Disability and John 5:1-18

What Jesus did at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-18 TNIV) in the healing of the man, the significance this has for the spiritual discipline of community and the inclusivity of all people - specifically the disabled will be explored in what follows.

What does it mean to be disabled? “…two basic aspects of disability: (1) disability conceived as a kind of natural impairment or functional limitation (a biomedical condition) and (2) disability construed as the social stigma or limitations placed by a society on certain groups who are labeled ‘disabled’ (Albl, 2007, p. 145).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door” (Bonhoeffer, 1954, p.38).  The text from John states that, ‘“Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?" "Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me”’ (John 5:3-7).  The man claims that no one would help him and the text states, “Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.” Seemingly, the “great number” at the pool have created some sort of community of disabled peoples that at least congregated if not squatted at the pool in hope of being healed. Jesus asks if the man wants to be healed, implicitly asking whether or not he wanted to remain where he was known and comfortable? The man experienced that, “If a community of disabled people finds itself excluded from a temple or other site of cultural privilege, then an accommodation is in order – even in biblical times. One could lift the prohibition, eradicate a structural obstacle, or as in many New Testament stories, remove disability through cure so the access barrier in question no longer hinders participation….the removal of social barriers delimits the environment as the target of intervention, in cure/resurrection/redemption scenarios bodies are fixed to fit an unaccommodating environment” (Mitchell, Snyder, 2007, p. 179).

Regardless of the man’s answer to the question that Jesus asks, the statement that, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred” – speaks to a community of outcasts or less desirable people who apparently no one wanted to help to get into the pool. For if the pool did what those there believed it did, why would not someone come and help more of those camped out there into the pool when the waters stirred so they could be healed and be welcomed back into community as whole? Jesus bypasses the pool and simply heals the man and by healing explicitly manifests a willingness to engage with the disabled at the pool. This willing engagement of Jesus with the man at the pool reveals a deeper dimension of what it means to be human and the willingness to enter into “I/Thou” relationships and to know that, “All actual life is encounter” (Buber, 1970, p.62). Jesus does the healing to point out the “unaccommodating environment” and to make the case for the need of accommodation of the community for the disabled to be welcomed and included with their disability – for, “…disability’s need for social supports and accommodations can be bypassed once the promise of cure alleviates communities of responsibility to reimagine a more accessible world. The active exclusion of some bodies ultimately devalues our investment in all bodies as dynamic, vulnerable and mutating in their capacities over a life span” (2007, p. 182).

The fundamental problem is not with the one with the disability but within the community that fails to accept and include within it the disabled person. This is what Jesus by his healing was attempting to make manifest – in the kingdom and the new reality for humanity all are to be at the table, the wedding feast. The disability does not hinder the disabled but rather the lack of inclusion in community by the abled bodied hinders their participation with the divine. In barring entry to the table of those not like themselves – the exclusion of the “other” demonstrates, “… longings for human similitude ultimately avoid rather than engage the necessity of providing provisions for our meaningful inclusion in social life” (Mitchell, Snyder, 2007, p. 183).

Now what ensues after the healing is remarkable in the sense that even though a man is now healed and presumable whole in the sense of looking like the rest of the individuals welcomed into community – evidenced by his going to the temple where Jesus found him later. The issue with the Jewish leaders is that this healing was done on the Sabbath and the Jewish leaders were less interested in a man who could be now be able to be part of the community again than they were in upholding their interpretation of the law and Sabbath keeping. When Jesus is confronted about this, his response is that, ‘“My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working."’

It is from this statement of Jesus that the argument is going to made that Jesus and his Father are always at work to heal and bring all humanity into community and relationship with each other, as Bonhoeffer stated, “…in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.”

The imagination is crucial for the creating of communities capable of including all humanity and the Jewish leaders at the time of Jesus and to churches today’s which lack the imagination for authentic community. What happens is that, “Inevitably, without committed family members or caretakers, the profoundly disabled are institutionalized and, in many cases, practically abandoned. The church has often been at a loss about how to minister to such people who are more or less unresponsive to social intercourse. In some instances, the church has given encouragement to the caregivers of such people – an important, even if insufficient ministry. Yet, by and large, people with profound disabilities are absent from most churches. They are certainly seen more as encumbrances than as viable members of ecclesial communities” (Yong, 2011, p. 112-113).

This is not surprising for if as Jeanne Brown comments, “Israel’s story is the Church’s story…” (Brown, (2007) p. 157) and as Israel’s propensity to exclude the other is also the Church’s propensity so as to defer the messiness of “actual encounter” and as such preserve what to the Church has become the method of its own comfort. What is comfortable is that which is familiar and perhaps it is use of, “The ‘normative hermeneutic’….the means by which scripture is interpreted so that it complies with and reinforces the socially constructed norms. This hermeneutic imposes a society’s interpretation of disability on the text without due consideration to the text itself” (Wynn, 2007, p. 92). Just Israel was to be the vehicle, the means for community and healing for the all humanity, now it is the Church that is to develop healing communities. The welcoming of the disabled into community and recognition that all humans have been created in the image of God as the communities created Jean Vanier that are, ”….driven by a vision of the full and ineradicable humanity of each person created in the image of God, regardless of that individual’s capacities or abilities” (Yong, 2011, p. 113).

