Luke 24:50, ‘And, lifting up His hands, He blessed them.’
These are the same hands that Jesus displayed to His disciples in v.39, the hands bearing the wounds of His crucifixion, which is to say, wounds that bear witness to the disciples’ sin and the condemnation due that sin. More than this, in those wounds is witnessed every horror, every suffering, every desolation, and every death His people will ever know—the full weight of her affliction and grief…
**And yet,** these same wounds are now displayed in the lifted hands of the risen Lord as wellsprings of blessing, pouring mercy out on the very ones by and for whom they were dealt.
There is no horror, no suffering, no anguish, no rebellion, no damnation, that—piercing through the flesh of the crucified Lord, and being raised up in the body of the Risen One—does not become blessing, peace, joy, and beauty…That is what we see bound up in this simple image of Jesus raising His wounded hands in blessing.
So, at the center of today’s image is a skull weeping tears made of thorns. This is a depiction of all sin (the Genesis 3 curse of thorns), sorrow (the tears), suffering (the point of the thorns), and death (the skull itself).
All that grieves, that shatters, that burdens, that harms, that assails the Bride—within and without—is there represented. This emblem of suffering is borne within the the wound of Christ’s hand, since it is this reality that He endures in His Passion.
And yet, the wounded hand is not dead, but raised up in blessing. By this resurrection, the thorny tears of the skull are turned to fruit-bearing vines (images of end-time blessing).
Finally, from the broken jaws of Death rings out the eschatological ‘Hallelujah!’ / ‘Praise YHWH!’, declaring the Name of the LORD (Is.55:13). Through the resurrection of the crucified Lord, all the horrors that He endures in death are turned by His life into heralds of the beauty (the identity, the glory, the name) of YHWH, which is to say, servants of the joy of the saints.
Truly, the nail-wounded hand of the Crucified One, raised to bless by the life of the Risen One, is an emblem of the meaning of reality and an apocalypse of the heart of God.
