senegal – the God who sees these and his heart breaks.
I want the God whose broken heart is further broken by my selfish preoccupation with my own comfort and convenience, by my own callous disregard for the suffering I encounter.
I want the God who will not, who cannot tolerate evil, the God whose wrath is not the opposite of his love, but whose righteous anger serves his love, the God whose love includes a holy hatred of sin and death.
How can that be? How can God express simultaneously his hatred of sin and his love for us sinners? Look, here it is. Jesus’ hands are bleeding. Don’t you see it? He goes to the cross, taking on all the sin and suffering, all the sickness and sorrow. There on the cross he dies the death we deserve. He pays our penalty. He provides our ransom.
Jesus’ hands are bleeding – for us.
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I heard a story not long ago about a little girl who was embarrassed by her mother’s grotesquely disfigured hands. Whenever her friends came over to play, she asked her mother to wear gloves to cover them.
The little girl grew up, and her mother became ill and eventually died. At the funeral home, her body was displayed in an open casket, arms folded across her chest, gnarled hands there for all to see. As the daughter approached the casket with a pair of silk gloves to cover her mother’s hands, her father stopped her.
“It’s time you knew the truth about your mother’s hands,” he said. “She never told you this while she was alive because she didn’t want you to feel guilty. When you were a baby, there was a fire in the nursery. In order to rescue you, your mother had to put out the fire in your crib with her bare hands. That’s why the look the way they do.”
Those hands – that moments before had appeared so hideous to the daughter – now seemed so beautiful.
When you come back on Sunday morning, you’ll hear how the first thing Jesus showed his disciples after his resurrection was his hands – the hands that still bore the marks of the nails, the hands that had been so badly maimed while he was rescuing God’s children – you and me – from the fires of sin and death.
How beautiful those hands became. For those with eyes to see them, even tonight, how beautiful they are, those bleeding, broken hands.
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