Sacred Mysteries: Contemplating wounds by which we are healed

Telegraph

29-03-2025

In a short book for Lent, Erik Varden, the Leicestershire monk who was made bishop of Trondheim, has employed an unexpected method.
His title is Healing Wounds, and this must chime with the ambition of most readers to find an answer to troubles, whether a bad back or a bad temper. The author's approach is Christocentric, and he takes for his epigraph 'By his wounds we are healed', a quotation from Isaiah.
Perhaps it was in a book by Joseph Ratzinger, before he was Pope Benedict XVI, Behold the Pierced One, that I was struck by the continuing presence of the wounds of Christ in his resurrected body.
They are there in the Gospels, confronting Thomas after his doubts. One might have thought they would no longer be visible, but they are. And it must be true that Jesus, the one who has been wounded, also retains the knowledge of the psychological wounds that his death on the Cross entailed.
Anyway, Bishop Varden considers wounds and their healing by contemplating an ancient poem about the wounds of the body of Christ. The poem used to be attributed to St Bernard, a star of the Cistercian order of monks to which Bishop Varden belongs, but it is thought more likely to be by a Cistercian abbot active a century later, in the first half of the 13th century, Arnulf of Leuven.
The 370-line poem, in 74 stanzas, which begins Salve, mundi salutare, 'Hail, salvation of the world', takes each of seven wounds in turn, not only the five wounds of the hands, feet and side, but also the knees, breast and face of Christ.
It is when we reach the last, towards the end of the book, that we realise that the text there was the source for the moving lines set to music by Bach in the St Matthew Passion: O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, 'O sacred head, sore wounded'.
But initially there is an obstacle to appreciating a meditation on this poem – which is that we may well find the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus repellent and horrific. Bishop Varden makes his task one of showing that wounds are not the end of the story, but he does not deny the painfulness of the events expressed by the words 'Passion and Cross'.
Though, in the Gospel according to St John, the Cross is called glorious, Bishop Varden makes the point that the Lamb of God is said to take away the sins of the world, not by dispelling them at a stroke, but by taking them upon himself, picking them up and carrying them.
As he sets about contemplating the wounded body of Jesus on the Cross, I was put in mind of a mural in Florence. It is in the cloister of the Dominican friary of San Marco, where Fra Angelico left a transcendent series of frescoes. The cloister mural depicts Christ on the Cross, below which kneels St Dominic as though he was present in the scene, embracing the wood of the Cross streaked by the blood of Christ.
Bishop Varden performs a similar task to Fra Angelico, with the help of Arnulf's verses, which he translates himself. He also links the events of the Crucifixion with their liturgical reenactment before Easter each year. The Crucified is not just 'Jesus of Nazareth', the man that Pilate saw, he is also our 'Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal', as it is put in the Trisagion, words of the Good Friday liturgy preserved in Greek from the earliest times.
In taking part in the devotions of Good Friday, people peacefully acknowledge the suffering by which no life is untouched, while putting their trust in being loved.