A Halo around His Hands

Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash

Years ago, I visited a church member, a surgeon, who’d been hospitalized. He was quite sick. During our conversation he mentioned his hands.

He held them up, hands at that time gnarled from the effects of arthritis, but he remembered how they once could perform life-saving surgery. He said he understood his hands to have been given to him for the good of people, for God’s work. He felt gratitude that those hands could alleviate suffering.

The reaching out and walking into people’s lives that involves our hands and our feet often matter more than what we say.

Sometimes it’s the everyday thing we do that speaks most powerfully: The extending of our hands to offer a gift, or give a pat on the shoulder. A thumb wiping away a tear. In one of Rembrandt’s great works of art, there is no halo around Jesus’ head, no radiant band of light, as was the custom for Renaissance art. But there’s something even more unusual than the lack of a halo around Jesus’ head. It’s where Rembrandt chose to put a halo. There is a halo around the Lord’s hands.

Over the years historians and critics have debated Rembrandt’s placement of the halo. But I’m pretty sure I know why: the artist wanted to convey how Jesus’ hands were holy hands. They became instruments of service, used to bless children, give bread to the hungry, bring healing. This was no vague sentiment or airy wisdom dispensed from afar. They were hands both holy and human. Hands divine but willing to get grit under the fingernails. 

I’m struck a reading from John’s Gospel usually read on the Sunday after Christmas in my tradition. In Jesus, John says, all the words spoken by God became flesh, became human. God enlisted ordinary human instruments of interaction and help. Like hands.

John speaks in lofty ways about a capital-W Word—there with God, there as God, all along.  The Word of the Greeks that suggested order and a presence along with the creative power of the Word of God of the Jews, was made a person. This Word was made humanly real. 

In Jesus we see and hear one who can be watched and listened to, whose touch can be felt. Now, says John, look at Jesus, because in him the Word gets made visible. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” John wrote, “and we have seen his glory … full of grace and truth.” 

This Word comes as a life made tangible and real, a real person come to us, on our level. Through a child. Through One who would grow up to use his hands in ordinary and extraordinary ways, because God took residence in a human body.

By the way, my surgeon friend, the one whose hands did so much good: His hospital stay went on and on. One of my clergy colleagues visited and asked him, “How have you endured the constant limitations of a heart attack, a fall, an amputation, extended hospital stays--doing so without grumbling?”

The good doctor answered, “I contemplate the love the Father has for me.”

Because he was a believer, he had more to feed into his imagination and his praying than mere spiritual thoughts. He could look at Jesus, what Jesus did with his hands, what he did with his whole life, and know indeed, how great is the Father’s love. He could see with his mind’s eye a love vast and wide, but also close by.