The Care-Filled Touch of Jesus
Émile Signol, “Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery” [1842].
While the topic of physical and sexual abuse does not assume a central place in my book, A Body of Praise, it is a tragic reality that I have to assume throughout. And I’m grateful to many of my colleagues at Fuller Theological Seminary whose expertise and wisdom on this topic are a great help to me as a theologian.
I’m also grateful to Russell Moore for bringing up this topic in our Christianity Today podcast. Russell has been giving such wise and purposeful attention to this evil disease that has infected the church for years.
As I remark in the podcast, sexual and physical abuse are vile and dehumanizing, and the effects of the trauma are felt for years. Even with all the therapeutic helps (whether traditional or non-traditional), the road to healing is usually a long and painful one.
In the class that I taught on the Psalms, I told my students that there are certain things that are God-damnable in this sin-infected world; and we should not shy away from making use in worship of the curse psalms, which give us holy language to damn the things that violate the integrity of human life, such as abuse of any sort.
But in addition to naming these things, is there a way for our congregations to welcome positive, meaningful touch within corporate worship in a way that contributes to the corporeal healing of victims of abuse?
I think yes, though it’s always going to be a complex and culturally contextual thing.
But perhaps I might suggest the following as a starting point.
On the one hand, we are wrong to reject the physical ways of our Lord, as I write throughout my book, and we do well to make space in our worship for the kind of physical touch that bears witness to the tactile and restorative care of Jesus.
On the other hand, we ought always to remain alert to all forms of abusive and in-sensitive touch. Such forms of touch violate the law of love and result in experiences of violence against the body.
In doing both things well, we witness the work of the Spirit in our communities, enabling us to become at home in our own skin, however broken or disappointing it may feel to us, and enabling Christ’s Body to become a vehicle of healing and a source of desperately needed good news in our broken world.
