What Did Jesus Teach about Disabilities?
Jesus Saw the Broken
In the record of Jesus’s ministry in the four Gospels, we see in the Savior a striking focus upon a ministry among the deaf, mute, lame, blind, and the broader community they represent. Let’s focus on selected passages from Luke’s thorough Gospel account as well as a key passage from the Gospel of John.
Luke 5:12–13
While prior to Luke 5:12–13 Jesus had already healed many sicknesses and driven out numerous demons, the account of the healing of the man with leprosy is the first encounter with one who clearly falls into categories of disabled, broken, and weak. I admit that the demon possessed were disabled and marginalized in a very real sense, and many would classify such cases as mental and emotional brokenness. However, for our purposes here, I consider such demonic cases primarily as spiritual warfare and beyond the scope of this more limited discussion.
All three synoptic writers note that after the leper’s plea for healing (Luke 5:12), before Jesus even spoke, he reached out and touched the man. I also think it is important to note here that Mark (again, according to the unanimous testimony of the church fathers, capturing Peter’s close observations of Jesus) notes that Jesus, “moved with pity,” touched the man (Mark 1:41). The touch was unnecessary for the physical healing—indeed Jesus at times healed from a distance. But this seemingly insignificant action is profoundly crucial. Think about this for just a moment. If this man had lived with leprosy for any amount of time (and it could have been years), he had lived without the tender touch of another human. Loneliness can be much more than emotional. In the first century (and for that matter through much of human history everywhere) lepers experienced physical loneliness. The space between them and other humans seemed to represent the space of rejection. But here in Luke 5, God the Son showed compassion for this rejected man, broken in body, by first offering emotional healing through touch followed by physical healing through his divine power.
Disability and the Gospel
Michael S. Beates
Exploring key Bible passages on brokenness and disability to develop helpful principles for believers and churches, this book teaches us to first embrace our own brokenness and then embrace those who are more physically broken.
Stuart Govig, in his good work Strong at the Broken Places: Persons with Disabilities and the Church has written:
The idea of the skin as a “boundary” also underscored the “clean” and “unclean” dietary regulations the Teacher encountered. While the Pharisees were occupied with hands (unwashed, unclean) and mouth (eating), Jesus added a new dimension, the heart. This vital but unseen bodily part is as important as the most visible organ (the skin), because personal attitudes and intentions are crucial for receiving the Gospel.1
This is the first of countless occasions where Jesus intentionally crossed social and even religious boundaries in order to encounter the broken and the rejected. In so doing, Jesus not only offered them the hope of existential salvation through bodily restoration, but he also touched hearts and souls by grafting such people into the covenant community of God’s people.
How we long, so many of us, to feel such a touch from the Savior. We think to ourselves, “If only I could have been there to receive that touch.” Or “If only Jesus would come now, here, today, and enter my pit of despair and touch my soul, then I could be healed.” All who are broken could wish for such a divine but real encounter. But remember the words of Jesus after his resurrection when Thomas asked to touch the wounds of the risen Savior. Jesus said, “Have you believed because you have seen me [and I think we could add “touched me”]? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
Too often we fall into the trap of wishing for things we know we cannot have—like a personal, physical touch from Jesus. God has given us a great gift with the promise of his presence through his Holy Spirit. And even when we do not feel that presence or that power, even when God seems silent and far away, unresponsive to our cry, the Scriptures remind us that he hears and is closer to us than we can ever know.
Luke 14:15–24
From the lips of Jesus, the parable in Luke 14 of the great banquet is crucial for our understanding of disability in the kingdom of God. Jesus explained that many had been invited to a banquet but the cares of the world either diverted their attention or kept them from coming. Indignant, the banquet host ordered his servants to fill the banquet hall with “the poor and crippled and blind and lame” (Luke 14:21). I am sure the listening crowd was already shocked.
But as the parable continued, Jesus says that when told by his servants that this had already been done and there was still room, the banquet host told the servant to go outside the city to more obscure places and “compel people to come in, that my house may be filled” (Luke 14:23). An exegetical case can be made that the antecedent of “people” is the “poor, crippled, blind, and lame” who lived outside the city and were not as easily found or seen. It may be that the only guests would finally be those least expected to be at such a banquet table—the physically disabled and the socially marginalized—the broken.
