The Wounds That Match Our Own

In the early 1500s, the German painter Matthias Grunewald completed a massive altarpiece for the monastery hospital at Isenheim, in what is now eastern France. The patients there suffered from ergotism, a disease that ravaged the skin with open sores, blackened the limbs, and twisted the body in agony. What Grunewald painted for them was unlike any crucifixion scene before it.

His Christ does not die with quiet dignity. The body on that cross is covered in the same festering wounds the patients bore. The skin is pocked and torn. The fingers splay in anguish. The flesh has gone greenish with decay. Grunewald did not paint a beautiful Savior. He painted one who looked exactly like the people lying in the beds before it.

The sick were carried into the chapel and placed before the altarpiece as part of their care. And what they saw was not a God untouched by their suffering, but a God who had entered into it completely, whose body bore the very marks they recognized on their own.

That is the heart of the gospel's claim about sacrifice. The cross is not a transaction observed from a distance. It is God entering the ward, lying down on the sickbed, taking on the sores. "By His wounds we are healed," Isaiah wrote, and Grunewald made it visible.

Whatever you carry into this room today, the sacrifice of Christ meets you there. Not above your pain. Within it.