Good morning! What a joy and honor it is to be with you today and to have the opportunity to journey with you through what has become one of my favorite scripture passages. Full disclosure, this passage plays a critical role in my dissertation, so I also appreciate the opportunity to lift my head from my books, exit my isolated office space, and talk about it in the light of day with other people. Outside of my doctoral work, I am married to Justin, an ordained deacon in the United Methodist Church who is with us today, and we have a 16-month-old son, Angus. If you have had the chance to meet Justin, you might notice that our life also includes a rather conspicuous power wheelchair. Moving through the world as a disabled family means that we get a lot of questions, and these questions often seem to compare our life, or perceptions of our life, with what is “normal.” When we were expecting Angus, we encountered a lot of questions that often circled around one central, even if often unspoken, concern: How are you going to do this, because if you haven’t noticed, your family isn’t normal? Being the academic that I am, when you ask me a question, I am going to try to answer it. So, I would say “Well, it will be a challenge, but here are the things Justin can do…” One of the things I would name is that Justin can hold Angus and roll him around. I would then get responses from well-meaning people who said, “Yes, but he will get wiggly at some point, so that won’t last long.”
Fast forward to today, and yes, my son is wiggly. But he has also grown up with a father in a wheelchair, who from the early days of his life, held Angus and rolled him around the house and eventually outside. Already today, Angus has climbed onto Justin’s footplates, attempted to steal the cover to his joystick, and rolled with Justin from the backdoor of our house to our van so we could come here. Some days this is not as successful, but for the most part, Angus knows how to ride with his dad and enjoys doing it, even if his wiggles get in the way from time to time.
Angus encounters disability every day. His daily interactions as part of our disabled family shape him and his approach to the world before he can even begin to comprehend that in our society disability is somehow not normal. Yet not all of us are born into a disabled family, and so our notions about disability are, often unconsciously, shaped by a lack of encounters or by predominantly tragic encounters with disability. This morning, as we journey through Mark 5:24-34, I invite us to encounter disability differently in the hopes that it will shape and re-shape our understanding of God’s relationship to disability and what that means for us as the Body of Christ living in the world here and now.
Our story begins with the hustle and bustle of Jesus’ busy schedule. Jesus is on the way. He’s got business to do. Specifically, he is on the way to heal a dying twelve-year old girl. Not only that, but he’s surrounded by people while he’s doing it. Suddenly, Jesus stops and says, “Who touched my clothes?” Now, I’m not sure if any of the disciples had experience with toddlers, but I, as the mother of a burgeoning toddler, would have looked at Jesus, heaved a sigh and said, “I know, Jesus. EVERYBODY is touching EVERYONE. C’mon. Let’s keep moving.” But, Jesus remains rooted to the spot and continues looking around until a woman comes forward.
The writer of Mark gives us the woman’s backstory. She has had gynecological bleeding basically as long as the dying twelve-year old girl has been alive. She has no money left to consult physicians who promised a remedy but were unable to deliver. In her cultural context, her physical condition also made her ritually impure. Such ritual impurity imposed two potential forms of isolation on the woman: 1. religious isolation from aspects of the worship life of the local Jewish community and 2. social isolation because if she touched another person, she would contaminate them with her impurity. To top it off, since Mark portrays her as a woman in public alone, it is likely the woman had no family, or at the very least, no family who would claim her. The woman is isolated, marginalized, and desperate for healing.
It is important at this point to pause and note the difference between healing and cure. Jaime Clark-Soles, one of your own, distinguishes between cure and healing in this way: “cure” is the removal of bodily impairment on the individual level and “healing” is a person’s “integration and reconciliation to self, God, and the community.” Let me say that again: “cure” is the removal of the individual’s bodily impairment and “healing” is a person’s “integration and reconciliation to self, God, and the community.” Using these understandings, cure may or may not result in healing and healing may or may not include cure. While the woman think that needs a cure, her healing will not occur unless cultural barriers to her participation in her community, her worship of God, and her understanding of herself in right relationship to God are torn down.
Bearing the weight of the last twelve years of physical weakness and communal isolation, the woman desperately and bravely reaches out a hand to touch Jesus, saying “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Instantaneously, her bleeding stopped. In fact, the Greek in this instance indicates that her body dried up or hardened, a detail I want us to hang onto for a moment. But then, instead of being able to slip back into the crowd, go home, and never have her story recorded in the Gospels, Jesus and his entourage stop. He wants to know who touched him. With fear and trembling, she approaches him, likely uncertain about what he will say. The encounter she initiated in private suddenly becomes public.
Imagine the woman and Jesus face-to-face in the middle of the street. Who do you see? A woman newly restored to health and…Jesus. Well, what’s Jesus like? When we dig underneath the surface of this narrative, the Jesus who faces the woman is anything but a normal, healthy man by the cultural standards of his day. New Testament scholar Candida Moss, whose work I am indebted to for this sermon, notes that the ancient world cast the female body as soft, vulnerable, porous, lacking in control, weak, and therefore sickly. Male bodies, on the other hand, manifest the heat, dryness, impermeability, and boundedness that make up healthy bodies. So, sick and sickly bodies were porous and permeable bodies, whose lack of boundedness, boundaries, and control threatened to contaminate those around them.
Thus, the hemorrhaging woman—and female bodies in general—lack the boundedness that is necessary to achieve the health, vigor, and strength of the superior male body. Further, the woman’s long-term hemorrhage and its communal consequences constitute what we would now call a disability. Thus, it would seem that the woman’s cure—her literal “drying up” to resemble the ideal, healthy body—indicates that part of Jesus’ divine mission is the erasure of disease and disability. But, when we start to pay attention to Jesus’ body in the passage, a different meaning comes to the fore.
