We Need to See the Scars

3 April 2026  Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

“Upon Him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with His stripes we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5)

Fulton Sheen once wrote, “Satan may appear in many disguises like Christ, and at the end of the world will appear as a benefactor and philanthropist – but Satan never has and never will appear with scars” (The Life of Christ, xvii). He goes on to relate how the modern world has torn asunder what God has put together, and separated Christ from His Cross.

The Cross without Christ is merely an ancient Roman form of punishment which had some of the virtues and all the glittering vices of Roman antiquity. The Cross without Christ produces finally societies that are authoritariuan, cruel, and oppressive of human freedom. In living memory it has produced “concentration camps, firing squads and brain-washings” (The Life of Christ, xix). In living experience it produces cancel culture and gag rules, virtue signalling without virtue, and the emotional torment of the young (see Jonathan Haidt, The Age of Anxiety).

Satan never appears with scars, but God does because He has gone to the very limits of God-forsakenness, where people proclaim God dead, wish God dead, and participate in the killing. God goes even there so that people will know that there is no place so far away that God’s mercy does not reach there.

Western post-Christian society has also chosen Christ without the Cross, which H. Richard Neibuhr once famously and sardonically described: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” (The Kingdom of God in America, 1937).

Christ without a cross may deserve applause and popularity for the moral vision of the Sermon on the Mount, but merits unpopularity for what He said about His divinity, sex, divorce, judgment and hell. Christ without the Cross is the result of the dogmatic principle that anything divine must be a myth. It is the gospel according to Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, most of academia and Hollywood.

Satan never appears with scars, but God does because He has gone to the very limits of God-forsakenness, where people proclaim God dead, wish God dead, and participate in the killing. God goes even there so that people will know that there is no place so far away that God’s mercy does not reach there. No matter how fast, how far you run away from God the Father, you are always running toward the outstretched arms of God the Son. He got there first. He meets you there.

And the reason you can believe that is the scars. He shows them to you, even invites you to touch them. Even though you locked all the doors, He gets in anyway, and He still says, “Peace be with you” (cf. John 20:19-23).

The Roman statesman Cicero, who never knew Christ but did know the cross because every Roman did, said the cross should be kept far way from the eyes and ears of all people because it is so hideous (Pro Rabirio 16). We make it the largest object in our sanctuaries, we wear it around our necks, carry it in our pockets, and put it on the walls of schools and hospital rooms. We do that because we need to see the scars. They are the final proof of the love that we desperately scream for even while we are running away from it. The scars are the assurance that the mercy got there first and has alread found you.