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Since I once apprenticed as a carpenter, I can easily imagine the adolescent hands of Jesus, who learned the trade in his father's shop. His skin must have developed many calluses and tender spots.

And then came the hands of Christ the physician. The Bible tells us strength flowed from them when he healed people. He preferred to perform miracles not en masse, but rather one by one, touching each person he healed.

When Jesus touched eyes that had dried out, they suddenly admitted light and color again. Once, he touched a woman who suffered with a hemorrhage, knowing that by Jewish law she would make him unclean. He touched those with leprosy—people no one else would touch. In small and personal ways, his hands set right what had been disrupted in Creation.

The most important scene in Jesus' life—the one we memorialize during Passion Week—also involved his hands. Then 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 it.

In surgery I cut delicately, using 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 well what crucifixion must have done to a human hand.

Roman executioners 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 maiming the hand into a claw shape. And Jesus had no anesthetic as his hands were marred and destroyed.

Later, his weight hung from them, tearing more tissue, releasing more blood. Has there ever been a more helpless image than that of the Son of God hanging paralyzed from a tree? The disciples, who had hoped he was the Messiah, cowered in the darkness or drifted away.

But that is not the last glimpse in the New Testament of Jesus' hands. He appeared again, in a closed room, just as one of his disciples was disputing the unlikely story he thought his friends had concocted. People do not rise from the dead, Thomas scoffed. They must have seen a ghost, or an illusion.

At that moment, Jesus appeared and held up those unmistakable hands. The scars gave proof that they belonged to him, the same one who had died on the cross. Although the body had changed in certain ways, the scars remained. Jesus invited Thomas to come and trace them with his own fingers.

Thomas responded simply, "My Lord and my God!" It is the first recorded time that one of Jesus' disciples directly addressed him as God. Significantly the assertion came in response to Jesus wounds. Jesus' hands.

Throughout all of history, people of faith have clung to the belief that there is a God who understands the human dilemma. That the pains we endure on Earth are not meaningless. That our prayers are heard. In Passion, we Christians focus on the supreme event when God demonstrated for all time that he knows our pain.

For a reminder of his time here, Jesus chose scars in each hand. That is why I believe God hears and understands our pain, and even absorbs it into himself—because he kept those scars as a lasting image of wounded humanity. He knows what life on earth is like, because he has been here. His hands prove it.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44