From our perspective, the bloody wounds with which we punctuated his body were question marks. Our God was a stranger to us. We did not know the answer that he would give us to the evil that we did to him. From Jesus’s perspective, the bloody wounds with which we punctuated his body were exclamation marks. They are badges of forgiveness. His answer to the evil that we did to him was asymmetric - radically asymmetric. He forgave us. We tortured and killed him. He suffered and died. Yet, he poured the sweet elixir of forgiveness into the boiling pot into which we baptized him in evil.
The position of prominence in the showcase of Christianity belongs to the Stigmata and the story of the Stigmata. Our God is the God who forgave us for the evil that we did to him. The Stigmata reminds us. The body and blood of the most Holy Eucharist distributes the Stigmata and its story across time and space to the children of Adam and Eve. The wise rest their understanding of God on the Stigmata and its story. The Stigmata and its story illuminate the darkness of our understanding of God in a glorious burst of epiphany.
The payload of the thirty-three year Visit that the Son of God paid us at and about the city of Jerusalem in a region of our planet that we call the Middle East more than two thousand years ago was apocalypse. The Visit revealed to us the nature of God.