by Jim Palmer (An Excerpt)

It is okay to feel what human beings feel. We laugh, cry, dance, feel ecstasy, even feel despair. It is how we know the world. It is how we live inside of our hearts and not dissociated from them.

Jesus didn’t theologize or spiritualize people’s suffering. Jesus faced suffering and tasted the depths of it. He leaned into it, endured it, and fully met others in their suffering. Jesus cared. Jesus wept. Jesus felt it all deeply. There’s something between living in denial and being swallowed whole by the pain and suffering of human existence, and Jesus lived there.

Being Jesus means that we go through life embracing it all fully and feeling it all deeply. That we don’t hide and try to protect ourselves. That we live. That we show up. That we laugh. That we cry. That we hurt. That we heal. That we care. That we love. And we wake up the next morning and sign up for it all over again.

Why did Jesus do this? Why do we? Because this is what it means to be human. You don’t get to pick and choose. It’s all of it.

There is a bliss that no amount of ache can steal away. And there’s an ache that no amount of bliss can rescue you from. Enlightenment doesn’t spare you from being human. You are supposed to be here. You are supposed to be human. You are supposed to feel both the bliss and the ache.”

Though I am not a Christian and dispute virtually all traditional Christian theology, I still find meaning in Jesus. One of those ways is seeing Jesus as the wounded healer.

Jesus can be understood as a radical companion, not a distant savior. His wounds symbolize solidarity, not supremacy. He walks with us through rupture, grief, and reconstruction. His crucifixion becomes a symbol of divine solidarity with suffering, not divine punishment. He is the one who bled with us, not the one who demands we bleed for him.

You don’t need to believe in literal resurrection to honor Jesus as wounded healer. You can walk with his archetype through grief, rupture, and rewilding. His story becomes a map for mutual liberation, not a mandate for conformity. His wounds become a vow to walk with the wounded—not to erase them. The cross becomes a fault line, tomb as compost, resurrection as vow.

Jesus can be seen as the archetypal wounded healer not because his suffering is redemptive in doctrine, but because it’s relational, embodied, and symbolic. Jesus doesn’t bypass pain—he enters it fully: betrayal, abandonment, physical agony, existential despair. Jesus experienced a rupture in his own faith in “God” – “My God, why have you forsaken me?” His wounds are not hidden in resurrection. He shows them to Thomas. They become proof of presence, not power.

I walked away from Christianity many years ago, but there is a two-word sentence in the gospels that won’t let me give up Jesus entirely.

“Jesus wept.”

I finally learned why the statement, “Jesus wept” could only be a two-word sentence. There are no words preceding those two words, and there are no words following it. There are these moments in life where there is nothing more to say. Nothing that could be said. Nothing that should be said. It’s just a time to weep. Nothing fits before it or after it. Anything and everything that could be said rolls down you face in a tear and falls quietly to the ground.

I don’t know about a God in the sky who pulls strings, but I can relate to a Jesus who leaned fully into the lived human experience with vulnerability, courage, love and compassion.

For some years I have from time to time been working on the Religion-Free Bible (RFB). I rewrote that two-word sentence like this:

Jesus the Wounded Healer

“Anguish climbed from the bottom of his gut up through his chest and throat, and into his eyes with a power that even he could not contain. A lone tear quietly dropped from his eyelash. As it inched down his face, Jesus grieved the human condition, of which he was now inseparably a part. The heartache of humankind washed through him like cold rain. Jesus drank the cup of his true identity. He felt eternity in his soul, while human suffering coursed through his veins.

Life is beautiful. Life is agonizing. That was the deal, and there was nothing Jesus could ever do to change that. Gravity had it’s way with this solitary tear, and as it fell from his chin to the ground, Jesus was undone with sadness and compassion that stretched across every human wound and scar that had ever been felt. No divinity could save him now from his own human heart.

Jesus wept.”

– Jesus, John 11:35, Religion-Free Bible