“...As I became a disability advocate, I struggled with the redemption narrative of disabled people in the Bible. Namely, Jesus kept healing them. This meant that disabled folks were seen as ‘redeemed’ only when they became nondisabled. Like the ex-nun, I pushed back. Where were the stories about the blind man who was divinely touched by God and remained blind? Couldn’t that be a thing? Instead of saying to the paraplegic, ‘take up your mat and walk,’ why couldn’t Jesus change the ableist hearts of a culture that didn’t find reasonable employment for its paraplegic citizens? Was my God incarnate ableist? ...
Something seemed amiss, though, in this take. In seeing God as ableist, I was crafting God in humanity’s image. Whenever we design God in our own image, we’ve tried to contain God in too small a shell. And God is not a hermit crab. Neither is God a thing we can hold, nor just a man who holds things. ...
For a time, I raged a little at Jesus. I heard the healing stories in church and huffed. I encountered the stories during my morning Bible time and scrutinized. Please stop ‘fixing the cripple,’ Jesus, I thought while my daughter’s walker wheeled across the sanctuary floor.
Eventually, though, I started noticing something surprising. Jesus heals a lot of people, sure, but he also becomes pretty secretive about it, even frustrated by the demands of it. ‘How long must I put up with you?’ he says after someone asks him to heal an epileptic boy. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says to the man who takes up his mat, the same man who then goes straight to his people and tells. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says again and again to the one he heals. Jesus seems to lament that ‘Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe.’ It’s almost as though Jesus is telling us, ‘these corporeal healings? They are not the thing!’
Perhaps Jesus saw that the signs were misdirecting people. God’s glory was looking to them like human glory, like bulging biceps flexed on top of an award podium, like ableism. We cannot expect God’s work, and God’s glory, to look like human work and human glory. This is why I think Jesus is often insisting people keep mum that he healed. Healing is not the point. Don’t get distracted.”
Heather Lanier in her article for the first Sunday of Disabling Lent: An Anti-Ableist Lenten Devotional
Questions for Reflection:
Lanier says she longed for disabled figures who remain disabled within the pages of the Gospels, and she is not the only one. Janet Lees suggests that some of Jesus’s disciples may well have been disabled themselves!
What feelings arise in you when you imagine a disabled person encountering Jesus -- and remaining disabled? Are you troubled? surprised? encouraged? How does this idea challenge your own assumptions around disability?
What aspects of God have you constructed in humanity’s image? How can you invite God into your understanding, to help you unpack any ableism, racism, sexism, cissexism, etc. there?
If God’s glory is not like human glory, what is God’s glory like?
This post on passages from Paul’s letters and disability theology (weakness is strength, and foolishness is wisdom)
This quote from Australian disability advocate Elizabeth Hastings
Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource by John M. Hull (read excerpts here)
“God on Wheels: Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology” by Julia Watts Belser
Video - “Wait, don’t we want a cure for disabilities?” in the Disabled and Blessed YouTube series
This post is part of a Lenten series for 2021, with daily passages shared from various texts on life and death, suffering and solidarity, and faith at the intersections and the margins.
