The image is what we are. The wound is where we meet. And grace is what prevents the wound from having the final word.
I often accuse myself of not being very relatable to the everyday Joe. First and foremost, my name is not Joe. But maybe I have mistaken my uniqueness for something that separates rather than unites. We are all so different and live such different lives, yet there is a river beneath the surface where all our experiences flow together. Beneath the words we use to identify ourselves (our job titles, our age, our ethnicity, our religion) runs the river of universal experience. Who can say they have never suffered an embarrassing moment? Who can say they have never regretted something they have done or said? Who can say they are perfect? “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
So, rather radically, I will ask you, dear reader: would I be wrong in saying that what unites all of humanity, the Muslim holding hands with the Christian, the Hindu with the atheist, the Palestinian with the Israeli, the rich man with the beggar, is our imperfection? I chose those pairs on purpose. Some are divided by what they believe, some by where they were born, some by what they own, some by a war still being fought. This is not only a question about religion. It is a question about every wall we build between ourselves and another person.
At first you might want to protest. You were expecting the classic Christian answer (this is a Christian website, after all): that what unites us is the holy image of God. And that is true. The Fathers go even further and say that sin is not part of our nature at all. St Athanasius writes, “what is evil is not, but what is good is” (Against the Heathen 4). Evil has no substance of its own. It is rot in a sound beam, a shadow where light has been refused. The image of God is what we are. Sin is the wound.
But think simply with me. To tell an atheist that they are sacred, made in the image of God, is in our minds the greatest truth that can be uttered. Yet to speak of it to someone who has never seen, heard or experienced any proof of such a thing is not merely useless. It breeds the very disdain so many feel towards religious people, as if a child were telling them about an imaginary friend. It is far easier to point to what we all know too well: “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (Romans 7:19). The image may be what we share, but the wound is what we can all see. So I propose we extend St Paul’s mentality to our own time: “to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews… I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:20, 22). I become as a Muslim to the Muslim, as an atheist to the atheist, not in creed, but in the wound we share.
You cannot point someone to the Healer until they have seen the wound. Only when I expose my own poverty and become humble before my brother can he see in me what is in him. Christ Himself said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Mark 2:17). St Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to be thrown to the lions, gives Him His name: “There is one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God; first passible and then impassible, even Jesus Christ our Lord” (Epistle to the Ephesians 7). This is the common factor between me and my Muslim brother. We do not stand on either side of a wall. We sit together in the same waiting room, and the same Physician knows both our names.
What will unite humanity is what is common to us all. The image is what we are, but the wound is where we meet: our imperfection, our sin.
Before we continue, I think it important to look at this word more deeply. Please take a moment and consider your reaction to the word “sin”. You may have followed my line of thought so far. It’s nothing crazy to say we are all imperfect. But when I switched to the word sin, did you hesitate? The word has been mangled and twisted by shame, and we now keep it strictly for religious contexts. To say I sinned when I spilled a cup of water sounds wrong. Yet as many would be quick to remind us, its original meaning (the Greek hamartia) is simply to miss the mark. But knowing in your head is not knowing in your heart. Do we really believe it means missing the mark, or has Satan been so successful over the years in tying this word to shame that we shudder at the sound of it?
It is good that we do not desire to sin. It is not good that we are unable to deal with it.
Notice how carefully we step around the word. We speak of our weakness, our brokenness, our struggles, our mistakes. We say we are “working on ourselves”. These are not wrong words (St Paul himself boasted in his weakness), but notice which ones come to our lips first, and which one we almost never say out loud. Brokenness is something that happened to me. Sin is something I did. Some wounds truly are done to us, and no one should be asked to repent of what was done to them. But I am speaking of the part that is mine. The first word lets me stay the victim. The second asks me to kneel. And yet the second is the better news, because if I am only a victim, all I can do is wait to be rescued, while a sinner can repent: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Weakness is St Paul’s word for the condition we all share. Sin is the honest name for my part in it. The wound is real, but I had a hand in making it.
Calling it sin does not mean we are chained to it. We are free, and confession is the first act of that freedom. But the healing is slow. Over many years of training (ascesis) our tendencies are gently turned towards the perfect, and even then it is not our own achievement. “It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). The work takes a lifetime, and it is grace’s work in us, not ours. “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).
The wound is where we meet. But here we must be careful, because sin has two faces. Sin unseen hardens the heart: “exhort one another daily, while it is called ‘Today,’ lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). But sin seen, sin known and brought into the light, becomes a blessing and a road to God. It becomes the key into the souls of those around us, the greatest tool of evangelism, the door on which Christ knocks: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20).
