Pray for Helen

Monday afternoon in Wangaratta. Helen Haines MP, aged sixty-five, stands at the open boot of her car outside her electorate office, getting something out of the back, the way any of us do a dozen times a week. A LandCruiser passes, turns around, and drives at her. Then it reverses and does it again. A barber from a shop nearby runs out and pulls the driver from the car. He has since said he is no hero. He only wanted to make sure nobody else got hurt.

The Prime Minister said it was deliberate, and that we do not know why. And on Wednesday, outside the Alfred, Helen’s husband Phil told us the surgeons could not save either leg. Then he said the two most important parts of Helen, for her family, are her heart and her mind. Her heart is huge. Her mind is the sharpest he knows. Both are in good shape. They will have been married forty years next month.

Helen Haines was a nurse before she was a politician. A midwife, then a researcher in rural health, then the member for Indi. There is a shape to that life. Hands on bodies first. Babies caught and mothers held through long nights. Then years asking why country people get sicker than city people. Then the slow work of representing them. A life spent caring for bodies, and now a body being cared for. The nurses at the Alfred are doing for her what she spent decades doing for others.

One of the strangest things about our Christian faith is that it has an injury at its centre. A man whose feet were nailed to wood by other men who had decided to do it. Hundreds of years earlier, the prophet Isaiah had written of how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. The gospel writers let the irony stand. And when Jesus rose from the dead, he returned marked. “Put your finger here”, he says to Thomas. “See my hands.” He does not say, “look, all better.” He offers the wounds. Thomas comes to faith through them, not around them. At the very end of the Bible, the one at the centre of heaven's throne is a Lamb looking as if it had been slain. Slain and standing. The wounds go all the way into glory.

What does this mean for Helen in intensive care this week? Not a tidy answer. But a few things we can hold.

Violence does not know how to stop. It calls forth an answer, and the answer calls forth another. It always has a reason, and the person who does it usually believes the reason. We do not know what story the man in the LandCruiser told himself. Within hours the rest of us were reaching for stories too, about whose rhetoric did this and what should be done to people like him. This is how violence spreads. One man drove the car. The heat that follows is driven by all of us.

The cross is where the chain breaks. God takes the violence into his own body and does not pass it on. Father, forgive them. His arms stretch open towards the people who are killing him. That should be our posture too. Before we know what the man charged deserves, we decide not to shut him out of our humanity. We keep our arms open. We can do that because vengeance belongs to God, and God is not indifferent to Helen's legs. We can leave the man to the courts and to God, and pray for a justice that tells the truth.

Phil Haines showed us this on Wednesday. A man who had just lost so much stood in front of the nation and said thank you. He did not name an enemy. He named her heart and her mind.

And open arms do not mean forgetting. Thomas touches a wound, not smooth skin. The truth is kept, remembered inside a bigger story where it no longer has the last word. Whatever healing comes to Helen, it will not be a return to the Monday before. It will be something on the far side, carrying its history with it. That is the only healing Jesus ever modelled. It can hold the wound and still stand.

So pray for Helen. For her body, and for her heart and her mind. Pray for Phil and their children, keeping vigil in a week they never imagined. Pray for the nurses and surgeons at the Alfred. Pray for the staff who saw it happen, and the barber who ran towards it. Pray for Wangaratta. Pray for the man who did this and for his family, who have known Helen for twenty years and whose lives are also in ruins. Pray for a justice that tells the truth, and for the grace to leave the rest to God. Pray for our country, that the chain might break here, in us.

And pray that we would see, in a nurse's broken body, the one who was wounded for us, and who still says to every frightened friend: put your finger here. See my hands.