Do these kinds of people today feel welcome at God’s banquet in the church? Too often, sadly they do not. Too often, merely coming to church is too much of a burden. People encounter both physical and social obstacles. And how many churches intentionally go about the business of seeking such people and using the church’s manpower to go and bring them in? Again, too often, the church does not.
Jesus intentionally crossed social and even religious boundaries in order to encounter the broken and the rejected.
Luke 18:35–43
In Luke 18:35–43, the final recorded healing in Luke, an unnamed blind beggar cried out for mercy as Jesus passed by in the crowd. He was rebuked by “those who were in front” (Luke 18:39). He was told to be quiet. Ostensibly, these leaders of the apostolic band thought Jesus had more important things to do and more important people to see than a blind beggar. But consistent with the scriptural testimony to this point in both Old and New Testaments, Jesus stopped, had the man brought near, and healed his blindness, restoring his sight. The blind man followed Jesus on the way, praising God as he followed.
Though Jesus healed so many bodily afflictions and made the disabled and disenfranchised such a focus in his work, how interesting (and disturbing!) that those who led the way for Jesus would rebuke and ignore a blind beggar! Jesus had already said that the banquet table of the Lord would be filled with such people, yet his own disciples (mercifully unnamed in this account!) still sought to marginalize the weak and broken, keeping them from Jesus. Why is this still the case today? Why do the leaders of Jesus’s modern apostolic band so often pass by and ignore the outwardly, physically broken and wounded among us? The teaching of Luke and the words of Jesus are clear and uncompromising at this point.
While these accounts are a challenge to church leaders, they may also serve as an encouragement to those who live in brokenness and disability. Jesus wants such people in his kingdom and in his church. No matter how difficult or awkward it may be, my word of encouragement is: Go to church! Show up and allow your presence to be used by God to make his church what he intends for it to be!
John 9
Though not the final miraculous sign, the healing of the man born blind in John 9 is the final instance in John of Jesus healing a person with a disability. The episode opened with Jesus’s disciples asking a question still commonly asked today when people are confronted with a congenital disabling condition: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” To the vast majority of people, even those with a spiritual awareness—perhaps especially those with such an awareness—there are two possibilities when confronted with a person born blind, or with Down Syndrome, or with cerebral palsy, or with any number of other disabilities: either the parents sinned, or God, in his foreseeing knowledge, punished beforehand the sins of the person so born.
But Jesus immediately offered a tertium quid—a third way—an explanation his followers never expected: the man was born blind so that God’s glory might be displayed. Though there are times when disability is clearly the result of sin and disobedience toward God (Samson’s blindness is one example), Jesus taught here that this is not necessarily the first and certainly not the only option. In fact, consistent with the developing pattern we are seeing, God should be expected to use the disabled, the weak, and the broken for his special purposes precisely so that he will get the glory he desires and deserves.
The chapter closes with Jesus again speaking to the man, now healed. Jesus drew a clear spiritual lesson and purpose from the healing, saying, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (John 9:39). Obviously, Jesus never made a physically sighted person permanently blind, though God did take the sight of Saul of Tarsus temporarily (and see also 2 Kings 6:15–17). So this must require a spiritual application. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that the spiritual lesson is drawn from the fabric of Jesus’s interaction with one who was physically afflicted. God in Christ used the real, tangible disability to show his grace and mercy to the weak and outwardly broken as a sign of what he can also do inwardly to those who recognize their weak and broken spiritual condition.
In fact, when some Pharisees heard Jesus speaking in these terms to the healed man, they asked if they were “blind.” Jesus affirmed that their implicit claim to see (apart from the grace and healing of Jesus) meant they were still blind spiritually, so their guilt remained. Jesus came to live a life of righteousness that we cannot live, and he came to die to pay the penalty for sins, which we could not pay. He came to save those whom God loves. Does God love all people? Certainly in a general way, yes! But the Scriptures are clear that he has a special affection for those who are broken and who realize in their brokenness that they are helpless to save themselves. When we see Jesus as a way to improve our lives, one of many ways toward self-improvement, we miss the hope of the gospel. He came to save the lost, not those who “just need a little help along the way.”
Notes:
- Stuart D. Govig, Strong at the Broken Places: Persons with Disabilities and the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1989), 38. Emphasis in the original.
This article is adapted from Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace by Michael S. Beates.
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