Trauma, Togetherness, and Passionate Solidarity
A Johannine Vision for Religious Trauma Healing, Part 4
I had the privilege of delivering a message in May at “Preying on the Sheep – Finding Green Pastures after Pastoral Harm,” a conference put on by The Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence in Bristol, England. The title of that message was “Healing in Four Dimensions: Pastoral Care According to the Pastoral Gospel.” This week’s post is the final section of that message, which incorporated my Johannine Vision for Religious Trauma Healing from earlier this year.
Where did the story of John 9 come from? It’s a familiar story: a man blind from birth is given sight by Jesus; he is interrogated by neighbors and religious authorities; he testifies his belief in Jesus as a prophet sent from God; and he is forcefully cast out of his faith community. For most of that story, Jesus and the disciples are absent. If neither Jesus nor John were eyewitnesses of those encounters, where did the story come from? I imagine it coming from the man himself, sharing it with John, perhaps along the lines of what Diane Langberg describes:
“Returning to relationship after the shattering trauma starts with the person we tell our story to. When we speak, we are heard. We are heard by someone who seeks to understand and feel with us. We are no longer isolated and alone in our suffering.”1
Relationship is the glue that holds talking, tears, and time together. Returning to relationship starts with just one person, one listener, one sister or brother willing to pay the cost of tears and time.
But it goes on from that one person, or at least that is the challenge, as Langberg says: “we must eventually choose whether we will love again, care again, reach for another human being again.”2
For survivors, that decision to trust and love again is painfully difficult. I wonder if that’s why John opens his Gospel with the powerful image of love and trust between Father and Son that we see in 1:18, where the Son is described as “in the bosom of the Father.” David Ford translates this as “close to the Father’s heart,” and says,
“Here John is pointing to the deepest secret of reality: the relationship between the Father and the Son. Love is not mentioned at this point, but the rest of the Gospel makes it clear that this is above all a relationship of love…[T]he whole Gospel can be read as an invitation to take part fully in the love between the Father and the Son.”3
Spiritual abuse, like all abuse, is inherently relational. Survivors often feel a dilemma between choosing to protect their wounds or choosing to be in relationship; but they can’t seem to choose both. This makes John’s emphasis on the relationship at the heart of reality all the more significant. That reality provides the foundation for the mission of the Son and Spirit to create a new family who can call God “Father,” and call Jesus “Brother.”
The creation of a new family household runs through John from beginning to end. We see this concern front and center in the mind of Jesus both on the cross, when he joins his mother and the beloved disciple into a new household (19:26-27), and after he is raised when he declares to Mary Magdalene, “But go to my brothers [and sisters] and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17).
Therapist Bonnie Badenoch explains that
“the essence of trauma isn’t events, but aloneness within them. Who we perceive as being with us before, during, and after an event is central to our ability to integrate the trauma throughout our embodied and relational brains.”
If this is true, than it seems significant that Jesus stresses relational togetherness before and after the trauma of the cross. Indeed, Jesus created togetherness during that trauma. Unlike the Synoptic accounts, the Johannine Jesus does not utter the cry of dereliction, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Surprisingly, with all of John’s talk of light and darkness, there isn’t even any darkness mentioned at the cross, as there is Matthew, Mark, and Luke.4 It seems that John’s emphasis on the unbreakable togetherness of the Father and the Son reaches even to the cross. In John, it is on the cross that Jesus is glorified. It is on and through the cross that he ascends back to the Father. Jesus is togetherness incarnate, and nothing, not even the cross, can break that.
So, underneath and above and surrounding thee three dimensions of talking, tears, and time is the fourth dimension: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Togetherness incarnates the healing potential of talking, tears, and time.
We incarnate Jesus’ love when we not only speak, but listen, for the first words of the Word of God came in a question: “What are you looking for?” (1:38), and his first resurrected words were two questions: “Why are you crying? Who are you looking for?” (20:15).
We incarnate Jesus’ love when we bear witness to tears, as Jesus did with Mary Magdalene, and even shed tears himself with Martha and Mary.
And we incarnate Jesus’s love when we point survivors to the one who transcends and transfigures the time that has been fractured by their trauma.
