Charlotte
I am also interested in the fact that Jesus just doesn’t have one singular way of healing people. There’s no standard model. We ran this course with the Leeds Church Institute, and we had a disabilities-only group, and, although there are a couple of times where he heals people without asking their permission, everybody in that group pointed out that Jesus most often asks permission. Most often there’s a personal interaction, and there is agency for the disabled person. Which is something we miss in church – quite often we assume what disabled people need, and we tell them that they should want to be healed, or that they should want to feel included in the way we want to include them, because it makes us feel better. But Jesus tends to centre on the person, not other people’s need.
John 9 is a particularly interesting passage. We have this man who is born blind and the first question the disciples ask is whether sin was the cause of his disability. In that passage Jesus also chases the man – the man leaves after he is healed and Jesus goes to find him – to talk to him about what has happened. There’s never any sense of Jesus telling people what they have to be.
Craig
Yeah. Because in John 9 Jesus also includes the man in the process of healing, doesn’t he?
Charlotte
Yes. Yeah.
Craig
Which to me is significant.
Charlotte
Yes, he does. And that passage in itself is so fascinating from a disabilities perspective, because all of the things that happen to disabled people in churches happen to that man.
The disciples are having a weird theological conversation about sin and Jesus ignores that conversation. There’s some grammar stuff there that’s really good but basically Jesus doesn’t answer the question about whether anybody sinned. He says ‘It doesn’t really matter who sinned. What matters is that we can do the works of God while I’m here.’ So let’s do the work of God, and the work of God is healing this man. But it is one of the few healings where he doesn’t forgive the man’s sins. On this occasion the healing is nothing to do with the man’s sin. Jesus just heals it. But right after the healing everyone ignores the man. They say “are you the man that was born blind?” And he says “yes, I am”. And they go, well, we don’t believe you. So they go to his parents and there’s the 1st century version of the infantilising thing that happens so often with disabled people in churches. We infantilise them. We don’t think they know what they want, or don’t know what they need and they don’t know how they’re feeling. A disabled person will say ‘well, I don’t really want prayer for healing. Thank you.’ And people pray it for you anyway.
We see that here, this moment where they they go and talk to his parents because they don’t believe his story. He was disabled, so he can’t possibly know what he wants.
And if you read the passage carefully, what actually revolutionises that man’s life is not the healing, it’s the section at the end where he meets Jesus and he asks Jesus who Jesus is, and Jesus reveals himself. At that point the man has a revelation of Christ. This interests me because again, every time I heard it preached growing up, the miracle in that story was his restored eyesight. However, if you read it all the way through and it’s a very long passage, the miracle is the revelation of Christ. (And in John’s gospel being able to see and knowing who Christ is are uncomfortably linked. I think there’s a real problem here with the link between blindness and ignorance as a metaphor, and we have to acknowledge that when we read these things in church. I think it’s unhelpful to keep repeating them, without acknowledging that issue) One of the members of this disability group reading the passage pointed out that you could take the healing out entirely and the story would still be about revelation. You could take out the healing, you could leave the man blind, and he still would have a revelation of Christ and that still would revolutionise his life. That should give us pause on how we teach disability from the Bible.
Craig
That’s fascinating. It was reading Kenneth Bailey on that passage that really blew it open for me because he talks about the social contract that disabled people have with the wider culture. They’re only able to make ends meet economically by presenting the one part of their body which is disabled. The traumatising effect that has on someone over a long period of time can be huge. I spent the first 20 years of my life hiding myself under a under a long sleeved jumper no matter what the weather. But if I’d have had to make a living by presenting my physical disability to the world I’d have been entirely defined by my disability. That messes with your head because you’d come to identify yourself entirely as someone who needs other people’s help.
Charlotte
Absolutely. And I think one of the problems with the way our society (particularly in the UK) deals with disability right now is that we have gone very hard towards that medical model: ‘perform your disability’. I found it so demoralising to go through the PIP system. It is torturous, having to spend 2 hours telling somebody all the worst parts of my life with no chance to say any of the good parts in case they said ‘well, If you’re enjoying something, you can’t really be ill enough to get help’.
Its an attitude where disabled people can’t be enjoying things, can’t have a good life, can’t eat well etc. it felt like if ‘I tell you any of the things that are remotely good you will take away the thing that sustains me.’ I need PIP. I need it for my cleaner and I need it to get my bedding changed. And you know, there are things I need, But our society does this to me.
to be continued…
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