Welcome readers! Please subscribe through the button on the right.
(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
The last thing to note this week is that this is an ableist story.
The intention of the Jesus story is to portray a Jesus who sought to liberate people from suffering, whatever the form of that suffering. I’m thankful for this. We must also understand our own ableism: it includes the presumption that all disabled people want to be cured. They don’t. Some people who live with disabilities see their disability as part of the variety within humanity’s potential, not as something “wrong” with them that needs to be “fixed.” This can be very difficult to get folks without disabilities to understand. As the colloquialism states, fish don’t know they’re wet. People who aren’t disabled often don’t perceive the assumptions that their own experiences cause them to make about people with disabilities.
Consider that the gospels’ solution is never to change the society that people who are living with disabilities are living in so that they do not experience discrimination, marginalization, or exclusion. The gospels’ solution is always instead to transform the disabled person, to align or harmonize them with their society so that the social, religious, political and economic stigmas attached to their disability are no longer present. The action restores the person with a disability to their community rather than calling the community itself to change and either challenging or rejecting the stigma.
Some will challenge my critique here, and that’s okay. But the question we have to ask in each story is where is change taking place? Is the person with the disability being transformed or is the society those people live in being changed? In some of the stories an argument could be made for both, but in every story the person with the disability experiences a change to remove the stigma applied to them.
This is one shortcoming of the Jesus stories that Jesus followers must acknowledge and it doesn’t mean these stories have no value. What it does mean is that we can still highly value the Jesus story and note where we could do better today. The ethical spirit of Jesus that we love so much also sets us on a trajectory toward telling more life-giving stories that don’t marginalize anyone, including people who live with disabilities.
The stories this week point us to prioritizing the needs of people to thrive. Survival isn’t enough. We are worth more than that. We are also worth more than a few people in society thriving while the rest of us simply survive (or don’t even do that.) This week’s story also calls us to attend to things that enable all of us to thrive together without anyone being marginalized.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In