Marks of Honour

“The whole house was alight in minutes. There was just no time … I managed to get Emelia out through a window, just. She still wakes up yelling. And the way that people stare at her…”

Wolfblood S4 E1, ‘Captivity’ (2015)

 

Presumably Matei got Emelia to safety before the blaze reached such a stage as this.

Wolfblood is one of those excellent CBBC dramas I’m always enthusing about, and it has thus far had a four-series run. Series Four did a pretty good job of navigating the tricky situation of a new location and almost entirely new cast while maintaining the premise that made the programme so enjoyable in the first place, namely that a bunch of teenagers with the ability to turn into wolves have to hide the fact from the increasingly vigilant society around them.¹ The thrilling conclusion of the final episode then saw the premise completely destroyed as – spoiler alert – our heroes deliberately revealed their lycanthropy to an assembled press conference, leaving the world in shock and me rather pessimistic that the programme’s quality would continue into Series Five, due to be broadcast at some point early next year. Still, I’ll always be able to console myself with the few dozen episodes that already exist.

One of the principal cast members introduced in Series Four was Emelia Covaci, a tweenaged wolfblood whose parents had, some time previously, died in a fire at the family home. Emelia herself had only managed to avoid the same fate thanks to the efforts of her older brother Matei, who managed to bundle her out of the building to safety, though not before Emelia suffered severe burns including to one side of her face. The fact that Emelia is bullied on account of her disfigurement is one of the first aspects of her story that the scripting sets up for us – in a fashion that, I have to say, feels a little contrived at times, but nevertheless, the narrative purpose of all this becomes abundantly clear a little later on in the series, when Emelia meets a ‘wild’ wolfblood named Meinir.

‘Wild’ wolfbloods are those who refuse to integrate into human society, instead leading a hunter-gatherer-style existence, moving in packs around the remotest bits of countryside they can find. Emelia is rather taken with this idea, particularly when Meinir, catching side of the burnt side of her face, tells her, “In the wild, that is a mark of honour. You are a cerddwyr tan.”

Emelia, nonplussed by the Welsh, asks, “A what?”

“A fire walker,” translates Meinir. “Our pack has a legend: thousands of years ago, a powerful wolfblood who mastered her fear of-”

At this point we get a comic interruption from another character, and never do find out the details of the legend, but it seems a safe bet that that sentence was going to end ‘fire’. As far as a wolfblood is concerned, there is nothing more dangerous or terrifying than fire. The fact pops up in numerous tiny ways over the course of the programme; of particular poignancy here is the fact that, at the end of the last series, Meinir was forcibly turned human by means of a special serum, and one way the man who did it proved that she was no longer a wolfblood was by having her carry a flaming torch into a cell where he was holding a number of other wolfbloods captive. They all shrank from the flames in abject fear, but Meinir was unafraid – only desperately sad at the loss of her wolf.

So Meinir’s point is that Emelia bears a mark of having been through the most fearful sort of peril imaginable and survived – conquered it. It’s a status for which she has the utmost respect. When the two manage to resume their conversation, Emelia asks with cautious hopefulness, “Would they stare at me in the wild?”

Meinir almost chuckles. “They would envy you, cerddwyr tan.”

Later in the series, Emelia decides to join the wild pack. It’s not very hard to see why. Her schoolmates and other humans saw the evidence of her injury as a flaw, a marredness, a disruption of the normal and acceptable. They saw her as less than she would have been otherwise because of it. The wild pack, by contrast, see the evidence of her injury as a mark of honour, proof of extraordinary achievement. Far from marring her, it actually thrusts her status up a few levels; it makes her more than she would be otherwise.

So we have these two possible outlooks on the significance of evidence of injury. Which is the more appropriate to bring to the table as concerns the following couple of verses from towards the end of the twentieth chapter of the gospel of John?

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.²

Yup, it’s the event that Thomas is just about to get himself a bad rep for doubting – but we needn’t go into that. The point is, Jesus shows up and shows his disciples the injuries exacted upon him during his crucifixion, and they are absolutely delighted. Jesus is alive. And the fact that he still bears the marks of having been put to death is but proof that yes, that really happened, but he came out the other side. He conquered it. Jesus’ hands and side testify to the foe he has faced and defeated – and it’s a foe worse even than fire is to a wolfblood: death itself, the result of the unimpeachable wrath of God against every injustice, rebellion, and evil of the human heart. That’s what Jesus has overcome. We’re going to have to side with the wild pack on this one: such injuries cannot be flaws, cannot render Jesus less than. They can only be marks of honour.

It’s worth pausing to consider that this is Jesus’ resurrection body we’re talking about here. This is not the same version of him that was killed – the (necessarily) perishable version – but the risen, imperishable version. And that mean’s it’s the version that’s going to exist for eternity. Jesus is the firstfruits of the new creation process: when that process is rolled out to the public and we see our Lord face-to-face, he is going to have the marks of his crucifixion in his hands and his side, just as the disciples saw them in John 20, forever. If those marks were in any way detrimental to Jesus’ perfection, how would it be possible for him to bear them in his risen, imperishable form? On the contrary, they testify to his perfection; they ornament it – because the very zenith of Jesus’ demonstration of his perfection was, indeed remains, his crucifixion. His love for sinners, his obedience to the Father, his willingness to give of himself even until nothing remained to give – all were tested to the limit and proved sufficient for the task at hand, despite the fact that the task at hand involved unimaginable agonies worse than anything else in all existence.

Go and read Revelation Chapter 5. I was going to quote it here, but every bit of it is so integral to what I’m trying to say and the quotation was getting a little unwieldy, so just go and read it. Seriously, just open another tab and stick the reference into the Bible Gateway search engine if you don’t have a paper Bible handy.³ The Lamb is Jesus (in case that wasn’t obvious) and the reason he’s worthy to open the scroll – and to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing – is because he was slain and ransomed a people for God. Plus, John as narrator specifies that the Lamb looks as though he has been slain: the visual evidence of his worthiness is to be displayed, not concealed. And we, brothers and sisters, are going to spend the whole of eternity praising him for the worthiness to which that evidence testifies.⁴

Emelia’s mark of honour actually starts to look a bit lame by comparison even allowing all due room for the fact that she’s a fictional character and a child and, you know, not God. She didn’t actually master her fear of fire like the wolfblood in the legend; she just sat about helplessly and then got rescued. Matei is surely the one more deserving of the mark of honour here – and yet Emelia got it. She is treated, among people who actually understand the issues at hand at least, as one who deserves respect for having conquered the most fearful thing ever, despite the fact that her role in the situation was entirely passive. There’s definitely another analogy there, but if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to comb through the niceties of it by yourself.

Footnotes

¹ Consequently, the beginning of Series 4 isn’t the worst place ever to start watching, and it happens to be available on iPlayer currently: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b03b5gpv.

² Here’s the whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+20&version=ESVUK.

³ Or, if you prefer, use the following link: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+5&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Also worth checking out on this point is the following John Piper podcast on the way the cross shapes Jesus’ present role as our advocate before the Father: http://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/how-is-christ-my-advocate-if-his-saving-work-is-finished.