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Isaac Newton said, "In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence." After 40 years as a surgeon specializing in hands, I am tempted to agree. Nothing in all nature rivals the hand's combination of strength and agility, tolerance and sensitivity. We use our hands for the most wonderful activities: art, music, writing, healing, touching.

Some people go to concerts and athletic events to watch the performance; I go to watch hands. For me, a piano performance is a ballet of fingers—a glorious flourish of ligaments and joints, tendons, nerves, and muscles. I try to sit near the stage to watch the movements.

Unless you have tried to reproduce just one small twitch of the hand mechanically, you cannot fully appreciate its movements. Often I have stood before a group of medical students or surgeons to analyze the motion of one finger. I hold before them a dissected cadaver hand, with its trailing strands of sinew, and announce that I will move the tip of the little finger.

To do so, I must place the hand on a table and spend about four minutes sorting through the tangle of tendons and muscles. Seventy separate muscles contribute to hand movements. But in order to allow dexterity and slimness for actions such as piano playing, the finger has no muscle in itself; tendons transfer the force from muscles higher in the arm. (Body-builders should be grateful: imagine the limitations on finger movement if the fingers had muscles that could grow large and bulky.) Finally, after I have arranged at least a dozen muscles correctly, I can maneuver them to make the little finger move. Usually, I give this demonstration to illustrate a way to repair the hand surgically. In 40 years of surgery, I have personally operated on perhaps 10,000 hands. I could fill a room with surgery manuals suggesting various ways to repair injured hands. But in those years I have never found a single technique to improve a normal, healthy hand. That is why I am tempted to agree with Isaac Newton.

I have seen artificial hands developed by scientists and engineers in facilities that produce radioactive materials. With great pride an engineer demonstrated for me the sophisticated machines that protect workers from exposure to radiation. By adjusting knobs and levers he controlled an electronic hand whose wrist supinated and revolved. High-tech models, he said, even possess an opposable thumb, an advanced feature reserved for primates in nature. The engineer, smiling like a proud father, wiggled the mechanical thumb for me.

I nodded approval and complimented him on the mechanical hand's wide range of motion. But he knew, as I did, that compared to a human thumb his atomic-age hand is clumsy and limited, even pathetic—a child's Play Doh sculpture compared to a Michelangelo masterpiece.

I work with the marvels of the hand nearly every day. But one time of year holds special meaning for me as a Christian; then, too, my thoughts turn to the human hand. When the world observes Passion Week, the most solemn week of Christendom, I reflect on the hands of Jesus.

Just as painters throughout history have attempted to visualize the face of Jesus Christ, I try to visualize his hands. I imagine them through the various stages of his life. When God's Son entered the world in the form of a human body, what were his hands like?

I can hardly conceive of God taking on the form of an infant, but our faith declares that he once had the tiny, jerky hands of a newborn. G. K. Chesterton expressed the paradox this way, 'The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle." And too small to change his own clothes or put food in his mouth. Like every baby, he had miniature fingernails and wrinkles around the knuckles, and soft skin that had never known abrasion or roughness. God's Son experienced infant helplessness.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44