Chapter Twenty-Three

A PRESENCE

TO MY MIND nothing in all of nature rivals the human hand’s combination of strength and agility, tolerance and sensitivity. Our finest activities—art, music, writing, healing—depend upon hands. In my surgical career I have specialized in the human hand. Naturally, then, when I think of the incarnation, I visualize the hands of Jesus.

I can hardly conceive of God taking on the form of an infant, yet Jesus entered our world with the tiny, jerky hands of a newborn, with miniature fingernails and wrinkles around the knuckles and soft skin that had never known abrasion or roughness. “The hands that had made the sun and stars,” said G. K. Chesterton, “were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.” Too small, as well, to change his own clothes or put food in his mouth. The Son of God experienced infant helplessness.

Since I have worked as a carpenter, I can easily imagine the hands of the young Jesus as he learned the trade in his father’s shop. His skin must have developed calluses and tender spots. He felt pain gratefully, I am sure. Carpentry is a precarious profession for my leprosy patients, who lack the warning of pain that allows them to use tools with sharp edges and rough handles.

Then came the hands of the physician. The Bible tells us strength flowed out of them when Jesus healed people. He chose not to perform miracles en masse but rather one by one, touching each person he healed. He touched eyes that had long since dried out, and suddenly they admitted light and color. He touched a woman with a hemorrhage, knowing that by Jewish law she would make him unclean. He touched people with leprosy—people no one else would touch in those days. In small and personal ways, Jesus’ hands were setting right what had been disrupted in his beloved creation.

The most important scene in Jesus’ life also involved his hands. Those hands that had done so much good were taken, one at a time, and pierced through with a thick spike. My mind balks at visualizing the scene. 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 maze of nerves and blood vessels and bones and tendons and muscles inside. I have conducted treasure hunts inside splayed hands, searching for healthy tendons to attach to fingers that have been useless for twenty years. I know what crucifixion must do to a human hand.

Executioners of that day drove their spikes through the wrist, directly 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. Jesus had no anesthetic. He allowed those hands to be marred and crippled and destroyed.

Later, his weight hung from them, tearing more tissue, releasing more blood. There could be no more helpless image than that of God’s Son hanging paralyzed from a tree. “Heal yourself!” the crowd jeered. He had saved others—why not himself? The disciples, who had hoped he was the Messiah, cowered in the darkness or drifted away. Surely they had been mistaken.

In one last paroxysm of vulnerability, Jesus said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” The humiliation of incarnation ended, the sentence served. It was finished.

But the biblical record gives us one more glimpse of Jesus’ hands. He makes an appearance in a locked room, where the disciple Thomas is still disputing the story he thinks his friends have concocted. People do not rise from the dead, he scoffs. It must have been a ghost or an illusion. Without warning, unannounced, Jesus enters and holds out those unmistakable hands. The body has changed—it can pass through walls and locked doors. The scars, however, remain, proof that he is the very one they saw crucified.

Jesus invites Thomas to come and trace the scars with his own fingers. Overwhelmed, he says simply, “My Lord and my God!”—the first record of one of Jesus’ disciples calling him God directly. Significantly, it’s an encounter with Jesus’ wounds that sparks the epiphany.

Why did Christ keep his scars? He could have had a perfect body, or no body, when he returned to splendor in heaven. Instead, he kept a remembrance of his visit to earth, and for a keepsake of his time here he chose scars. The pain of humanity became the pain of God.

New Hands

Do we somehow miss the revolution that Jesus set loose? Ancient myths told of the heavens above affecting the earth below. Like kids tossing rocks off highway bridges onto the cars below, the gods dropped judgment and mischief on the earth in the form of rain and earthquakes and thunderbolts. Now the ancient formula has reversed: “As above, so below” becomes “As below, so above.” Human actions, such as prayer, affect heaven.

Reflecting on the incarnation, the author of Hebrews notes the progression of intimacy between God and human beings: from the Old Testament style of approaching a distant God through a priest, on to Jesus’ up-close visitation. He concludes, “Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). The Head never needs to be awakened or enlightened, and no lack of wisdom or power limits God’s activity on earth. The limitation hinges upon member cells obeying the Head in order to serve the rest of the Body.

