The Disabled God

God does not see as humans see—God can see and understand the human heart.  And as humans, we can barely admit how limited our sight truly is—we think we know everything, or at least we think we know enough to judge righteousness.  Jesus reminds us of our limitations, what we cannot know nor understand nor even see. 

John’s Gospel is full of themes of light and dark, even to the point of mentioning the time of day in stories of Jesus-the nighttime conversation with Nicodemus, the teacher who can’t learn, and the noontime conversation with the woman at the well, the ordinary person without social status who comes to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and then enlightens her whole village with this truth. 

In the Gospel lesson today, darkness and light become spiritual metaphors alongside blindness and sightedness, and Jesus speaks of a different way of seeing.  Blindness isn’t strange for the man who was born blind—it’s the only way of life he ever knew.  The only strange thing is that he was born into a world that so thoroughly privileges sight.  It’s only strange that his only option in this world is to sit and beg for food—which sounds like the way we speak about dogs at the dinner table, sitting and begging for food. 

Nancy Eiesland, a theologian and advocate for the rights of disabled people, writes about her own experience of disability and seeks justice for disabled people, for self-determination.  Rather than being seen as lacking ability, Eiesland wants for disabled people to be understood as whole and valid with the bodies they have, and more than that, to be welcomed as part of the body of Christ by understanding God as disabled, developing a theology of God become human in Jesus Christ, the crucified and disabled one. 

She speaks of how disabled people become objectified by able-bodied peoples’ “inappropriate fascination with the bodies of people with disabilities.”  She writes: 

“Often strangers in elevators ask me what I did to myself.  This inappropriate curiosity, defended as charitable goodwill, is a ritual enactment of patterns of social power in which able-bodied people assume an exceptional access to the bodies of people with disabilities.”

“…these attitudinal barriers are funded by foundational Christian themes such as the conflation of sin and disability, virtuous suffering, and segregationist charity.”[1]

Her goal in writing about these things, as she puts it, is “to offer a vision of a God who is for us and a church that is for that God and persons with disabilities as the people of God.”[2]  She writes, “This disabled God makes possible a renewal of hope for people with disabilities and others who care”[3] and “For me and, I hope, other people with disabilities, as well as for some able-bodied people, the presence of the disabled God makes it possible to bear a nonconventional body. This God enables both a struggle for justice among people with disabilities and an end to estrangement from our own bodies.”[4]

In the Gospel story, Jesus engages directly.  Now he doesn’t exactly secure the consent of the man born blind—Jesus just smears mud on his eyes and issues a command to wash off the mud in a pool of water.  However, Jesus sees value in people because he chooses to.  Jesus chooses to deny and reject the system that values people by their work.  That is not the way of the kin-dom of God.  Instead, Jesus highlights God’s work. 

At the end of the story, Jesus speaks directly with this man, empowering him by valuing his perspective, rather than making assumptions or making decisions for him.  The man who was formerly blind gets to be his own subject, not an object—not the object of pity nor the object of scorn, destined only to receive whatever other people had to give to him.  He becomes his own self-actualizing subject, free to make his own destiny.  He could have done anything; he chooses to humble himself, to ask “Who is this Son of Man?  Tell me, so I may believe.”  This humility and openness of heart is the way to seeing as God sees—a vision beyond the sense of human sight. 

It is also significant that Jesus employs the sense of touch, laying his hands on the man born blind.  Eiesland speaks of her own experience with healing rituals like the laying-on of hands, and I think it’s important to listen to her own voice.  She writes:

“I, like many people with disabilities, have experienced the negative effects of healing rituals.  Healing has been the churchly parallel to rehabilitative medicine, in which the goal was ‘normalization’ of the bodies of people with disabilities.  As Nancy J. Lane writes, ‘Healing is expected to change the person who has a disability into one who does not.  The burden of healing is placed totally on the person who is disabled, causing further suffering and continued alienation from the church.’  Failure to be ‘healed’ is often assessed as a personal flaw in the individual, such as unrepentant sin or a selfish desire to remain disabled.  Thus for many people with disabilities, laying on of hands is associated with their stigmatization within the church.”

“Yet I have also experienced laying on of hands that was restorative and redemptive.  These physical mediations of God’s grace have often kept me related to my body at times when all of my impulses pushed me toward dissociating from the pain-wracked, uncomfortable beast.  …I was a participant in a powerful service of laying on of hands…their touch and tears were the body practices of inclusion.  My body belonged in the church.  …I recall the physical sensation of having my body redeemed for God as those spiritual women laid hands on me, caressing my pain, lifting my isolation, and revealing my spiritual body.”[5]

Maybe our own healing of sight would be to not look at disabled people differently but to look differently at God.  Eiesland shares her own profound vision of God’s majesty and power.  She writes:

“For me, epiphanies come too infrequently to be shrugged off as unbelievable.  …I had waited for a mighty revelation of God.  But my epiphany bore little resemblance to the God I was expecting or the God of my dreams.  I saw God in a sip-puff wheelchair, that is, the chair used mostly by quadriplegics enabling them to maneuver by blowing and sucking on a strawlike device.  Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant.  In this moment, I beheld God as a survivor, unpitying, and forthright.  I recognized the incarnate Christ in the image of those judged ‘not feasible,’ ‘unemployable,’ with ‘questionable quality of life.’  Here was God for me.”[6]

This makes me think that the power of God is beyond what we can see or hear or perceive, a God who sees each of us as whole and complete for who we are, a God who never stops trying to pull us all close and to pull us all together.  We can’t see every thing, and maybe we don’t need to.  We are loved and valued by the God in whom we are fully seen.  Thanks be to God. 

Amen. 

Pastor Cheryl 

[1] Eiesland, Nancy, The Disabled God, Nashville: Abingdon, 1994, Page 93.

[2] Page 90.

[3] Page 103.

[4] Page 105.

[5] Page 117.

[6] Page 89.