Have you ever had a wound that you tried to hide? The hurt might have been painful, gross, or embarrassing that you tried to conceal it. After some years, some have shared with me the scar, the mark, the burn of childhood domestic violence, the shame of what should not have been. While I like to think I am vulnerable and open, I was hesitant and deliberate to show or speak of a recent wound on my arm from an unprovoked dog bite. Tending the wound in the Emergency Room, the antiseptic wash, water, and tender hand still had me on guard from the wound, which has now healed fairly well. But in the words of the ER Doctor, I got to “feel all the feels”. Some wounds we don’t want anyone to clean, close, or cover, bringing more infection and making the hurt worse. Fearing the truth of the vulnerability, still we can let wounds fester.
In today’s Gospel reading, the audience with which Jesus has a conversation has a deep invisible wound. The first audience of the Gospel were Jewish Christians who had just been formally banned — cast out from their Jewish synagogue. Like skin stripped of its protective layer, the Johannine community was completely exposed. The disagreement meant losing your social circle, your family ties, and your cultural safety net.
The Protestant Reformation resulted in divisions in the church. As much as Reformation Day is often a Lutheran Pride day with Martin Luther posting his historic reforming thesis on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517, the reality is the Reformation not only sought a renewed emphasis on the Gospel but also brought deep divisions and hurt —separating families and property and social structures in the early 1500s throughout Europe. Is God divided? The freedom of the Gospel is less of fierce self-autonomy but freedom to love, care, and serve.
Religious oppression, trauma, division, and confusion still occurs today where some have been thrown from their faith community, where their gifts are not welcome, and forced to flee and find refuge and unable to return to their home of faith — what had been the place of the divine where God is love and hope and healing.
The Gospel of John acts as a healing balm applied directly to this wound. To an audience bleeding from rejection, Jesus is presented not just as a teacher, but as the True Vine (a connector in their new community), the Good Shepherd (their protector), and the Way, the Truth, and the Life – reassurance that they haven’t lost God, even if they lost their synagogue.
Jesus clear desire is to tend to and dress those injuries, causing the very people he seeks to help to pull away and hide their wounds. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Seeking a way from the oppression in a whole of rules, authority, the sons and daughters of Abraham captivity is their invisible wound. These are the generational inheritors of the memories of enslavement. These are carriers of the wounds from centuries of Egyptian bondage. And now the Roman Empire rides their backs and taxes their paychecks. Every time they walk past a Roman soldier, every time they hold a coin bearing the image of Caesar, every time they negotiate their lives inside an occupied land, the open wound throbs – the pain intensifies.
The open wound of the Johannie community resonate in Luther’s Reformation theses 27 and 28, which read: “There is no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of purgatory immediately the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.” And “It is certainly possible that when the money clinks in the bottom of the chest avarice and greed increase; but when the church offers intercession, all depends on the will of God.”
I can image the Johannine community might feel like immigrants hiding in fear, the child living in domestic violence, refugees fleeing war, those struggling with poor physical and mental health.
So when Jesus’s words seem to suggest they are not free, something in them cannot bear it. They cannot hear it as an invitation. They hear it as a painful memory. When they say, “We are Abraham’s descendants. We have never been slaves of anyone,” that is their wound talking.
If these followers of Jesus could hear and trust, if they could show their wounds, healing would have begun. But they do not. Later in the chapter of John 8, the sons and daughters of Abraham continue to argue. Continue to defend their wounds. Continue to stand unhealed.
Remind you of anyone? Remind you of anything happening today? We get stuck in our ways, our hurts — continue in cycles that hurt us and one another. We live in a world where the wounds are on full display of cruelty and corruption.
To acknowledge the wound is to acknowledge the need for confession and repentance, for antiseptics and bandages, for vulnerability and help, for cleaning out what is still infected, protecting against looking weak, admitting we need a new way.
But here is what Jesus knows and what the text makes plain: The wound that is never tended does not simply stay a wound. It threatens the whole body, just like sin. And sin, Jesus says, enslaves.
When we fail to acknowledge the truth of our reality. Everyone who sins is a slave to sin (verse 34). The denial that sin enslaves becomes the cage — the prison.
As Martin Luther encouraged, the gift of the cross is the ability to name the truth of our reality even when it is so brutally painful. And the reading from Romans for today reminds us that we are all in the same boat and unable to avoid the weakness and wound — everyone needing the promises of faith as a gift from God.
We can acknowledge our wounds, our enslavements, our sins, our need for a different way, and offer prayers and trusting for the balm and a new day, life, perspective, and hope.
Or we can stand in our woundedness, waiting for the worst to come.
What becomes of us who perhaps have not known incarceration, but have certainly been socialized into routines of being enslaved to our habits, hurts, and hubris? Can we name that unthinking ways we consume, emotionally coping, our spiritual numbness? We cannot speak of freedom without first confronting what is ailing us.
Reformation Day also calls to mind the open wound in the body of Christ of division wherever power and money corrupt, where God is less than love and where some boast on their own merits. In his preface to the 95 Theses on the first Reformation Day, Martin Luther writes “[o]ut of love for truth and from desire to elucidate it.” The struggles of the Reformation have not concluded but change in form. From the illusions of autonomy, grace moves us to know our freedom to give, share, love and heal.
Will we hide their wounds or open them to the light of the gospel? The emergency room doctor pleaded with me not to cover the dog bite, saying that bacteria would grow in the wet darkness, but the wounded needed air and circulation to heal.
The truth will free us to love. Naming the oppression makes the demon flee. Calling out the corruption gives removes its power. Let the little word of truth subdue the devil’s mighty power. Let the light of the Gospel shine brightly.
