Try Try Again

Me, Job, Doubting Thomas, and the Shroud of Turin

Note: I got confused and made a big error in the recording about what people in Jesus’ day believed about the Resurrection of the dead. I corrected it in the text.

File: Giovanni Serodine - Doubting Thomas - M.Ob.1556 MNW - National Museum in Warsaw.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Well, I didn’t mean to, but I have been obsessively listening to Shroud of Turin podcasts and lectures for almost a whole week. In fact, I have fallen behind on all my usual content consumption because I have, hem, become transfigured by all the people talking about it. I wasn’t even sure why I suddenly thought I should drop everything to attend to this particular subject, and so, because Grok is so available to answer all of a person’s questions, I typed in, “Why is everyone talking about the Shroud of Turin right now?” Grok provided me with a variety of plausible explanations, but none of them were “The lections for the Second Sunday of Easter are Job 42:1-6, Ps 111, Rev 1:(1-8)9-19, and John 20:19-31.”

Seriously, before I wander up and down over the Bible, the details about the Shroud are so amazing. I am not a very sciency person—as in, I can barely count and whenever I think of the weather, I think of the wrath of God more than barometric measurements. One reason I am so ill-adept at navigating Instagram and other social media platforms is that it means remembering what all the little iconic symbols mean and when to use them. I can’t wait to get to heaven, where there will be no technology, neither sorrow, nor sighing, nor the miserable feeling on the pads of the fingers after having tapped hard on keys all the livelong day.

Is there any suffering like my suffering? That’s a joke, of course, because the shroud is a record of suffering. This seems like a good moment to launch forth and say that I one hundred percent believe that it’s real. I hear there are a lot of people online who think it is wicked to believe that it is real, because there should be no image of Jesus, even if that image was produced miraculously by God, but I confess, I haven’t spent nearly the amount of time on those who disbelieve the shroud as on the heaps of evidence provided by those who do. Where was I? Oh yes…

As a mere mortal, it is hard for me to keep two thoughts in my head at once. There is the physical suffering that the Lord Christ endured, and there is the profound and terrible spiritual suffering, the alienation and humiliation of the cross, the Father turning away his face from the son for the redemption of the world. Which was worse? Or rather, which is more significant?

I’m not sure. In a Bible Study just before Easter, we dwelt upon Jesus in the Garden, the heartrending bending of his will—not my will, but thine—and how only Jesus had the power to drain the cup of wrath all the way down to its dregs. And this was no small thing. The Lord Christ was so agonized in his spirit about what he had to endure that angels came to minister to him while his friends, weary with grief, slept. But, during Holy Week, so many of the Psalms, not to mention Isaiah, dwell on the details of what would happen to his body, including that none of his bones would be broken, which is an oddly specific thing to say. When someone is being beaten beyond recognition, when his beard is pulled out at its most painful part, when he is so afflicted, so marred, why mention that none of his bones would be broken?

But in the shroud, none of them are. His shoulder is dislocated, so that when he stretches his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross so that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace, his arms go all the way back. The nail cuts through the bones of the wrist, hitting the nerve, so that the thumb curls in. The spear is thrust up through the ribs, into the heart, so that the blood and fluid appear on the cloth, the signs of a man in the throes of death printed in perfect detail.

For my whole life, I have tried my best to look at the cross. But, most of the time, I do not succeed. I cannot actually face it. If I had been one of those women, unable to go away, I yet would have had my face to the ground, unable to bear the sight of so much blood.

One person I watched this week tried to describe the sheer amount of blood shed by the Lord. Normally, the crucified were not scourged. They went to a humiliating and painful death with a certain amount of strength, so that they hung for hours. Jesus, on the other hand, lost a huge amount of blood through being scourged and then being on the cross, crowned with a dome of thorns. Is it any wonder that he fell, that he hit the ground hard enough that his nose was pushed out of place? “The life is in the blood,” said several of the people I listened to. It is an old declaration, dating thousands of years before Jesus shed his own.

