Whole Community

In the story of the pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John (John 5), we hear of a man who waited for more than thirty years to be healed. The story indicates that the angel who stirred the waters did so on an unpredictable basis. It makes sense that someone would wait a long time for a miracle, but thirty years? A lifetime? Why in the world would he have stayed that long? Why would anyone? We are never told, of course, but we would have to consider one disturbingly simple possibility that would be consistent with the culture of the day. The man had nowhere else to go.
Having a disability, illness or other anomaly at the time meant being set apart from society. Lepers were separated and instructed to shout “unclean” so that others would not encounter them. We logically assume that this was for the purpose of limiting the spread of the disease, and that was certainly a result. But that is an unlikely assumption. Two thousand years ago, people knew little about the bacterial transmission of leprosy (now Hansen’s Disease), but they knew a lot about cultural and religious separation, about clean and unclean. This is the central issue. Creating barriers between the general population and others who, for a variety of reasons, don’t measure up seems to be a familiar theme running through scripture. Jesus was routinely in the business of confronting or simply ignoring those barriers. Jesus healed, to be sure, but when he did, those whom he healed were put back into the mainstream of society. In the Gospel of Luke, we are presented the story of ten lepers whom Jesus cured of their leprosy. Of those ten, only one returned to offer thanks. Jesus asks the natural question, “Where are the nine?” We tend to read this story as a lesson in praise and gratitude, but something else is at work. Indeed, “Where are the nine?” While it would have been good, right and proper for those nine to return to Jesus and offer their heartfelt thanks, they are obviously somewhere else, doing other things. The healing has put them back together with the community. Beyond healing, they have something far more precious, the gift of wholeness. More than healing, faith communities today are being called to seek and to promote wholeness.
The late Elizabeth Hastings, an Australian disability rights activist pulled no punches when it came to her opinion on the healing stories in scripture.

“With all the respect due to the ten lepers, the various possessed, and the sundry blind, lame, and deaf faithful of scripture,” she writes, “I recon people with disabilities may have been better off for the last two thousand years if Our Lord had not created quite so many miraculous cures but occasionally said, ‘Your life is perfect as it is given to you, go ye, and find its purpose and meaning,’ and then to the onlookers he might have said, ‘This disability is an ordinary part of human being, go ye and create the miracle of a world free of discrimination’.”

The stories of disability in the Bible tend to end with the disability disappearing. In our commitment to disability as a metaphor in scripture, we need to be careful not to erase disability.
In her landmark book, The Disabled God, the late Nancy Eiesland identifies what she calls a "hidden history" among Christians. The book’s title refers to Jesus, who embodies disability even after resurrection. After rising from the dead, Christ appears to many and two things are clear; first, that he is fully God, and second, that his hands and feet are mutilated and the wound in his side is still there. God bears the marks of physical impairment. Eiesland writes, "The resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are, both disabled and divine.” Disability is not incompatible with God and should not be incompatible with God’s people.
There is an iconic photograph that frequently surfaces on the internet. It depicts a woman in a wheelchair at a protest gathering. Her sign reads, “Fix the system, not me.” Most people with disabilities do not seek healing for the affliction we perceive them to have as much as they seek a wholeness in the world to which they could more freely belong. In the words of one mother, “I don’t want a different kid. I want a different world for my kid to grow up in.”