Pride hardens the heart, and known sin humbles it. The most dramatic conversions often come when a person is finally brought face to face with their own pride, and pride turns itself inside out into the truest humility. St John Chrysostom paints this with a wonderful image. He imagines the Pharisee and the tax collector of Luke 18 as two chariots in a race, the Pharisee’s drawn by righteousness and pride, the tax collector’s by sin and humility. Pride drags righteousness backwards, while humility, “even when yoked with sin, out-stripped the Pharisee’s pair” (Concerning Lowliness of Mind 1). Notice who is pulling the chariot. Not the sin, but the humility of the man who confessed it.
This is conviction, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit: “when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement” (John 16:8). Too often when we recognise our sin we grow sad and ashamed and hide, as Adam hid among the trees of the garden. But the moment of conviction should be a moment of rejoicing. God has shown you the truth about yourself because He thinks you are strong enough to bear it. A physician does not uncover the wound until he is ready to heal it. There is a sorrow that heals and a sorrow that kills: “For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). St Anthony the Great, the father of monks, put it plainly: “This is the great work of a person: to lay his own fault before God, and to expect temptation until his last breath.”
So if imperfection is what unites humanity, am I to sin more? “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?” (Romans 6:1-2). Chrysostom adds the same warning himself: he praises humility not so that we grow careless of righteousness, but so that we flee from pride.
If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. A “perfect” person ends up being the one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection.Richard Rohr
St Gregory of Nyssa said something similar sixteen centuries earlier: true perfection is never to stop growing towards what is better (On Perfection). As Rohr puts it, “What a clever place for God to hide holiness,” tucked away where only the humble and earnest will think to look.
Christ tells us in His greatest sermon, “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Why give us such a heavy burden, one that seems impossible? It doesn’t take much trying to realise that if we attempt it alone, we end up miserable. Of course our wise Lord knew this. So He took our nature and became man, so that perfection would no longer be out of our reach. St Irenaeus says He “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Against Heresies V, Preface). St Athanasius says it in one breath: “He was made man that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54).
Yet again the Bible gives me a stumbling block. Christ took our nature completely, except for sin alone: “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathise with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
But God cannot sin, and a Christ who sinned would need a saviour Himself. Still, I believe His love would go to any length for us, and it did. He went as close to sin as sinlessness can go. St Paul speaks of a great mystery: “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). St Gregory the Theologian explains, “For my sake He was called a curse, Who destroyed my curse; and sin, who taketh away the sin of the world” (Oration 30.5). St John Chrysostom notices that Paul does not say God made Him a sinner, but sin, so that we would become not merely righteous, but righteousness itself (Homily 11 on 2 Corinthians).
He stood in the line of sinners at the Jordan to be baptised, though He had nothing to repent of. The Pharisees complained, “This Man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). He was crucified between two robbers: “So the Scripture was fulfilled which says, ‘And He was numbered with the transgressors’” (Mark 15:28). He descended into Hades itself. St Gregory writes, “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed” (Epistle 101). So He assumed our hunger, our tears, our fear in the garden, our death. Everything but sin, because sin was never the human part. Christ is the most human human who ever lived.
It would be futile to try to understand such a paradox, but what we are to learn is simple. It is the story of our salvation. Sin is no longer a barrier. It was broken down.
Henri Nouwen gives this a name in The Wounded Healer. Compassion, he says, is recognising in your own heart the same craving for love, and the same cruelty, that you see in everyone else. When they kill, you know you could have. When they give life, you know you could do the same. This is what makes forgiveness real: you can only forgive the brother whose weakness you have already found in yourself. The Physician healed us through His own wounds, “by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5), and even risen, He kept them. He told Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side” (John 20:27). The scars were not erased. They became the proof. Now He sends us out wounded too. We are not sent to hide our scars, but to let others recognise their own in them.
My wound is where I meet my fellow man. I should not hide from my weakness, but use it to build bridges to those I find it so hard to relate to. Sin, known and confessed, humbles and softens the heart so that Christ can enter the home He longs for. It furnishes the heart with the soft comfort of humility, so He can find rest there. “Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Romans 5:20). St Augustine says, “He judged it better to bring good out of evil, than not to permit any evil to exist” (Enchiridion 27).
Let us then give thanks for our weakness, for the conviction of the Holy Spirit that shows me my sin, for the hope that is always before me, for the warm arms that are always open to me, for the nails of the cross that pierced our shame. For it is not despite my weakness that I am saved, but in it. “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
If you make each sin an occasion for you to kiss the wound of His Heart with repentance and confidence, each sin will become a rung in the ladder by which you ascend in love. From misery to misery we go from mercy to mercy.Fr. Jean d'Elbée
Written by
Friend of Thérèse