Today, because Jesus turned over the mission, God’s tendrils of activity reach out across the globe. His followers would take the message of grace and compassion and justice to places he never visited during his time on earth, to “Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” In his life cut short, after all, Jesus had done nothing for most of the world—and that was the plan all along. More than thirty times the New Testament reminds us that we his followers are Christ’s Body, the visible presence of God in the world. Where we go, God goes.

I have searched the four Gospels to observe how Jesus prepared for the new phase of headship, and a trend does emerge. During his three years of ministry Jesus gradually turned over his work to his disciples. At first his own hands did the healing, exorcizing, and ministering to needs. As the time of his death neared, Jesus concentrated more on training those who would be left behind. A few key events stand out.

“I am sending you out like lambs among wolves,” he warned one of the first groups of his followers to go forth on his behalf (see Luke 10:1-24). Thus he began to entrust sacred tasks to a ragtag group of six dozen novices. Despite the stern warnings, the seventy-two met with great success on their mission, and Jesus responded enthusiastically—I know of no other scene that shows him so full of joy. The work of the kingdom had advanced even as Jesus himself waited, alone.

Later, at the very end of his earthly life, Jesus turned over the entire mission, a transfer that occurred at the Last Supper. “I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me,” Jesus said that night (Luke 22:29). From that point on, he has mainly relied on the self-limiting style of working through human “cells.” Clearly, God seems to prefer delegating authority to us humans.

Mrs. Twigg

As a junior doctor on night duty in a London hospital, I called on eighty-one-year-old Mrs. Twigg. Although this courageous woman was battling cancer of the throat, she remained witty and cheerful. In her raspy voice, she asked that we do all we could to prolong her life, and so one of my professors removed her larynx and the malignant tissue around it.

Mrs. Twigg seemed to be making a good recovery until about two o’clock one morning when I got an urgent summons to her ward. She was sitting on the bed, leaning forward, with blood spilling from her mouth. Her face showed an expression of terror. I guessed immediately that an artery back in her throat had eroded. I knew no way to stop the bleeding except to thrust my finger into her mouth and press on the pulsing spot. Grasping her jaw with one hand, I explored with my index finger deep inside her slippery throat until I found the artery and pressed it shut.

Nurses cleaned up around her face while Mrs. Twigg recovered her breath and fought back a gagging sensation. Fear slowly drained from her as she began to trust me. After ten minutes had passed and she was breathing normally again, with her head tilted back, I tried to remove my finger to replace it with an instrument. But I could not see far enough back in her throat to guide the instrument, and each time I removed my finger the blood spurted afresh and Mrs. Twigg panicked. Her jaw trembled, her eyes bulged, and she gripped my arm fiercely. Finally, I calmed her by saying I would simply wait, with my finger blocking the blood flow, until a surgeon and anesthetist could be called in from their homes.

We settled into position. My right arm crooked behind her head, supporting it. My left hand nearly disappeared inside her contorted mouth, allowing my index finger to apply pressure at the critical point. From visits to the dentist I knew how fatiguing and painful it must be for tiny Mrs. Twigg to stretch her mouth wide enough to surround my hand. Yet I could see in her intense blue eyes a resolve to maintain that position as long as necessary.

With her face a few inches from mine, I could sense her mortal fear. Even her breath smelled of blood. Her eyes pleaded mutely, “Don’t move—don’t let go!” She knew, as I did, that if we relaxed our awkward posture, she would bleed to death.

We sat like that for nearly two hours. Her imploring eyes never left mine. Twice during the first hour, when muscle cramps painfully seized my hand, I tried to move to see if the bleeding had stopped. It had not, and as Mrs. Twigg felt the rush of warm liquid surge up in her throat, she coughed and grasped my shoulder like a vise.

I will never know how I lasted that second hour. My muscles cried out in agony. My fingertips grew numb. I thought of rock climbers who have held their fallen partners for hours by a single rope. In this case the cramping, four-inch length of my finger, so numb I could not even feel it, was the strand that kept life from falling away. I, a junior doctor in my twenties, and this eighty-one-year-old woman clung to each other superhumanly because we had to—her survival demanded it.

