Last May I wrote about the rich symbolism of the Wounds of Christ. Having come round again to the same point in Eastertide and written further about the sacramental nature of the post-Resurrection appearances, I find there is more to say on the subject.

Thinking of the wounded side as an orifice (wounds are said to have lips) brings to mind two other sets of lips in the human body. We already said that the wounded side was not only the place from which a new Eve (the Church) was fashioned to be the bride of the new Adam (Christ) but also the place from which water and blood (which we can view as the species of the two dominical Sacraments) flowed. Both of these images are obviously related to birth: from Christ and His self-sacrifice the Church is born and the soul is reborn; the new Body of Christ, fecundated by Christ (cf. the traditional ceremony – one of a very few things found in the Altar Book but not the pew edition of bcp1979 – of dipping the Paschal Candle into the baptismal font at the Easter Vigil) bears new members.

  And of course the original from which these images come is the mouth itself. Thinking as I did last year of the wound as a dark but not necessarily dangerous place – ‘the gap between doubt and faith, fear and freedom, death and life’ – trying to rehabilitate ‘Doubting’ Thomas, see the side as the ‘cleft in the rock’, and simultaneously believe it to be an active part in the accomplishment of salvation, I believe we can see the wound as the very mouth of hell which Christ absorbed, defanged, into Himself. In the Ugaritic Ba‘al epic, Mot, the god of death, is pictured as having a very wide mouth with ‘a lip to the earth, a lip to heaven’; he swallows up those who die and thus conveys them to the underworld (cf. Hk 2.5, ‘they [the arrogant] open their throats wide as Sheol’; Is 5.14, ‘Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure’; Ps 106.17, ‘the earth opened and swallowed Dathan’; this image is found in Christian iconography East and West throughout the Middle Ages) – but in Is 25.8, appointed for Easter Evening and quoted in 1Co 15.54, we read that the Lord ‘will swallow up death for ever’; similarly, in 2Co 5.4, ‘that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life’. By this understanding, we can believe that there is no place we can go where Christ has not gone before and is not now present.
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