I don't suppose anyone has been holding their breath, but I do apologise that I have not posted anything for a few weeks. I can't even pretend I've been on holiday because I hate the heat of the summer and view it as a season to survive! Maybe that is why I've not really felt enthused by the thought of sitting at my desk wrestling thoughts and ideas into submission.
One of the most distinctive themes of John's gospel are the numerous references to Jesus' belief that he was about his father's business.1 John evidences this by reference to numerous signs and wonders,2 comments on the quality and authenticity of his teaching3 and descriptions of the transformational impact of his forgiveness.4 The festivals had been designed and instituted by God to act as visual reminders of his covenantal faithfulness and yet, whenever Jesus made himself present he felt compelled to provide an additional commentary.5 John presents Jesus as endlessly frustrated that God's people had become so entrenched in covenantal thinking that they had rendered themselves entirely unable to engage with the larger calling I described earlier in this series.
I have already demonstrated how Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well illustrates, not just that he saw more deeply into situations than his fellow teachers, but also that he interpreted what he saw differently. John's Jesus has a deep compassion for individuals which he displayed freely, even in situations where they were trapped in lifestyles the Torah denounced. Jesus also insists that it was his intimate relationship with Yahweh that led him to act as he did.
As Jesus walked along, he saw a man who had been blind since birth. Jesus' disciples asked, "Teacher, why was this man born blind? Was it because he or his parents sinned?”6
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Every time we view a human body our minds recognise it as such because, for all the years of our conscious existence, we have viewed countless thousands of bodies and have laid down a mental pattern of what one normally looks like. It takes a millisecond to match the body we see with the embedded pattern stored in our brains and the whole process is completely subconscious. When we scan a crowd or meet someone for the first time, we subconsciously match our store of embedded images to search for features we recognise. This is the point at which people who look different is experienced by us as a shock to the system.7
Human disability therefore creates a tension. We will all tend to stare at a bodily form we've not seen before simply because something that is usually a subconscious act (viewing a body and recognising it as such) is being drawn to our conscious awareness and we are thus forced to deal with the unusual visual data that is before us.
As a physically disabled person I am very aware that, when I am walking in a public place, my very presence is disturbing to everyone I come into contact with, sometimes profoundly so. My arms were damaged by the thalidomide drug prior to my birth and they look different. So people who notice me are forced to make an instant decision they were not expecting. Many stare, others look away, some do a double-take, children ask questions of their parents, and occasionally people ask me why I am different.8
The disciples noticed a man with glassy eyes, or maybe with no eyeballs at all and, fascinatingly, the very first question that entered their minds was a theological one: “why was this man born blind? Was it because he or his parents sinned?”
In the culture of Jesus’ day, the disabled, the diseased and the afflicted were more visible than they are within the society in which many of us live. This is because they were forced onto the streets by economic necessity.
In traditional Middle Eastern society beggars are a recognised part of the community and are understood to be offering ‘services’ to it. Every pious person is expected to give to the poor. But if the poor are not readily available to receive alms, how can this particular duty be fulfilled? The traditional beggar does not say “excuse me, mister, do you have a few coins for a crust of bread?” Instead, he sits in a public place and challenges the passer-by with “Give to God!” He is really saying: “My needs are beside the point. I am offering you a golden opportunity to fulfil your obligations to God. Furthermore, this is a public place and if you give to me here, you will gain a reputation as an honourable, compassionate, pious person. When a beggar receives money, he usually stands up and in a loud voice proclaims the giver to be the most noble person he has ever met and invokes God’s grace and blessing on the giver, his family, his friends and associates, his going out and coming in, and many other good things. Such public praise is surely worth the small sum given to the beggar.9
The problem created by such a tradition is that this beggar was forced to expose the part of himself that set him apart from others in order to make a living. In doing so, he is in great danger of being defined in his own eyes by his limitations rather than his abilities. He also has no opportunity to receive genuine grace from others within such an arrangement since he becomes the net receiver of money in exchange for honour. Which of these, money or honour, is more important to our sense of dignity?
I wonder if the question posed by the disciples reveals something about the way they were re-processing the world as a result of their journey with Jesus. Their theological system is based on a commonly held view that God created a perfect world and that Adam's sin defiled it. So where imperfection exists there can only be two options: it must be sin that caused the disability, and the blame was either located with the parents or the man himself. They were about to discover that it doesn’t occur to Jesus to join the theological dots in this way but, before we get to that, I want to comment on the way we do our theology when faced with difficult questions.
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Disability is a thorny theological question for those who believe in a good and a loving God. Yet, in my experience, most people tend to avoid this sort of hard question, maybe out of fear that the theological map they use to make sense of the world might not be up to the job. The disciples ask the very question I wanted answers to in my early years as a Christian, but only because others thought it was important. For me their question was troubling for at least four reasons:
It risks upsetting the relative harmony of the present moment
It risks putting us both in an embarrassing situation
It risks creating a scenario where ‘any answer’ will be dragged in as a stop-gap
It risks unmasking the possibility that no satisfying answer exists
I have encountered numerous painful comments and actions from Christians who, on meeting me, clearly sensed the immediate need to restore balance to their view of God and his relationship with the world. These range from a worshipper who was overheard asking exactly the same 'sin' question the disciples asked as I led a service in her church, to Christians who jumped straight to the insistence that I should be 'healed' (i.e. made to look like them) even before they had got to know me. The lesson I learned from numerous encounters like these in my younger years is that I was an embarrassment, and that it was therefore unsafe to explore questions that would make people feel even more uneasy.
…to be continued.
John 5:17-30, 37, 43; 6:37-40; 7:16-18, 28-29; 8:14-19, 27-30, 38, 49-59; 9:14-18; 10:25-38; 14:6-31; 15:9-10, 22-24, 26; 16:5-15, 25-33; 17.
John 5:36; 7:31; 9:16, 32-33; 10:21, 24-25, 38.
John 7:14-32; 8:1-11; 10:34-38.
John 4:28-30, 39-42; 6:53-58; 8:1-11.
John 5:1; 7:2, 10; 10:22; 12:12ff. These are the only specific references in the Gospel.
John 9:1.
See Malcolm Gladwell – Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (London: Penguin Books, 2005) for further explanation and application written in a popular style.
The most humorous example was a teenaged American boy who encountered me in a restaurant in San Francisco and asked, in all seriousness, “sir, are you an alien?”.
Kenneth Bailey – Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes, 173-4. I am relying on Bailey for many of the cultural details underlying Jesus' encounters with both the blind man and the adulterous woman in the coming posts.