The surgeon came. Assistants prepared the operating room, and the anesthetist readied his chemicals. Orderlies wheeled Mrs. Twigg and me, still entwined in our strange embrace, into surgery. There, with everyone poised with gleaming tools, I slowly eased my finger away from her throat. For the first time I felt no gush of blood. Was it because my finger no longer had sensation? Or had the blood finally clotted after two hours of pressure?

I removed my hand from her mouth and still Mrs. Twigg breathed easily. Her hand continued to clutch my shoulder and her eyes locked on mine. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the corners of her bruised, stretched lips curled slightly up, forming the hint of a smile. The clot had held. She could not speak—she had no larynx—and she needed no words to express her gratitude. She knew how my muscles had suffered; I knew the depths of her fear. In those two hours in the slumberous hospital wing, we had become almost one person.

Where Is God?

Forty years later, as I recall that night with Mrs. Twigg, it stands as a kind of parable of the conflicting strains of human helplessness and divine power within each of us. During that agonizing night, my medical training counted very little. What mattered was my presence and my willingness to respond.

Along with most doctors and health workers, I often feel inadequate in the face of real suffering. Pain strikes like a tsunami, with sudden devastation. A woman feels a small lump in her breast, and fear rushes in. A child is stillborn and, for the parents, life itself seems to stop. A young boy is thrown through the windshield of a car; his consciousness flickers on and off like a faulty switch—doctors, ever cautious, offer little hope of recovery.

When suffering strikes, those of us standing close by are flattened by the shock. We fight back the lumps in our throats, make visits to the hospital, mumble a few comforting words, perhaps look up advice on what to say to the grieving. And yet when I later ask patients and their families, “Who helped you most?” I get an unexpected answer. They rarely describe a person with a smooth tongue and a sparkling personality. Instead, they tell me of someone quiet, who listens more than talks, who offers practical help when needed, who does not judge or even offer much advice.

“A sense of presence,” they say. “Someone there when I needed her.” A hand to hold, a sympathetic, bewildered hug. A shared lump in the throat. Confronted with another’s suffering, we long for formulas as precise as the techniques I study in my surgery manuals. But the human psyche is far too complex for a manual. Sometimes the best we can offer is to be there, to love, and to touch.

I have written of lessons from the spiritual Body: the need to serve the Head faithfully, the softness and compliancy of the skin, the diversity of member cells and the marvels that result from their cooperation. Taken together, these provide a sense of presence to the world—God’s presence.

When Jesus departed, he transferred that presence to the bumbling community of followers who had largely forsaken him at his death. We are what Jesus left behind. He did not leave a book or a doctrinal statement or a system of thought; he left a visible community to embody him and represent God to the world. The seminal metaphor, Body of Christ, could only arise after Jesus Christ had left the earth.

The apostle Paul’s great, decisive words about that Body appear in letters addressed to congregations in Corinth and Asia Minor, churches that in the next breath he assails for their faithlessness. Note that Paul, a master of simile and metaphor, does not say the people of God are like the Body of Christ. In every passage he says we are the Body of Christ. The Spirit has come and dwelled among us, and the world knows an invisible God mainly by our representation, our “enfleshment,” of God.

Three biblical symbols—God as a glory cloud, as a Son subject to death, and as a Spirit melding together a new Body—show a progression of intimacy, from fear to shared humanity to shared essence. Where is God in the world? We can no longer point to the holy of holies or to a carpenter in Nazareth. We form God’s presence through the indwelling of God’s Spirit. It is a heavy burden.

I show you a mystery: “In him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). We bear God’s image on this planet.

After World War II German students volunteered to help rebuild a European church that had been destroyed by bombs. As the work progressed, debate broke out on how best to restore a large statue of Jesus with his arms outstretched and bearing the familiar inscription “Come unto Me.” Careful patching could repair all damage to the statue except for Christ’s hands, which had been destroyed by bomb fragments. Should they attempt the delicate task of reshaping those hands?

The workers reached a decision that still stands today. The statue of Jesus has no hands, and the inscription now reads “Christ has no hands but ours.”

Teresa of Avila said it best:

Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.