For my spiritual reading, I’m re-reading Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ. And as I was reading yesterday, I came across this great bit:
Satan never has and never will appear with scars.
And this struck me so deeply, and I’ll tell you why.
I talk about this in my book (in the epilogue)—the idea that Christ has glorious scars, that we see, in His glory, the scars of His crucifixion and the things he has endured. The hymn “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending” talks about this:
With what rapture
With what rapture
With what rapture
Gaze we on those glorious scars!
But we don’t like scars, right? We try to cover them up or remove them or have them lasered away, because they’re imperfect, they’re ugly, they’re not pretty.
But they’re also signs that we survived. Chris Cleave, in his novel Little Bee, writes that scars don’t form on dead people. Scars are signs of life. And they are.
I have a lot of scars, in a lot of places. But they’re signs of life. Just like Christ’s are, they’re signs of triumph in battle, of overcoming, of survival and glory.
Satan doesn’t have scars, because he doesn’t fight the battle. He causes the battle.
Christ fought the battle and won. Thomas poked his fingers into the scars and saw them and believed.
To me, scars aren’t ugly. They’re glorious. And they’re glorious for Jesus, too.
(Here’s my favorite version of “Lo He Comes”—by the Dominican student brothers of the Province of St. Joseph. You can get the CD here. )