Like a number of you, Allison and I have been watching the recent Ken Burns series about the Vietnam War. Like so many of his other documentaries, it carefully weaves together the story of that troubled era, placing each major leader and event in its proper place. It also has that human touch that marks Burns’ storytelling, breaking the wide narrative to focus on the experiences of ordinary people who patrolled the jungles, marched in protest and captured it all behind the lens of a camera.
In his Civil War epic, Burns was restricted to diaries and letters, but for this series, he and his crew interviewed dozens of people, American and Vietnamese, about what they had seen and felt. It was striking how vividly these men and women could recall the events of a half century ago: the sounds of exploding shells, the feel of boots sloughing through the rice paddies. Several of them pulled up a pantleg or unbuttoned a shirt to reveal the traces of old wounds. I can remember that day because I see it every day. I am marked forever.
My mind goes immediately to King Henry’s words in the English camp before the Battle of Agincourt:
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Though most of us don’t bear battle scars, there are other records etched in our bodies. The pains sparked by old mishaps on the sports field, the skin worn smooth under a wedding ring, the abdomen that never quite fits together again after the birth of a child. Our bodies tell the stories of our lives.
Saint Paul turns to the record in his own flesh as he closes his impassioned Epistle to the Galatians. “I bear on my body the marks—stigmata is the Greek—the marks of Jesus.” That term, stigmata, it means the brand of one’s master. Sometimes in the ancient world, temples would purchase slaves to care for the buildings, and those slaves would receive the stigmata of the god or goddess to whom the temple belonged--his or her symbol branded on their flesh with a hot iron or tattooed with needle and ink. In some units in the Roman army, soldiers received the stigmata of their commander.
Saint Paul chose his term carefully. In some of his writings he describes himself as the slave of Christ. As his life was ending, he wrote to his disciple Timothy: “I have fought the good fight.” He bore the mark of his master proudly. Saint Paul means, of course, the marks of Jesus’ crucifixion, the flesh torn, the bruises, the steady pains borne of a lifetime of hardship and turmoil. He gives a catalog of the marks in II Corinthians chapter 11: five times beaten with whips, three times with rods, a stoning, shipwrecks, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst. Not nails through the palms and a bleeding side, but profound physical suffering, for the sake of His call to proclaim the Gospel, following in the steps of Him who gave His own life to set us free.
His encounter with the Cross of Christ had changed everything in Saint Paul’s life. The Cross was at the center of His Gospel. Through His death, Jesus reconciled us to God, paid the price of sin, set us free from death and hell. The message of the Cross, he wrote to the Corinthians, is folly to those who are perishing, “but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” By the Cross of Jesus Christ, he writes, in today’s Epistle, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Crux probat omnia: the Cross tests all things. The motto was Luther’s, but it is as good a summary of St. Paul’s life as anything.
Galatians, I said earlier, was his most impassioned Epistle. He strenuously defended the Gospel he had received against false teachers who were trying to set up another path to reconciliation with God. Ashamed of the Cross, they were aiming to set up a system of rules, one step after another to climb up to heaven, avoiding entirely Christ’s self offering, the free gift on which salvation hangs. He has made his case against the false teachers, using all the tools of his rhetorical arsenal. But here, in the postscript, he points to His wounds--”he strips his sleeves and shows his scars”--for Calvary’s sake, I have these wounds. This Cross I defend is not just an idea to me, he means. Through His grace, it has become the story of my life. And here is the proof.
There is no better text to read as we remember our patron, Saint Francis. For he too, was a man whose life was determined by the Cross of Jesus Christ. He came to his profound conversion to the life of the Gospel, through a vision of Christ Crucified. He had met a poor man, a leper, on a lonely plane. He walked up to give him some money and he embraced him with a kiss. And then the leper vanished from sight. A few days later, he saw the vision, Jesus the leper, suspended on His Cross. “His soul melted at the sight,” writes St. Bonaventure in his famous biography of St. Francis, “and the memory of Christ’s Passion was so impressed on the innermost recesses of his heart From that hour, whenever Christ’s crucifixion came to his mind, he could scarcely contain his tears and sighs.”
St. Francis gave himself to a life in full conformity with the sufferings of Jesus. He renounced all his possessions and lived as a beggar. He sought His Lord among the poor and the sick. He spent long nights in prayer and fasting. He preached a message of repentance, and turned the hearts of thousands of sinners to the mercy God offered freely in Jesus. St. Bonaventure says that when a community of brothers began to gather around him, they had no liturgical books for their common prayers. He wrote, “In place of these they had the book of Christ’s cross which they studied continually night and day, taught by the example and words of their father who spoke to them constantly about the cross of Christ.”
The climax of St. Francis’ life, of course, came on Mount Alverna, two years before His death. His body had already been broken, like Saint Paul’s by the intensity of his labors, the rigors of his fasts, the poverty of his life. But there on the mountain, he saw Christ crucified again, surrounded by blazing angels. And he received from Him the stigmata, the marks of Jesus’ crucifixion on his hands and feet, and wound in his side that bled until the end of his life. “Now fixed with Christ to the cross, summarized St. Bonaventure, in both body and spirit”.
Do you have wounds to show from your life with Jesus? What would it mean for you to be fixed with Christ to the cross, in body and spirit? Saints like those we remember today make me feel ashamed. I look at my own life and I see how far I am from the courageous self-giving love that should mark the true servants of our holy Master. But they also encourage me to press on. I can serve the poor also. I too can fast. I can beg God’s forgiveness, from the heart, with tears that mark one who knows his sins honestly. I can give generously, to bless the church and those who suffer. I can share the Gospel with those God has placed in my life.
My body does not yet show the One to whom I belong. I hold back parts of my life that are not yet fixed to His Cross. Is it not the same with you? But He is at work in us as He was in Saint Paul and Saint Francis before us. Day by day, he calls us closer to Him, bids us share in the “fellowship of His sufferings.” The path which leads us closer to His Cross is the way of true joy. Press on in hope.
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