I guess what shocks me is that God would want to be so known. But why is this a shock? One of the lessons appointed for today is from the very end of Job. You remember him, sitting in his ash heap, crushed with grief and illness. Never had a man had so much to lose—reputation, honor, health, wealth—and then had to endure the “comfort” of friends. How does it turn out for him? The Lord comes to him, appears to him, and Job, astonished, answers the Lord and says:

“I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.’
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”

How on earth did Job “see” the Lord? Was it corporeally? Or in some kind of insightful spiritual way? Perhaps he looked up into heaven and saw him there. One of the strangest portions of Job is the one where he sees, like Isaiah, the crucifixion:

Men have gaped at me with their mouth;
they have struck me insolently on the cheek;
they mass themselves together against me.
God gives me up to the ungodly
and casts me into the hands of the wicked.
I was at ease, and he broke me apart;
he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces;
he set me up as his target;
his archers surround me.
He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare;
he pours out my gall on the ground.

He breaks me with breach upon breach;
he runs upon me like a warrior.
I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin
and have laid my strength in the dust.
My face is red with weeping,
and on my eyelids is deep darkness,
although there is no violence in my hands,
and my prayer is pure.

“O earth, cover not my blood,
and let my cry find no resting place.

But other people “see” Jesus. John the Evangelist, who was literally with Jesus through the whole course of his earthly ministry, and thus saw him every day, and then saw him resurrected, later saw him in glory:

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this.

These peculiar characteristics of the Risen Christ must surely be symbolic. How would one even begin to form a picture of what John is seeing? As so many crack “biblical scholars” instruct us that we should believe, and as many people living in the modern era assume, “the resurrection” is purely metaphorical. Jesus, having died, will live on in our memories until we like him, die, never to rise up again. So God has really lost the battle and death will win out in the end.

Two millennia later, I have not seen Jesus alive in the flesh. I have to imagine it as best I can. And that, probably, is what is most astonishing about the shroud. It not only bears a bloody and precise record of the suffering of the Lord Christ upon the cross, but on the surface of the cloth is the image of a man. A photo-negative 3D image of a man who is about 5”10 that no one has been able to replicate.

Almost everyone who has studied the shroud with any seriousness believes it is the image of the crucified and risen Jesus. And this, the Truly Resurrected Jesus, according to the Scriptures, (not the Shroud as amazing as it is) is the heart of the Christian faith. Every Sunday, we confess that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was tried under Pontius Pilate, that he was crucified, died, buried, and on the third day rose again. But, wouldn’t you know it, the Lord Christ was pictured at the resurrection, in a manner that could only be viewed, technologically, two thousand years after it occurred. It feels a little bit like Jesus walking into a room unexpectedly, and insisting on being seen for who he is:

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Grok, summarizing the whole internet, says that:

Secondo Pia, the first person to photograph the Shroud of Turin in 1898, described feeling a "strong emotion" when he saw the image developing in his darkroom. He noted that the Holy Face appeared with "so much emphasis" that he was both surprised and delighted, realizing the photograph was a success.

I don’t know about you, but when bad things happen to me, I have a hard time forgetting about them. One thing that seems so strange about Job is that, after he sees God, he gets more stuff and more children, and then the book ends, and I always wonder, did he miss his first children? Was it enough to have seen God? Or, on the day of the resurrection, if I had had to die for the sins of the whole world, I would want to talk about it. I wouldn’t walk around happy enough to play a lot of jokes on my friends, and then offer up my body to be prodded, once again, by unbelief.

But God did not come into the world to try really hard and then fail. He came to completely undo the power of death and sin, and he succeeded, and so there is no reason for him—or me—to turn his face to the ground, to recoil, to hide in shame. I can look at him because he has already looked into the depths of my soul and conquered the death that makes me so sad. And, lest I begin to think all these are spiritual metaphors, I can look at the mountain of evidence of the mystery of our faith, and try again to open my eyes.

Ok so, for heaven’s sake, go to church!