Friends,
Our weekly Text Study resumes in September. Every Monday we will upload a 30-minute video of a study onto YouTube, then we will have a one-hour discussion on Wednesday mornings at 9:30 here on the church campus. The discussion will be on zoom and will be recorded, so you can also watch it live or later from home. If you want to get an email each week notifying you when the study is ready and sending the zoom link, please drop me a note here or call Sue-Ann in the church office (949-644-1341). Next week I will describe the focus of our study and list the different texts for each week. I’m trying to coordinate the study with our worship services, so there are some discussions that I need to have with our staff before I present it publicly. I think you will like what we’re cooking up.
This week in worship we will be hearing the story of Luke 13:10-17 during our Saturday and Sunday worship services. It is about a woman who was bent over double and is released from that condition and raised upright. I have an essay on the Political Theology blog about this story that you can read here. Or, I have a verse-by-verse analysis of the story on my blog that you can read here. In most Bibles, this story is prefaced with the subtitle, “Jesus heals a crippled woman.” There are 1,001 reasons why we ought not to use that subtitle, some of which I will address in this weekend’s sermon. For now, I want to address something about the way that we hear healing stories in the gospels, which has a troubling effect on the way we think of abilities and disabilities in real life.
I recently heard a recording of Dick Cavett interviewing Ray Charles during which he asked, “If I could just wave a magic wand and give you your sight back, would you want me to?” Sighted people might imagine an enthusiastic “Yes!” but Ray Charles’ answer was very circumspect. He said he would like to see, perhaps for a short time, to see his children’s faces and perhaps a few works of art and natural beauty. But he was not interested in having his sight restored for the rest of his life. He was happy with the way that he encountered and experienced the world as a blind person, “So, no thanks.” That interview enabled me to see the wisdom behind the story in Mark’s gospel when Jesus encounters a “blind beggar” named Bartimaeus, who is screaming to Jesus for mercy. When Jesus meets him, he asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” In this case, Bartimaeus indeed wanted his sight back. In the ancient stories any disability seems to be treated that way – as a lessening of humanity, a deficit that needs restoring. Ray Charles represented a different way of speaking about his blindness – not as a deficit or a weakness, but as a different and rich way of experiencing the world.
I believe we need to reassess the worldview that is presumed in gospel stories about healing. The point is not to criticize the gospel writers or the culture in which they were embedded. We can assume that they were inspired people doing the best they could with what they were aware of, and so we should aspire to do the best we can with what we are aware of. When we see a person with a disability in the gospels, the presumption of the story is typically that they want or need that disability to be “healed.” That notion of “healing” often becomes either a way that the power of the God ought to be present in our lives today, or a magical view of the world from the past that we dismiss with eye-rolling. I would suggest, instead, that it reflects a worldview present generally (not just among biblical communities) in the 1st century. As such, that view of disabilities and healing is fair game for us to interrogate as those who take the Bible seriously. When we do so, we see that many of the gospel stories have subtle ways of differentiating between a person’s identity or worth and their struggles or disabilities. But we also see how many of those stories are grounded in assumptions with which we disagree. I think this question about the worldview that is present in healing stories is even more important, or at least prior to, the common question of whether healings still occur today.
There’s so much more to explore here, but I should stop now. One cannot dig oneself out of a hole by digging deeper and deeper.
Mark of St. Mark
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