At home in Christ’s wounds.

Grace Hamman and St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the only refuge for sinners.

Caravaggio, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”

I was deeply moved by a recent post from

Grace Hamman

in her Medievalish newsletter, in which she mused upon the writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and his penchant for extracting homilies from the texts of Song of Solomon. To say that the romantic and often erotic overtones of Solomon’s Song have resulted in it being overlooked by clergy and laity alike is an understatement. It’s a book that is commonly understood to be too provocative for the average congregation since its pages are filled with suggestive language. Nevertheless, if all sixty-six books of the Bible are necessary and integral to the revelation of redemption in the Christ of God, that means that Solomon’s Song is just as significant as Paul’s epistle to the Romans. We often don’t think in those terms but the fact remains that nothing in Scripture has been preserved arbitrarily and all of it tends towards Christ.

In a sermon dated March 4, 1888, Charles Spurgeon fittingly declared that “Song of Solomon is the central Book of the Bible; it is the innermost shrine of divine revelation, the holy of holies of Scripture; and if you are living in communion with God, you will love that Book, you will catch its spirit, and you will be inclined to cry with the spouse, ‘Make haste, my beloved.’” Spurgeon, of course, was well acquainted with preaching from Solomon’s Song, a practice that certainly gives many modern evangelicals pause. In a way, though, he might have been following in the footsteps of St. Bernard who saw in the Song of Solomon “the all-encompassing love of Jesus,” as Grace Hamman puts it. She proceeds to describe this antiquated theologian as one who was “perhaps the most beautiful and clear-sighted writer on the love of God in the later Middle Ages.” Case in point, as Grace shares, in one sermon on Song of Solomon 2:14, Bernard also brings in imagery from Matthew 7:24–29 to highlight where sinners can find refuge and redemption:

Where is the safe sure rest for the weak except in the Saviour’s wounds? There the security of my dwelling depends on the greatness of his saving power. The world rages, the body oppresses, the devil lays his snares: I do not fall because I am founded upon a rock. I have sinned gravely, my conscience is disturbed but not confounded, because I shall remember the wounds of the Lord.

Finding refuge in the wounds of Jesus brings to mind a flurry of hopeful and life-giving thoughts, not to mention what the apostle Peter says in 1 Peter 2:24: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” This, of course, is a direct reference to what the prophet Isaiah says in Chapter 53: “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). Grace goes on to say:

What’s more, in a favorite trope of the Middle Ages, Christ’s wounds make the love of God readable, legible for us who would otherwise flee and hide in the face of our failures and weakness and fear. The nails that pierce him function like keys in a keyhole, “unlocking the sight” of the Lord’s will to love: The nail cries out [says Bernard], the wound cries out that God is truly in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. “The iron pierced his soul” and his heart has drawn near, so that he is no longer one who cannot sympathize with my weaknesses. The secret of his heart is laid open through the clefts of his body; that mighty mystery of loving is laid open, laid open too the tender mercies of our God, in which the morning sun from on high has risen upon us. Surely his heart is laid open in his wounds!

As Christ’s body is laid open like a book opening up to his heart, we read the immeasurable will to love of God, that “mighty mystery of loving” on Good Friday. His pain is our pain. His weakness and mortality is ours. His heart for us is vulnerable, ready and open to receive us as we are. Christ on the Cross: refuge for sinners, friend to and literally one of the weak and brokenhearted, revealed heart for the world.

In some corners of the church today, I have seen a resistance to the bloody imagery that the medieval church so prized. Not too long ago I saw a tweet grousing about the dolorous hymn, “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” and its too-close comparison to blood sacrifice and glorification of suffering. But such well-intentioned resistance ignores that we are embodied creatures of blood and guts, that we give birth in blood and water, that blood means life to us in our fragility and suffering. It is an act of sheer evil to crucify an innocent man, but nothing evil can end the far greater reality of Love as his character. His blood becomes witness to love, book of grace, invitation to mercy. In the wounds of Jesus, even as we deny Him, we witness, transformatively, truly, God with us, with us, with us.

With Easter Sunday looming and Good Friday already here, you will, Lord willing, be privy to sermons on texts that are very familiar, especially at this time of year. But let us not forget or gloss over the refuge for sinners that is found in Jesus’s wounds. The very scars that were exposed to Thomas (John 20:27–28) are the same marks with which every sinner and saint is made to be filled “with all joy and peace in believing” (Rom. 15:13). This is what the gospel presents to us — namely, the wounds by which we are healed in the righteous grace of God.

Grace and peace to you, my friends, and Happy Easter Week!