Craig

When we began preparing for this series we pulled together a list of theological issues that touch the question of living with limitations. I felt that the idea that Jesus limited himself in Philippians 2 was very significant.

Charlotte

Yeah.

Craig

For the sake of understanding us, and maybe identifying with us, the idea that God is one of us, walking this earth and all that goes with it feels very important. Have you reflected on that passage or the theology of Kenosis? How does that inform your understanding of Jesus?

Charlotte

It’s an amazing passage. I think there’s some really interesting work done on it from a biblical studies perspective. There’s some brilliant work being done on what’s going on in there, like what Paul is suggesting that Jesus is doing. And key to it is limitation within that Kenosis, and abandoned rights. Politically it’s an interesting passage. Jesus has the right like any God, or any son of God, in a Greco Roman pantheon to do whatever they want. But Jesus chooses not to do whatever he wants, but to do what the father wants and take a limited body. 

We have to pause in this then, and to think about what it is to experience a body.

There is a tension in disability that is helpful: I both suffer every day and also don’t think of myself as a suffering person. I am dis-abled but also whole.

Theologically, historically, protestants haven’t liked embodiment very much. We’ve moved away from ritual. We’ve abandoned, you know, these sorts of Papist things that connect our body to the practise of our religion and, particularly in the late 20th century when I was growing up, people’s opinion of sickness was often ‘it’s fine because I’m just like a spirit in a body. But this body isn’t real. And the spirit’s gonna carry on forever.’  That effects how we understand the limits of the incarnation in Phil 2.

One of the things that disability theology does and is a real benefit, I think, to the church at this moment is that it reminds us that we are embodied people. I approach God from my body. I read the Bible with my eyes. Just the practise of living is an embodied practise and therefore all religion is an embodied practise. If I want to pray and I want to kneel but my knees don’t work, that changes how I approach God. For me, thinking is one of the ways that I worship God best, and sometimes I can’t think anymore. My cognitive impairment can be very strong and I can’t read the Bible, and I can’t pray, and I can’t think –  now, that changes how I worship, how I approach things. 

But Jesus’s model in Phil 2 implies that being limited does not diminish the divine in a person. I think that is an incredible model to look at, and to provoke the question “what does it really mean for the incarnation to be in a limited space and to be something that therefore witnesses the limits of humanity?” 

Simon asked a question about being seen and in this sort of incarnation God sees me. God, you know, the grand spiritual, out there somewhere, looking at me and also in the incarnation, because Jesus witnesses what it is to be in a body that is limited. I had this amazing nun on our course (and some of my best spiritual teaching has come from nuns in my life) and she said she had another sister who sat down with her when they were talking about limits and this kind of limitation of the incarnation, she said “Yes, and God who is all things and God encompasses all of this diversity, including diversity of gender, limits themselves to being male – and that must have been a loss.”

As a feminist disabled scholar there are two things that strike me in this sentence: first, I’m intrigued by the idea of the incarnation in gender terms, and the loss that Jesus experiences – God is experiencing the limit of a male embodiment. So that’s interesting because we nearly always feel driven to explain how it is a grand positive that Jesus came as a man. But my friend, the nun, saw that as a loss for him. He had to choose a gender and in doing so loses something, maybe spends his time missing that part he had known before.

But second, in bodily terms, Jesus has to choose to lose something and then approach the father from a body. Jesus physically takes himself out into the wilderness, he goes out onto the water, he goes into the temple – that’s an embodied way of connecting with the divine, because his body needs to be in just one place. Probably his mind is quite crowded by all of those people. So he needs stillness. These are embodied things. 

We had a session on neurodiversity in our course. And thinking about, you know, Jesus craving stillness. It means that in the incarnation God understands the struggle of a mind that never stops and needs peace.

Craig

Thank you Charlotte. You have helped me to begin reprocessing memories of being in gatherings where pretty much everyone was raising their hands in worship and I felt so deeply excluded. No only because I can’t raise my arms, but because the elation they were experiencing seemed to be completely dependent on them being able to do so. I have had to leave gatherings where this was happening because the pain went so deep.

I was eventually able to decouple what I was seeing with the way I was interpreting those scenes, but only after studying the way the body processes feelings, and realising that there is no simple connection between feelings and God. But that leads to a whole new level of exclusion, because so many of my friends wanted so much to believe that what they were feeling WAS God!

The idea of Jesus needing stillness is really helpful.

to be continued…

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