The Wounded Christ and the Doubting Self: A Humanist’s Approach

I mean, I think anyone who grew up in the Christian Church—especially in a church that displayed the crucified Christ, the corpus, the body of Christ on the cross, either as a corpse or as an agonized, suffering figure—knows exactly what I am talking about. And of course, there are Christian traditions that do not depict the crucified Christ in that way. I have also seen images of Christ on the cross, radiant with resurrection, as though he has passed through suffering yet still bears it. I have seen the risen corpus with the wounds intact. And that, really, is one of the strange things about Christianity: resurrection does not erase the wounds. In John’s Gospel, the risen Jesus still says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,” and, more intensely still, “bring your hand and put it into my side” (John 20:27).

Crucified Christ
Credit: Mosan or Rhenish third quarter 12th century (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

That scene, to me, has always been one of the most psychologically compelling moments in the Gospels, even if it does not always get the same theological attention as the Passion itself. Caravaggio understood that. In The Incredulity of Saint Thomas—an oil painting usually dated to 1601–1602 and now in Potsdam—he compresses the whole drama into four bodies and one wound. Thomas does not merely look. He probes. Christ guides the hand. The whole painting is built around that terrible intimacy: doubt made tactile, faith forced through flesh. 

And I think that is why Thomas matters. He is not Judas, the catastrophe. He is not Peter, the blustering future leader. He is not Paul, the brilliant convert and architect. Thomas is smaller than that, closer to the rest of us. He wants proof. He cannot quite get there on charisma alone, or testimony alone, or rumor alone. And honestly, that is why I have always felt that, in some deep way, we are all Thomas. Jesus says, “Do not be unbelieving, but believe,” and Thomas responds with one of the great cries of the New Testament: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). But he only gets there by way of the wound. 

For me, the Christian message was always bound up with that: Christ undergoes horrific suffering in order to save humanity from sin, from fault, from the catastrophe of itself. The old Easter proclamation, the Exsultet, says it with outrageous daring: “O happy fault / that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” It is one of the strangest ideas in religion—that the wound is not incidental to salvation but somehow constitutive of it, that the disaster becomes the site of redemption. 

And then there is kenosis, that great Christian word for divine self-emptying. In Philippians, Christ is described as one who “emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave,” and who “became obedient to the point of death— / even death on a cross.” That is not just humility. That is divine abasement pushed to its outer limit. Von Balthasar, in a line that gets right to the heart of the matter, says, “no path of redemption can make a detour around it.” (von Balthasar 57). He means the Cross. He means that Christianity does not let you skip over humiliation, abandonment, flesh, blood, or death and still call it redemption. 

That, to me, is the twist in Christianity. Plenty of mythologies allow the gods to visit human beings in disguise or assume human form for a time. But Christianity says something more radical and, frankly, more disturbing: God does not merely visit. God becomes human and then submits to degradation, torture, and execution. The Paschal Mystery is not just resurrection. It is suffering, death, and resurrection. And I think sometimes Christians rush too quickly to the third term because the second one is so brutal. But if you linger there—if you really linger there—it is a terrifying religion. 

Jesus himself, at least in the Gospels, is not mild in the way people often want him to be. He is magnetic, cutting, aphoristic, often severe. He speaks in parables that are simple on the surface and devastating underneath. He tells the rich young man, “go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor,” and then follow him (Matthew 19:21, Luke 12:33). But the rich young man cannot do it. Jesus says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). That is not a soft religion. That is not spiritual accessorizing. That is a demand for transformation so total that it feels, at times, almost impossible. 

So yes, Christianity can look like the Olympics of the religions: not because it is better, but because it often frames discipleship as complete surrender, the remaking of the self through identification with Christ. There is a rhetoric of totality in it—die to self, take up your cross, be conformed to the suffering Christ—that can be profound, beautiful, and for some people utterly life-giving. But it can also become psychologically dangerous when it turns suffering into a moral requirement or self-erasure into a virtue in itself. That is where I have had to part ways with certain forms of it. I do not need any theology that tells me I must make a sacrament out of my own diminishment. 

That is part of why Kierkegaard’s meditation on Lazarus has always haunted me. In The Sickness Unto Death, reflecting on John 11, he writes: “because He lives, therefore this sickness is not unto death.” He is trying to think through the difference between ordinary mortality and spiritual annihilation. Lazarus dies, yes, but for Kierkegaard the real horror is not bodily death alone; it is despair, the self lost to itself, the death beneath death. That is a powerful insight. It names something real. But it also intensifies the Christian drama to an almost unbearable degree: not only must you die, you must fear the wrong kind of death. 

And I think that is where my own resistance enters. I am not mocking belief. I have known extraordinary Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant—whose faith made them more humane, more generous, less petty, less cruel. I have also known Christians who were insufferable, controlling, and spiritually colonizing. What I cannot stand is the assumption that one path must become everybody’s path, that one religious imagination must swallow all the others whole. Leave me out of it. I do not need to be assimilated into your metaphysics to have a soul, a conscience, or a meaningful life. A tree has many roots. Water finds more than one way. That is not relativism. That is just spiritual adulthood.

And maybe that is where I am right now, personally. I have been going through it a bit—a low-grade depression, a small crisis, whatever you want to call it. Some mornings it is hard to get up and go to work. And one thing I keep circling back to is this: I do not need to become a servant to self-abnegation. I do not need to imitate the suffering Christ in order to justify my own suffering. I do not need to hurt more than I already hurt. If there is any wisdom I want right now, it is not the sanctification of pain. It is the permission to remain here, in the ordinary, and not despise the ordinary.

That is why Epicureanism, however badly people caricature it, sometimes feels like a healthier corrective than Christian masochism. Not because it says, gorge yourself and forget the world, but because it reminds you that pleasure can be modest, local, embodied, fleeting, and still real. Eat the ice cream. Enjoy the afternoon. Let the warmth of a stupid, passing thing be enough for the moment in which it is given. That is not gluttony. That is not moral collapse. That is simply refusing to turn human life into one long rehearsal for annihilation.

And maybe that is the final thing I mean. Christianity, at its most compelling, stares directly at mortality and says that death does not get the last word. I understand the force of that. I understand why the image of the crucified Christ seized me as a teenager, why the holy cards, the saints, the wounds, the mysteries, the whole theater of it all felt so aesthetically and spiritually charged. But I also think there comes a point when one has to ask whether one is being saved by that vision or crushed beneath it. That is where I am. Still thinking. Still arguing. Still moved by it. Still unconvinced. Still, in some deep and irritating way, Thomas.

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