A Child on a School Bus: A Theological Stress Test

Faith & Science Conversation
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  • And I’d like to express it differently, too.
  • In Christian theology, the wounds of Jesus Christ may be read not merely as biographical injuries confined to a first-century execution, but as enduring theological signs that disclose how the world treats truth, innocence, and self-giving love. Because the incarnation binds God irreversibly to human history, the Passion functions paradigmatically rather than exhaustively: it reveals a structure of violence and rejection that recurs wherever injustice, oppression, and innocent suffering persist. The persistence of Jesus’ wounds in the resurrection narratives underscores this claim, signaling not the negation of history but its transfiguration without erasure. In this sense, the wounds of Christ operate as a metaphorical index of historical reality itself—marks of divine solidarity that render the suffering of the world neither theologically invisible nor morally neutral, but intelligible as participation in a world that continues to wound what it ought to recognize and receive.
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This is so poignant and beautiful. And true.

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Not if God is outside time.

But it doesn’t entail Jesus’ suffering being increased every time we sin.
For that matter I doubt that there is any scale by which that suffering could be measured, which is something necessary to your scheme as it is to the notion of Purgatory. I don’t think sin and grace work by a point system.
Beyond that, the suffering of Christ on the Cross was both finite (there’s only so much pain that a professional Roman crucifixion squad can inflict) and infinite (the infinite divine Son’s experience is from one perspective infinite itself. By either scale, there’s no “increasing” it or for that matter decreasing it – it is what it is, a mystery.

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At least one mystic insisted that the wounds never healed, that they are eternal wounds that He carries always – “always dying, always rising”, with those being two sides of the same event – Christ fighting on our side.

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  • I remember, in my Catholic Charismatic days, the “teaching” if Jesus ever appears to you, in a dream or in a vision, ask to see his wounds: the real Jesus will still have wounds; a “fake Jesus” won’t. Fortunately, I’ve never had to face that problem.
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Been there. And a missionary I knew gave a similar challenge: if the Virgin Mary ever appears to you, demand she take you to her Son.

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I suspect that “to follow the N.T. scriptures” is itself sacrificed when we have imposed theological systems of thought in between our eyes and the text.

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