Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."

John 20:27

On a pain scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a minor scrape and 10 being, say, childbirth (or so I'm told), my pain was probably a 2, maybe a 3. Not a huge deal. What was memorable about it, though, was that it was the first time I'd suffered an injury that my mother's kiss could not make instantly better, and so it stayed with me.

It's funny, isn't it, how pain burns brighter than the other stars in the constellation of human experience. We remember the happy events in our lives -- we remember processing down the aisle to receive our degree or marry our sweetheart. We remember the thrill of landing the job we coveted and worked hard to get. We even remember being happy on those occasions, but in most cases the happiness itself is gone, vanished like a morning cloud.

Pain is different. I recently caught an episode of Inside the Actors' Studio, featuring Gene Hackman. The host of the show asked Mr. Hackman about the day his father took leave of the family. Apparently one day his dad got in the family car, drove down the street past where young Gene was playing with his friends and simply waved good-bye, never to return.

As he told this story, Mr. Hackman's voice caught. This big screen tough guy paused for quite a long time, eyes surveying the floor. And then he looked up and said simply, "It's only been 50 years."

Happiness leaves memories. Pain leaves scars. It's a deeply human characteristic. But it doesn't have to be that way.

A couple years ago I had a chance to attend a pastoral care conference on pain. A man - I'll call him Mike - told how, growing up, it didn't matter how badly he hurt himself; his father's reaction was always the same: some variation of shake it off, tough it out, big boys don't cry.

That was well and good until a few years ago when Mike's brother committed suicide. No way to shake that one off. Mike himself figuratively doubled over in pain and stayed that way for a good while. His father tried to shake it off, tried to be a tough guy, but he couldn't. There was no way to tough this one out-he had to go through it like everyone else. And he found out that big boys do, in fact, cry.

Several years after the suicide, Mike went home for the holidays. He and his father -- I'll call him Frank -- paid a visit to the grave, to pray and to remember a brother and a son, and just to be with one another in their still-powerful grief. While they were there, Frank told his son Mike a story he'd not told anyone before, not even Mike's mother.

Apparently when he was a little boy, Frank's own father was dying. One the very day his dad would die, Frank cut his finger.

Somehow his father knew, and when Frank went to visit him for what would be the last time, his sweet father asked to see his son's bandaged finger. I bet anything he wanted to kiss it and make it better, one last time. But young Frank could not bring himself to share his small, boyish pain with his dying father. Instead of showing him his finger, he hid it behind his back.

The next time Frank saw his dad was at the funeral home. He showed him his finger then, but it was too late. He wanted desperately for his dad to see him and acknowledge him and kiss that hurt finger, but his dad could no longer share in his pain. And so Frank spent the rest of his life hiding his finger behind his back, not showing his pain to anyone, a legacy of denial that he passed on to his son Mike.

The point here is that in sharing the story of his pain, Frank gave his son an entry point into his life that Mike had never had before. Frank's wound, suffered as a child, shut a door into his life and heart that remained closed for 40 years. But finally, in that cemetary, Mike got the inside edition to his father's story, an explanation for his dad's tough guy exterior.

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Easter is the story about a man who suffered great pain, and triumphed over it. We pick up the story today, post-resurrection.

As I see it, there are at least two ways to read this text. The first is a sort of comic reading. The disciples are huddled together and are smarting from their own pain, pain rooted in the loss of their best friend and best hope for a different future, free of Roman occupation.

Suddenly this same man whom they thought was dead appears among them and, in a chirpy voice, says "Peace!" - the first century equivalent of "Good Morning!" - as though the current circumstances are entirely ordinary. "Good morning! Peter, how you doin'? James, good to see you! How are you?! Me? I'm great! Just been resurrected. Never been better!"

The other reading is a little more . . . potent. Same setting, same facts, same people. Suddenly in the middle of a locked room appears a man with nail scars in his hands and a lethal gash in his side, a beatific glow emanating from his resurrected body like hot smoke from a volcano.

On this reading Jesus takes something plain and ordinary -- "Peace!", "Good Morning!" -- and turns it into a declaration of cosmic significance. When this man, this man who claimed all along to be God's son and predicted this astounding post-death rendezvous, when this man walks into a locked room and declares "Peace!" you'd better believe it.

You'd better believe that our assumptions about life and death have just changed -- that the reality we take for granted in which hope dies with our loved one, in which nail scars disappear as a dead body decomposes -- you'd better believe that this reality has given way to something bigger.

When this man says "Peace," you'd better believe it. Who wouldn't? He's standing right there.

Well, Thomas, for one. Call him stubborn, call him skeptical, call him the slave of doubt, but whatever you call him, let's give him some credit. Wherever Thomas may have been on his faith journey when Jesus appeared in that room, at least he was honest. He didn't try hiding anything behind his back.

The other disciples had seen Jesus, but to this point in the story their claims were, for Thomas, mere words. You could believe them or not, like the claims of some huckster who predicts great things and promises that you'll be in on them.

We've all heard stories like that. And it usually pays not to believe them. But when Thomas sees those wounds, everything changes. Christ's claims change from mere words to something more like gravity--compelling, irresistible, true beyond all doubt or reason.

It's the scars that open up the story for Thomas, that give him the inside edition of Christ's own life. Notice his response when he sees those wounded hands, that torn side: " My Lord and my God." In that moment Thomas finally gets it--he finally understands that Christ's death was not just for the whole world, it was also meant, somehow, for him.

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Ladies and gentlemen, life is a rough and tumble affair. If you're lucky enough to make it past the age of 10, then you doubtless have some scars to show for it. And they just keep piling up thereafter.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I had just been resurrected, and had a body that could now walk through locked doors, one thing I would change about myself is those scars. But not Jesus. His wounds had healed, yes, but the scars stayed. They're part of his eternal identity.

So it is with us, in a way. Our wounds may heal but the scars stay. They're part of our story, our identity. We can't change them. But they don't have to be debilitating.

They don't have to keep us from getting back on the bike. They don't have to make us hide our finger behind our back, keeping the inside edition of our stories to ourselves for the better part of a lifetime.

What grounds do I have for saying that? Easter. Perhaps the most basic message of Easter is this: pain and suffering aren't the end of the story, they're not what it's really about. They're a chapter in that story, yes; an inevitable part of life to be sure. At some point we all have wounds visited on us by forces beyond our control. But the story, thank God, does not end on Good Friday.

The story continues with an open tomb and the knowledge that scars don't go away, but their meaning can change. More than anything else, Easter is an invitation to believe, with Thomas, that our best hope for a different future is not dead but alive and at loose in our world and that's very Good News!

Put your finger here and see my hands, Thomas. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.

Amen