The disabled deserve a seat at the table of fellowship, in the Gospel of Luke, ‘… Jesus said to his host, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous"’ (Luke 14:12-14). From this, “…the text clearly situates people with impairments at the final banquet just as they are, not with their impairments erased or made invisible. This would clearly have been counter-intuitive to prevalent images of afterlife in the first century….The parable reaches its height when non-disabled listeners are shocked to realize that the intimate relations  around the eschatological table are shared with the blind, the lame, and the impaired…” (2011, p. 133).

So where then are the pools of Bethesda today? The answer must be anywhere there are humans not welcome into community.

If the teleological reality of eschatology is found in Jesus then relational community is where this eschatology made visible. The path to this end is in the imaginative capacity to accept the perceived other as a brother or a sister and in doing so come to understand that the other is also us. Jurgen Moltmann wrote, “Theology always includes the imagination, fantasy for God and his kingdom. If we were to ban the images of the imagination from theology, we should be robbing it of its best possession” (Moltmann, 1985, p.20).  God’s kingdom is comprised of a community of others who with imagination know and acknowledge their otherness and as a result radically accept all deemed as other by the system we are immersed.

Relational community is the willingness to live with the acceptance and inclusiveness of the other. At the same time but to varying degrees and in differing perspectives and vantage points both the perceiver of the “other” and the other is us. So then there is no escape from otherness except through radical acceptance of self (which is other) and the “other” (to us) into community and a camaraderie of belonging which necessitates, “…genuine friendship involving people with profound disabilities relies upon a theological account of being human, on that fundamentally values life in a nonhierarchical mode as a gift of a God who has chosen all people, including those with profound disabilities, as his friends” (2011, p. 114).

Becoming whole persons, human beings, image bearers of God through and by relational communal inclusive acceptance thereby negates the ontology of otherness and “…ministry to people with profound disabilities becomes a means of ministering the love of God with them in an otherwise inhospitable world. The result is a renewed church, one that is inclusive of the lives and gifts of those who have previously been the most extremely marginalized members of the human community. But beyond this, when the church stands in solidarity with such people, it fundamentally alters its own self-understanding and identity in light of the weakness and foolishness of the cross of Christ” (2011, p. 115).

The issue is not the remedy of the disability per se although Jesus did heal the man at the pool but rather the realignment of the societal environment the disabled find themselves in. The physical healing was not the main point but rather it was a demonstration of that which excluded the man from the community of humanity. By healing the man physically Jesus shows that there was nothing wrong with the man as a human being and that he could now walk did not change fundamentally who the man was and that relationality and love replace the law as the standard of behavior for the followers of Jesus ( the remnant).

The implied question then is: why when a man can walk he is welcomed in the temple and when he can’t he is not? The disability is not what makes or not makes what a person is or is not – it is the being in the image of God that makes a person of worth. Subsequently, a disability does not mare the image of God negatively but conversely it enhances who that person is. In this light the warning Jesus gives the man in the temple is interesting, ‘Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, "See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you"’ (John5:14).  A reminder to the man to recall where he was laying at the pool not so long ago and to not now be one who excludes from community those who he once was.  To bear in mind that “People who are powerless and vulnerable attract what is most beautiful and most luminous in those who are stronger: they call them to be compassionate, to love intelligently, and not only in a sentimental way. Those who are weak help those who are more capable to discover their humanity and to leave the world of competition in order to put their energies at the service of love, justice, and peace. The weak teach the strong to accept and integrate the weakness and brokenness of their own lives, which they often hide behind masks” (Vanier, 2008, p. 100-101).

The creation of authentic relational community is not possible until and if we are willing to take a great risk and want to actually know what to us is the “other” and to, “…truly new understandings of those relationships of Jesus, not just as they were lived long ago, but as Jesus desires to live them now, with me and with us, through the weakest and most vulnerable people” (Nouwen, 1997, p.15).

Bibliography

 Albl, Martin. (2007) “For Whenever I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong”: Disability In Paul’s Epistles. In Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, Jeremy Schipper (Eds.), This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies. Society of Biblical Literature.

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Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. (1954) Life Together. Harper Collins.

Brown K. Jeannine, Dahl M. Carla, Reuschling Corbin Wyndy. (2011) Becoming Whole and Holy: An Integrative Conversation about Christian Formation. Baker Academic.

Buber, Martin. (1970) I And Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Scribners.

Mitchell, David and Snyder, Sharon. (2007) Jesus Thrown Everything Off Balance: Disability and Redemption in Biblical Literature. In Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, Jeremy Schipper (Eds.), This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies. Society of Biblical Literature.

Moltman, Jurgen. (1985) God In Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation – The Gifford Lectures      1984-1985. SCM Press.

Nouwen, J.M. Henri. (1997) Adam God’s Beloved. Orbis Books.

 Vanier, Jean. (2008) Essential Writings. Selected by Carolyn Whitney-Brown. Orbis Books.

Wynn H. Kerry. (2007) The Normate Hermeneutic and Interpretations of Disability within the Yahwistic Narratives. In Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, Jeremy Schipper (Eds.), This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies. Society of Biblical Literature.

Yong, Amos. (2011) The Bible, Disability, And The Church: A New Vision of the People of God. William B. Eerdmans.