A few years ago that far-seeing and wise pastor at St Mary’s North Sydney, Peter Bernard Quin, suggested that it is very helpful to follow the Easter events through the hands of Jesus. About the same time that I was pondering these words of wisdom, Riverview College was honouring one of its finest graduates, surgeon and war hero, Dr Kevin Fagan.
One of Kevin’s former medical students, Dr Bill Ryan of Nowra, wrote to me:
‘I had the extraordinary privilege of working under the guidance of Kevin Fagan, when a resident at Lewisham Hospital. He treated, among others, any severe burns cases. One such *#%#* went to sleep with a lighted cigarette and suffered very extreme burns. Dr Fagan grafted the burns and I was with him when he came to change the dressing— he always did the first change himself. He completed the task and departed. When I returned to the patient, he said “Gawd, he’s got the touch of an angel—who is he?”’
‘The touch of an angel.’ Those words seemed to sum up beautifully the life of Kevin Fagan both as a doctor and as a fine human being. While a prisoner of war in Changi and in that hell hole, the Burma-Thai railway, Kevin cared for many soldiers. This is what just one wrote of him:
‘To many an unfortunate digger and others who rolled and tossed and cried out with the well nigh insufferable agony of those #*%#* ulcers came a man who ceased suffering and pain, and taking limbs off in many cases he put them on the road to home again. That man’s name is a ‘bye’ [sic] word today, Major Fagan.
‘Young, cool, remarkably clever, with my own eyes I have seen him performing some ghastly operations on rude bamboo operating tables between the bamboo huts which were the wards of Kamburi Hospital. With Japanese guards amongst the interested spectators, I have seen him go to work on some ulcer sufferer with uncanny sureness and with supreme confidence in his own undoubted ability to send that sufferer back to the ward where a little later one would see the smiling face which was before grey with pain.
‘Yes, Major Fagan, the diggers’ children will hear your name spoken with feelings of gratitude for many a long day to come. For the noble work you did, your name will be memorable.’
Kevin Fagan certainly had the ‘touch of an angel’.
For all of us, I am sure, there have been deft hands to bring us into the world, hands to caress and comfort us, hands to bathe us, hands to discipline and point us in the right direction, hands to seek and discover our sicknesses, hands to soothe and calm us.
Sadly, for some there have also been hands to incite fear and harm, hands to forge recurring pain and hurtful memories. No one, however, can deny the significance of hands in our lives. We become those who touch us, as Joan Chittister would say.
When we begin the Easter journey with Jesus on Holy Thursday night, we see first of all his hands in service. We watch him kneeling on the floor, dipping his hands in a bowl of water, and washing the dust and grime from his disciples’ feet. As he dries them with a towel, one senses how vulnerable Jesus, the King of hearts, really is.
A little later, at the Last Supper, we catch the hands of Jesus in blessing. Jesus shares the bread of life with us his friends at our last meal together, breaks and blesses it. The act of blessing always brings illumination because it places everything in proper context. To bless someone or something is to acknowledge its true place in life as coming from God and ending in him.
In the garden of Olives, Jesus is betrayed by touch. The kiss of Judas is a lie. It signals not love and affection, but blows the whistle on Jesus to his enemies howling for his arrest by feral foreign soldiers. With typical impetuousness Peter responds by slicing off the right ear of Malchus, one of the High Priest’s servants. Immediately the hands of Jesus take the time to restore the ear to this man’s face.
When we think of all our medical friends, we give thanks for the power of their hands to restore health to the sick and broken parts of our bodies. Similarly, our soul friends and companions return life to our hearts with their healing touch.
We watch with dismay as the mocking soldiers tie the hands of Jesus and scourge his back. While they might bind his hands, they can make no inroads on his spirit. His commitment to the Father and to us, for whom he lays down his life, remains unfettered.
Even as his hands struggle to carry the cross to the hill of Calvary, we imagine ourselves alongside Simon of Cyrene. We place our hands next to those of Jesus and Simon in a desperate attempt to lighten the load.
Horror of horrors, when we reach the place called The Skull, the soldiers thrust us aside and begin to nail the hands of Jesus to this rough-hewn wood. We look on, helpless and afraid, unable to comprehend the pain that Jesus is enduring on our behalf.
When the cross is raised on high, and those bloodied hands are stretched wide across the beam, we understand how much life hands can give us. The hands of Jesus can give no more.
In the hours of emptiness and disorientation following the death of Jesus, we miss the guiding touch of his hands. Then a little time later we hear that he is alive and has appeared to Mary and some of our friends. We cannot believe this—until Jesus himself shows up in our hiding place and offers us his hands again.
Yes, they are disfigured by the nails of the cross, but they have a new softness about them. Holding on to them brings us great peace and hope for the future. The hands of Jesus, his touch, give us courage and new life for the journey ahead. The hands of Jesus, our risen friend, are the hands of peace.
In Mary O’Hara’s beautiful anthology, Celebration of Love, Maria Boulding writes:
‘When I was a child, my father’s hands meant a great deal to me. They were the most beautiful hands I have ever seen: large, beautifully shaped, strong, very sensitive and kind. I have many memories of clinging to them, but one recurrent joy stands out, that of being bathed by him as a small child …
‘At the time I simply enjoyed it with a mixture of sensuous delight and love; since then the memory of it has become for me a kind of sacrament of resting in the loving, cleansing, healing, creative hands of God.’
May you rest in the loving hands of God this Easter.
