Reading the healings: disability theology and the gospel

The gospels are full of healing stories. They sit at the heart of the way Jesus is remembered, and they may sit awkwardly with anyone who is themselves disabled, or who loves someone who is, and who has heard those stories used carelessly.

For thirty years, disability theologians have pressed a question worth hearing. They ask what it does to disabled people to read a healing narrative as the model of discipleship, as if the goal is to become not-disabled, and as if blindness or paralysis or deafness is principally a metaphor for spiritual lack. Amos Yong (The Bible, Disability, and the Church, 2011) and Nancy Eiesland (The Disabled God, 1994) are two of the voices to read here; the literature is wide and worth time.

This course takes the question seriously. We make four moves with it.

First, we read the healing stories as political and pastoral before we read them as metaphor. When Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus on the Jericho road, the argument the story is making is not "blindness is bad and sight is good in some general sense." It is "the system has put this man at the side of the road, and the system is wrong about him; he is the one who teaches the rest." That is a political claim about how a society organises its insides and its outsides, and a pastoral claim about who is allowed to call the messianic name aloud. The story is not principally about his eyes.

Second, the disabled person in the story is the model, not the project. Bartimaeus is the disciple in the chapter. The Twelve are the ones who are not seeing. What the story holds up as discipleship is not the not-blindness; it is the calling out, the refusing the silencing, the throwing off the cloak, the asking for what is needed, and the following on the way. None of those requires anyone to be not-disabled.

Third, healing in Mark is various. It can be physical sight restored, as at Jericho. It can be a way of seeing the world put down and a new one taken up, as the Plato connection in Session 12 suggests. It can be the kind of restoration that happens to a community as much as to a person. Mark is not making one single argument about disability and the body; he is using these specific men's and women's encounters to make specific arguments about the kingdom.

Fourth, the course holds the disability-theology critique alongside our reading rather than instead of it. We do not metaphorise disabled people. We also do not refuse the spiritual and theological work that the stories are doing in their own contexts. Both readings are needed, and the discipline is to hold them together.

The pericopes where this matters most across the course are the leper in Mark 1, the paralytic in Mark 2, the haemorrhaging woman and Jairus's daughter in Mark 5, the deaf-mute in Mark 7, the Bethsaida blind man in Session 9, and Bartimaeus here in Session 12. The sidebar applies to all of them. When you come to one of those passages and the question comes up, the four moves above are where we stand.