Unlike the version of this story found in Matthew 9 and Luke 8, Mark indicates that the power that heals the woman comes from Jesus himself through his garments. When the woman exercises her agency by touching Jesus’ garment to receive healing, her body is cured not by a magical transference of power from Jesus’ garment, but by the woman’s touch [pulling] power out of Jesus himself. Mark even indicates that Jesus experiences this flow of his own power as a physical and discernible loss. Thus, the mechanics of the woman’s cure point to the leakiness, if you will, of Jesus’ own body. Like the woman, Jesus has a bodily, uncontrollable leak.
He is sickly, weak, and disabled. Jesus cannot control, regulate, or harden his porous body. His lack of control of his own body manifests in the fact that the sickly woman…exerts control over the body of Jesus, God Incarnate. In the very circumstances of the woman’s physical restoration, Jesus’ body is physiologically weak, not conforming with the ancient world’s cultural ideals of bodily control, masculinity, and health. Though his uncontrolled flow of power enables Jesus to heal others, his physiology, his actual embodiment, resembles that of the sick and diseased.
So, we return to Jesus and the woman, face-to-face. The woman, at one time bleeding uncontrollably, now faces Jesus dried up, all her feminine leakiness properly contained. Jesus, who has likely passed as masculine and physically able in her imagination and the imaginations of much of Mark’s audience to the present day, greets the woman in all his leaky, unbounded weakness. The encounter between Jesus and the woman is full of reversals, and the narrative isn’t over yet. Woven into Mark’s cultural framework is the epiphany motif in Greek mythology in which a lack of bodily control actually reveals divinity. In the epiphany motif, gods came to earth disguised as human beings, but these disguised divine beings were often described as having divine light flooding through the confines of their fragile human bodies. The gods’ inability to regulate the boundaries of their own bodies positively indicated their hidden divine power. Similarly, Jesus’ leaky body reveals his divine identity as he contaminates others with divine power. Having received divine contamination in private, the woman publicly responds to Jesus by approaching him with fear and trembling, which is the standard biblical response to a theophany, or a visible manifestation of God. While the woman receives the bodily restoration she seeks, her encounter with the leaky Jesus results in a revelation of Jesus’ divinity for herself and the reader. Jesus’ divine identity comes to light in the disability of his uncontrollable flow of divine power, thus revealing Jesus as the Disabled Christ.
According to the liturgical calendar, today is Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before the beginning of Lent in which we remember when Peter, James, and John physically encountered Jesus in his divine glory at the top of a mountain where Moses and Elijah appeared to talk to Jesus. I suggest that today, we too have the opportunity to experience a transfiguration, a transfiguration that reveals who God is in the midst of disability. As God Incarnate in a disabled body, the Disabled Christ challenges our notions that disability is a consequence of sin, a punishment, or a God-ordained hardship meant to produce holiness. By producing and restoring life and life-giving community within disabled embodiment, the Disabled Christ reverses our cultural narratives that inextricably link disability to death, revealing that it is actually society’s privileging of the “normal” body over and against disabled bodies that leads to physical, emotional, mental, and communal death and destruction.
Every time we reinforce our society’s narratives that disability is worse than death, every time we treat people with disabilities like a burden to society, every time we teach that disability must be remedied or erased because it is not part of God’s intention for humanity, and every time we say “yes” to the normal and the status quo and say “no” to those with “abnormal” embodiments, we deny the Disabled Christ who transfigures our expectations for how divine power operates. By becoming human in a disabled body, God negates power structures that favor normal, individualistic, autonomous bodies. Instead, God saves us into the disabled Body of Christ, calling us to live out God’s love and power in the world after the pattern of disability, inviting us to recognize that all bodies—no matter their shape, age, gender, or diagnosis—have greater proximity to disability than to the normal body our society tells us we should try to achieve.
The woman’s encounter with Jesus ends with his acceptance of her as part of his family. In calling her “Daughter,” Jesus transforms the woman from isolated nobody to a member of Jesus’ family. Jesus’ leaky power may have cured her physical ailment in private, but she is healed as the Disabled Christ publicly restores her to community. How will our encounter with the Disabled Christ end? Since I am only one among many this morning, I cannot prescribe exactly where each of our encounters with the Disabled Christ this morning and in the future will lead us. However, I do know and it is my firm conviction that if the whole Body of Christ bravely encounters the Disabled Christ, we will be a different kind of people in the world. We will be a people who embrace our proximity to disability instead of marginalizing persons whose bodies insistently remind us that individualistic autonomy and bodily control are not the values Christ embodies. We will be a people who do the hard work of truly listening to the disability community and working with them to promote dignity, access, and abundant life for all persons with disabilities inside and outside the church. We will be a people who greet the work of making our spaces and gatherings accessible as an opportunity, not an undue burden, always listening to our community to open up what “accessibility” means beyond the requirements of the law. We will be a people who move beyond mere acceptance and toward integration of persons with disabilities and their families at all levels of participation and leadership in our society. We will be a people who holistically support one another when our bodies experience pain, illness, fatigue, impairment, and new diagnoses without jumping to cure as the only path to healing. We will be a people who value and honor the work of caregiving and care-receiving, supporting all persons who live on the frontlines of both. We will be a people saved by divine grace that flows away from the world’s standards of normalcy, masculinity, and femininity, and toward God’s standards of abundant life lived in life-empowering, life-giving community for all.
So, let us go forth today as unbounded, porous, leaky members of the Body of the Disabled Christ to contaminate the world with divine love, power, and hope, resisting the death-dealing power of normalcy by extending the wide, loving embrace of God’s disabled family.
Amen.