John 9:1-41
I am deeply indebted in this sermon and in my reading of the healing ministry of Jesus to Amy Kenny, author of My Body is Not a Prayer Request. If you only purchase or check out one book this year, I hope you’ll try Amy Kenny’s. I am also indebted always to The Accessible Altar and the unparalleled contribution of theologian Nancy L. Eiesland, author of The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability.
If today’s Gospel passage was a story about miracle cures, it would be a lot shorter. Instead of 41 verses, we might have 7, or even as few as 2. “He spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.” That’s really it, that’s the only part of this chapter that looks like a miracle cure. But we don’t call Jesus a curer, or a doctor or a nurse. We call him our healer, because what Jesus does is not clinical or individual. Jesus heals, and this is a healing narrative. Healing takes more than a couple of verses. It does not only happen in the body, and it cannot be accomplished alone.
Before we go any further, I want to point out that the main character in this passage is not Jesus. That might surprise you, especially since the actual main character is never named. But Jesus only comes in at the beginning and the end of the chapter, and speaks very little for a preacher. The actual miracle takes up very little space in the story. Our unnamed main character this week is a man born blind, one who becomes able to see after an encounter with Jesus. The majority of the chapter focuses on what comes after he has received sight. Everyone around him, from the disciples to the man’s own neighbors to the Pharisees know him only as the man who was blind, an inconvenient and uncomfortable object on the periphery of their world. Disability theologian Amy Kenny names this man Zechariah1, meaning God Remembers. Let’s borrow this name for now, to help us get to know this important figure in our Bible for something other than his disability.
Jesus’s disciples look at Zach, and they do not see a person. They see a symbol, an object lesson, an opportunity to debate theology. They see also what they do not ever wish to become- a beggar, cut off from access to community, isolated and alone. We are just like the disciples here- we look at people with an eye for how to identify them and categorize them, and from those categories we decide how to relate to them. Life is easier when we move through it in constructed binaries- sinners, and non-sinners. The people who are in, and the people who are out. The productive people, and the unproductive. This worldview is not something we get to smugly judge, or separate ourselves from, as if we are somehow more advanced. People like our new friend Zach, disabled people, make up 25 percent of the population of this country.2 That percentage is likely to increase as we see the long term effects of Covid on the body. And yet, a poll in 2018 found that 67 percent of people feel uncomfortable just talking to someone who is disabled.3 Two thirds of our population is uncomfortable even exchanging small talk with a quarter of our country. We are not so very far away from “who sinned that this man was born blind?” It’s no wonder that none of the disciples ever bothered to learn more about this man than his blindness. Anything more would require them to talk to him, after all.
When Zach returns with the ability to see, his own neighbors do not recognize him. They are stunned, and appalled, and even as he tells them the truth of who he is and how his sight was changed, they refuse to believe him. Zach is not trusted as a narrator of his own story, his own body and experiences left up for debate by those around him. This miraculous change in his life has not led to rejoicing in the community that knew him as a beggar. Even the day and time at which his eyes were changed is called into question and turned into a debate about the trustworthiness of his healer. Through it all, Zach is not quiet or demure. He is engaged and quick in his responses to Jesus and to the people who question him. He continues to tell the truth, recounting his own story and interpreting his experiences whenever he is asked. Zach responds to the community’s questions with theological statements, telling them what he knows to be true about God and his own experience with the mysterious prophet who has given him new sight.
Here is where we see the difference between curing and healing. Jesus acts to heal, not cure; the returning to wholeness includes returning to community, but what happens when the community rejects the opportunity for wholeness? What happens when the restoration is resisted by those who hold the power within a system? Curing can happen in an instant when miracles are involved, but healing takes time, and participation, and mutual reconciliation and repair. The community refuses to reintegrate Zach into full participation, so his healing cannot continue there. Instead, Jesus comes back to him, and the healing is completed when Zach confesses “Lord, I believe.” Barred from the place of worship amidst his community of origin, Zach experiences the fullness of God by reaching for Jesus, the place of worship that will never exclude him or become inaccessible to him.
The more convinced we are that we can see fully, the less we will see of God. The disciples look at Zach and see Blindness, evidence of sin. Jesus looks at Zach and sees a human being, a person who has spent his whole life being unseen and unheard by the community in which he was born. When Jesus first sees Zach, he says that God’s works will be revealed in him. The body of the man born blind, disabled by a world not built for him and a community that drives him out, is a place of encounter with the glory of God. His disability is not a symbol of sin, but a sign of openness, a place of revelation. Just as Jesus knows Zach as a whole person, Zach knows Jesus as one sent from God and confesses him as Lord. Just like the woman at the well in Samaria, this man sees something in Jesus that changes him forever, anointing him as disciple, evangelist, truth-teller and narrator of his own story.
The kind of healing that Jesus has to offer us is the same healing that dear Zach experienced and testified to in places not equipped to welcome him. The healing that Jesus brings is a healing that touches all of us, requires all of us. It’s the kind of healing that does not settle for less than wholeness, the kind of healing that in the original language of the Gospels was called sozo, salvation. A healing that brings communities together with the most vulnerable and oppressed taking the lead. Communities that are constantly turning outward to seek out the marginalized and to place them in the center where they are heard and believed. Communities that understand that not everyone wants or needs to be cured. Most of all, communities that know that there is no healing, no salvation without people like Zach, like the Samaritan woman, like the fumbling disciples who keep asking questions even when the answers are hard to hear. The entire Christian story is a healing narrative. What part will we play in the story?
1 Kenny, Amy. My Body is Not a Prayer Request, pg 4.
2 Referenced in My Body is Not a Prayer Request- “This statistic is according to the Scope report about attitudes and equality for disabled people: Simon Dixon, Ceri Smith, and Anel Touchet, “The Disability Perception Gap: Policy Report,” Scope, May 2018, https://www.scope.org.uk/scope/media/files/campaigns/disability-perception-gap-report.pdf
3 Referenced in My Body is Not a Prayer Request- “For more statistics related to disability in the US population, check out Disability and Health Data System from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://dhds.cdc.gov
Mother A Writes 