As 2023 closes, I wanted to draw your attention to a book that did not make it in time for the 2023 book list of December 5. Thomas Halik’s “Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation” is a deep read, and is worthy of contemplation. He states his premise:

The painful wounds of the world are Christ’s wounds… in the Gospels, the resurrected Christ identifies himself with his wounds. They are proof of his identity. The wounded Christ is the real, living Christ. He shows us his wounds and gives us the courage not to conceal our own: we are permitted our own wounds.

Halik comments on the attempted assignation of Pope John Paul II on St. Peter’s Square back in May, 1981. A few days after Christmas 1983 (December 27 – forty years ago today), John Paul visited his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, to express his forgiveness of him – a magnanimous act of generosity to an unsuspecting prisoner.

Halik observes that in this contrast to taking revenge, the Pope answers the question of how to truly heal those wounds when he embraced the man who had imperilled his life. Halik likened the embrace to Rembrandt’s painting of The Return of the Prodigal Son.

Therefore Halik exhorts:

We must not allow violence and hatred to triumph by drawing us onto their field of play where they would envenom us with their poisonous hatred, thereby clouding our brains and hearts and rendering us incapable of taking sensible and responsible decisions, forcing us to play by their evil rules, poisoning our language and tainting our lips with words that kill, with which they themselves inflame the spirit of vengeance and trigger a spiral of revenge, thus keeping the flame of permeant war alive in the world.

Only when we refuse to capitulate in this way to evil and do not become part of it will the human family perhaps walk without fear of mutual destruction along the path of the third millennium…

Thus we cannot blithely celebrate Christmas without recognizing its inexorable connection to Easter Forgiveness, for in Christ we recognize there is no forgiveness without great cost on the part of the forgiver (for more, see these posts on Forgiveness).

It should be noted that Agca had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy for the assassination attempt, but was pardoned by president Ciampi in June 2000 at the Pope’s request. Years later the former assassin visited the tomb of John Paul II in 2014, putting flowers on it. While in prison in 2007, Mehmet Ali Agca came to faith in Christ.

I suspect it was forgiveness that invited him to a new path of life.

This is More Enigma than Dogma