At six years old, you can’t wait to raise your short arm to touch the stove as it begins to turn red. Your mom sarcastically says “go ahead and touch it“ remembering where the unguentine is kept.

Touching is believing. The hand of God needs to stretch out to touch us in the Sistine Chapel. 

Buying clothing on the internet is very risky without that personal contact. 

As the adage says, “if seeing is believing”

then just imagine what touching means?

No one escapes life without bearing grief, sorrow or pain, regardless of its degree. So it was when the tomb was found empty. Some believers go into hiding, (I’m sure some of the apostles looked into the “witness protection program”) and how many others are now confused about what to do or find a new guy to follow.  

In the chaos of this time, the risen Savior shows up again, and again, and again—not as a ghostly, ethereal being but as wounded flesh. “Look at my hands and my feet,” he says to some of the frightened folks to whom he appears. “It is I myself!” 

There is an intimacy to Jesus’s command to Thomas, a closeness that we cannot overlook. Christ invites him to touch the unhealed wounds—no handshake or hugging touching but to feel the places where nails and spear had pierced his body. It is a proclamation that the physical body still matters…. Wounds, too, are especially a part of our divine story.

To Thomas, Jesus speaks the words, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” As if to say, “Go ahead and touch the worst parts of me. I won’t bite. My physical body still matters.”

This can be called a theology for the wounded, for those who are still healing, and even for those who aren’t quite ready for healing. The risen Savior insistently welcomes the doubting, the uncertain, and the grieving to touch and see that he is real and present and here with us. The risen Savior, who had been abandoned, denied, betrayed, and crucified, doesn’t hide his wounds or rush their healing. 

As wounded people encased in the frailties of human flesh, can we, too, summon enough grace and kindness to acknowledge that our own very human wounds need time to heal?…

Like the apostles-fisherman… Jesus shows us that God wants us “hook line and sinker“. 

Some saw and believed; others have not seen and still believed. At the center of both experiences is God-in-flesh, loving us in our own wounded places. 

Stretching out his hand for us to reach and touch Him and for God to touch us, especially in the most vulnerable and wounded parts of us.

Excerpts from Yolanda Pierce, The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 131–132, 133–135.