Third Sunday of Easter, 19 April 2015
Queen Camel, West Camel, West Camel Methodist Church
Nancy Eiesland was born with a congenital bone defect in her hips. By the time she was 13 years old, she had had eleven operations, and realised that pain was always going to be with her. She was a Christian; and as she matured she developed a remarkable ‘take’ on her faith and destiny. She said that she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled. [1]
The reason Nancy gave for this remarkable statement, a perspective which many disabled people would share, was that her disability made he who she was; that her identity and character had been formed by the mental, physical and social challenges of her disability. She felt that without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God.”
She died, aged 44, in 2009, not from her bone condition, but from a possibly genetic lung cancer. By that time Nancy had taken her understanding of life and faith even further. She had come to believe that God was in fact disabled. The key for her was the scene described in Luke 24, which we heard today, in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds. [2] In her book The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, she writes:
Much of my life I waited for a mighty revelation of God. I did experience an epiphany, but it bore little resemblance to the God I was expecting or the God of my dreams….
My return to intimacy with God began at a … rehabilitation hospital for persons with spinal cord injuries. A chaplain asked me to lead a Bible study with several residents. One afternoon after a long and frustrating day, I shared with the group my own doubts about God's care for me. I asked them how they would know if God was with them and understood their experience. After a long silence, a young African-American man said, "If God was in a sip-puff, maybe He would understand.”
I was overwhelmed by this image: God in a sip-puff wheelchair, the kind used by many quadriplegics that enables them to manoeuvre the chair by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device. Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. This was an image of God as a survivor, as one of those whom society would label "not feasible," "unemployable," with "questionable quality of life.”
Several weeks later, I was reading in Luke's Gospel about an appearance of the resurrected Jesus (24:36-39). The focus of this passage is really on his followers, who are alone and depressed. Jesus says to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.”
This wasn't exactly God in a sip-puff, but here was the resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are - disabled and divine. In this passage, I recognised a part of my hidden history as a Christian.
[She goes on to say that:] The foundation of Christian theology is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet seldom is the resurrected Christ recognised as a deity whose hands, feet, and side bear the marks of profound physical impairment.
This was my epiphany. The resurrected Christ is a disabled God - one who understood the experience of the others in my Bible study in the rehab centre, as well as my own. Encountering this disabled God became for me the source of a "liberation theology" of disability. Jesus Christ, as a living symbol of the disabled God, shares in the human condition; he experiences in his embodiment all our vulnerability and flaws. In emptying himself of divinity, Jesus enters the arena of human limitation, even helplessness. Jesus' own body is wounded and scarred, disfigured and distorted.
Nancy Eiesland offers us the remarkable insight that “In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God.” God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued - he is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing. [3]
This is a very different way of approaching our perennial questions around God and suffering, and our perennial speculations about the significance of the resurrection. Luke reports that the resurrected Jesus, the disabled God, “opened their minds to understand …” Like a benign virus, the resurrection introduces previously unimaginable perspectives into the world, which enable us to see our human condition in very different ways.
When you think about the Resurrection, consider this insight: that “resurrection” is a verb – not a noun. It describes something alive and active. The Resurrection is something we live into; it’s not merely an event we remember.
When they saw the wounds which Jesus presented to them, ‘something changed for the disciples. It was transformative. That’s what resurrection both does and reminds us of: true love is transformative.’ [4]
This active transformation, this benign virus continues to spread through the witness of people like Nancy Eiesland, and anyone prepared to see that rather than abandoning people to a life of suffering and the insufficient promise of healing in heaven, the disabled God stands among us in the here and now, embodying the possibility of our living life in all its fulness. Some, approaching this from other perspectives, have reached the same conclusions: consider the significance of the rise of the Paralympic Games in recent decades, and the increasingly appreciated contributions of disabled people in the world of the media and the arts.
Nancy Eiesland contended that in the eucharist, Christians encounter the disabled God and may participate in new imaginations of wholeness and new embodiments of justice. The resurrected Jesus said, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.” “While in their joy [the disciples] were disbelieving and still wondering.” If this how we respond to the resurrection - with a mixture of joy, disbelief and wonder - then the benign virus has begun to work on us, too, opening our minds to new understandings.
“Resurrection” is a verb – not a noun. The Resurrection is not merely an event we remember; it’s something we live into.
Now, if you find the idea of a disabled God uncomfortable - how about a dead God?
To grasp the full significance of the resurrection we have to understand that the risen Jesus, fully alive and embodied, eating fish with his disciples, is the same man and the same body who had previously died. The visible marks or scars from the crucifixion, are crucial. As James Alison writes:
When Luke and John tell us that the risen Lord appeared with the visible wounds of his death, it wasn't merely a way of identifying him as the same person, but a way of affirming that he was so much the same person, that, in the same way as that person was dead, so was he. But that death is nothing but a vacant form for God, that death is something whose reality has been utterly emptied out, which can only be detected in the form of its traces in the human life story of someone who has overcome death.
The marks, then, of Jesus' death were something like trophies: it was his whole human life, including his death, which was made alive and presented before the disciples as a sign that he had in fact conquered death. This not only meant that he had personally conquered death, which he had manifestly done, but that, in addition, the whole mechanism by which death retains people in its thrall had been shown to be unnecessary.
Whatever death is, it is not something which has to structure every human life from within …, but rather it is an empty shell, a bark without a bite. Death will unquestionably happen to all of us, but none of us has any reason to fear being dead, since that state cannot separate us effectively from the real source of life. This can scarcely be said with more precision than it is by the author of the epistle to the Hebrews:
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (Hebrews 2:14-15)
Now this is the central pillar of our faith. From the presence to the disciples of the risen victim, the crucified one risen as crucified, the lamb triumphant as slaughtered, everything else flows. Without that insight, nothing unfolds, no clear perception of God, of grace, of eternal life, about what we must do, how we must live. [5]
This is why “Resurrection” is a verb – not a noun. The Resurrection is not merely an event we remember; it’s something we live into.
Our life and faith is an attempt to understand ever more fully the relationship between those empty marks of death which Jesus bore and the mysterious splendour of the human bodily life which enabled them to be seen. What type of life is it that is capable not of cancelling death out, which would be to stay on the same level as it, but to include it, making a trophy of it, allowing it to be something that can be shown to others so that they be not afraid? [5]
The truth of the resurrected Jesus is that he is all at once dead, disabled, and fully alive. Just as our faith requires us to imagine Jesus as both fully God and fully human simultaneously, so also we are to stretch our minds to regard him as fully dead and fully alive, simultaneously, a body disabled and yet whole….
If we can grasp this astonishing truth about our Lord and learn how to translate it into our own experience - by the power of the resurrection - then we begin to understand that in our deadness we may be alive through Jesus, that through him, though in many ways disabled, we may at the same time be truly, fully whole.
Notes
[1] My gratitude to Paul Neuchterlein, in Girardian Lectionary, Year B, Easter 3b, for introducing me to Nancy Eiesland.
[2] Opening paragraphs are adapted from Douglas Martin, Nancy Eiesland Is Dead at 44; Wrote of a Disabled God, New York Times, March 21, 2009.
[3] Nancy Eiesland, ‘The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’.
[4] Mark Sandlin, The Resurrection is Real, But Not How You Think it Is, The God Article, Pantheos, April 14, 2015
[5] James Alison, Raising Abel, ch. 1, pp. 29-33. Quoted in Paul Neuchterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Year B, Easter 3b.
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