These four dimensions of talking, tears, and time are distinct but interwoven. This is especially true of togetherness. To be together is to be connected, and that implies two additional principles: authenticity and solidarity. Like Jesus, we must show up with our true selves, and not just as individuals, but as a corporate body. David Ford writes about this when commenting on Jesus’ strong emotion before he raises Lazarus, in John 11:33, when Jesus was “was deeply moved in his spirit.” Ford sees the second part of that phrase, “in the spirit,” as having double meaning, both Jesus’ human spirit, and the Holy Spirit. He writes,
“The Holy Spirit and the human spirit of Jesus are inextricably united, in line with the Word of God becoming human flesh, and this has profound implications for his disciples. As they unite with him and one another, they are being drawn into the sort of passionate solidarity with others, and especially suffering others, that Jesus demonstrates with Mary and the Jews.”5
Togetherness with survivors must often start one-on-one. Because the wounding happened in the context of church and religious community, any expression of Christian community can remind survivors of those wounds, if not re-open them altogether. Thus, reintegration with the body of Christ is painfully slow; naturally, and sometimes necessarily, avoided. But authenticity and solidarity, or “passionate solidarity” as Ford puts it, has the potential, I believe, to speed up the timeline of when survivors feel safe joining the gathered household of God. For that is exactly what Jesus did on Easter Sunday: he showed the disciples his scars. He was flesh and blood, and, though healed, he remained vulnerable. His scars showed his solidarity with their traumatized state, locked inside and fearful from the threat of religious and spiritual violence.
When a spiritual abuse survivor shows up for church on Sunday, it’s a miracle. I believe we might see that miracle more often if, in imitation of Jesus, we each shared our scars with one another, in their various stages of scabbing and re-opening and healing. Dorothy Lee writes about the symbolic nature of Jesus’ scars:
“They are symbols, at the same time, both of brute force and domination and also of the commonality that the Johannine Jesus shares with the victims of such suffering. This feature of Jesus’s risen body forms a lasting solidarity between the divine and the wounded, those who have experienced violence and abuse.”6
Lee then draws an ethical implication from Jesus’ passionate solidarity with survivors:
“The wounds of Jesus are both redemptive and mimetic for the disciples. Believers are embraced by their corporeal perpetuity and called to mimic in their own bodies the same engraving of sacrificial, self-giving love.”7
That uses a lot of academic lingo. I’m especially interested in her notion of Jesus’ wounds being mimetic, that is, they call for imitation. In addition to the call to imitate the wounds of Jesus through sacrificial love, believers can imitate the vulnerable sharing of scars—wounds that are healed, or more often perhaps, in the process of healing. Passionate solidarity.
, a survivor of spiritual abuse and systemic institutional betrayal, testifies similarly to the hope in the Pastoral Gospel’s account of the scars of Jesus. I was actually reading her book, The Hope in Our Scars, just one year ago here in Bristol. She writes about the “scary step” of“taking appropriate social risks and leaving our security blankets. This takes time if we’ve been wounded. Open wounds need time and attention for healing. In that time, we find those who see, who we are safe with, who meet us where we are. Amazing things can happen there. Little resurrections. Something new builds. Our scars become part of the artwork. Scars form in our healing. They are protective, making boundaries stronger than the skin around them. Our scars tell a story…While I’m valuing my scars, the stories they tell, and how they help me to see what’s real, I know that suffering itself isn’t to be glorified…I love how my friend Valerie clarifies it, “Hope in our scars centers hope.” Hope centers Christ, not the scars. We hate the wounds and wish them on no one. The scars, though, show healing, strength, resilience, and testimony. So we seek people who stay in the room and with whom we can create beauty together. This is the good stuff: when our scars become part of the artwork. Isn’t that what we see in Christ’s own body? To show his disciples he was real and alive, the first thing Jesus does after saying, “Peace be with you,” is reveal his scars (John 20:19-20). The story is there. They are a testimony.”8
The testimony that Jesus’ scars tell is not simply that he is alive (although of course it is that). The scars are also a testimony of healed trauma, which is exactly what fearful, traumatized disciples like Thomas need. Edward Wong explains:
“the scars give the wounded past of Jesus a different future, a future that is not marked by the torturers nor their inflicted wounds but by the scars of divine healing that prevail over pain and suffering.”9
The scars of Jesus also present a different future for survivors. Jesus’ healed scars offer hope for healing from pastoral harm. I believe that hope would exponentially increase if the church, as the renewed temple-household of God, practiced togetherness and passionate solidarity with the spiritual wounds of survivors.
Langberg, Suffering and the Heart of God, 154.
Ibid.
David Ford, The Gospel of John, 32. The word “father” occurs 136x in John, almost 33% of all uses in the NT (and only 14 of them refer to someone other than God). By comparison, Matthew is the next highest with 63 uses of “father.” John uses “son” 55x, 14.6% of NT uses, third behind Luke (77x) and Matthew (89x).
Cf Luke 23:44, Mat 27:45–56; Mar 15:33–34.
Ford, The Gospel of John, 223, emphasis original.
Dorothy Lee, “The significance of the wounds of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel,” Review and Expositor 120(1-2) (2023), 125.
Ibid., 126.
Aimee Byrd, The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024), 134-136.
Edward Wong, “From Wounds to Scars: The Embodiment of a Forwarded Past through the Body Marks of Jesus in John 20,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 46(2) (2023), 212.