At this service we shared a newly commissioned drawing called ‘Blind Jesus (no one belongs
here more than you)’ - see below. The drawing has been commissioned by Celia Webster from the
artist Alan Stewart with the aim of creating discussion in churches and the
wider community including encouraging others to create their own Last Supper
images. Both Celia and Alan joined us for the service. Celia is part of the Church of England disabilities steering committee, while
Rev Alan Stewart is currently the vicar of two churches in Hertford. He studied
Foundation Art at Belfast Art College, then graduated with a degree in Fashion
and Textiles from Central St Martins in London and has exhibited in various
churches and galleries. This image in charcoal of the Last Supper, to which I refer in the reflection, includes the central
character of a visually impaired Jesus, surrounded by twelve people of
differing ages, backgrounds and abilities. At the table, an empty chair invites
the viewer to find themselves at the table. This Jesus challenges theological
and Biblical imagery of blindness as sin or something to be cured. The image is
offered as the beginning of a conversation. It asks questions like... What
associations do we have with blindness? How does this Jesus ‘see’ me? Why has
each figure been chosen? What are their stories? Who else should be at this
meal? Is the empty chair for you?:
Tonight, we grapple with two of the more problematic elements of Jesus' miracles. As one whose teenage faith was renewed through the Charismatic movement, with its belief in supernatural healing, while also later becoming father to a daughter who not only has epilepsy but whose character and personality has been shaped through that experience, these are stories with which I grapple personally. In the book, Jeffrey John is crystal clear on one of the issues with which we grapple tonight. In the chapter on ‘The Withered Fig Tree’ he says that the way this story is told in Mark's Gospel 'exemplifies the way the early Church imported into the Gospel an anti-Semitic ideology which had no place in the original teaching of Jesus, and which has spawned a terrible legacy of atrocities perpetrated by Christians on Jews down the ages.’
John says that our response should be to ‘align ourselves consciously with Paul and against the evangelists, in particular, with Paul’s continuing love and respect for the tradition of Israel, his unbreakable conviction that God’s promises stand firm, and his yearning hope that in the end all Israel – the Old and the New – shall be one in God’s salvation.’ Jeffrey John doesn't go as far in regard to disability, but I want to suggest that we should essentially do the same.
The way in which disability is understood and treated within the Gospels and in Jesus' healing miracles is an issue with which we have grappled at St Martin's because of the work of our Disability Advisory Group led by Fiona MacMillan. Much of what I will say tonight is based on my understanding of their work and the issues they have raised, including use of several insightful phrases coined by Fiona.
The issue is highlighted by our title for tonight's session ‘Seeing and Believing’. If seeing is equated with believing then those who do not see, including those who are blind, are excluded from believing. The fact that Jesus heals blind people and speaks about such healing relating to faith seems to reinforce the problem. It is a problem that also applies to deaf people who are viewed in a similar way within these stories. A focus on prayer for supernatural healing also removes agency from disabled people and leads to accusations of a lack of belief on the part of those not healed.
The problem goes deeper still, however, because of an Old Testament belief that the difficulties we encounter in life derive from our sins or those of our ancestors. This is a belief that Jesus explicitly rejects, doing so in relation to the healing of a blind man. Nevertheless, it is an understanding that has found its way into the hymns and liturgy that we commonly use in church, and which alienates and excludes disabled people. As example, think about how you would feel singing these lines from ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Just As I Am’, were you to be a blind person yourself:
‘Amazing grace / How sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me / I once was lost, but now I'm found / Was blind, but now I see’
‘Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind’
While we know that the language of blindness, sight and salvation is intended metaphorically and refers to a sinfulness in which we all share, nevertheless to hear a fundamental aspect of your identity as a blind person equated to wretchedness is deeply galling, disheartening and is ultimately exclusionary.
Jeffrey John is clear that the point of Jesus' miracles is not medical but theological and spiritual. This has the effect of making them about all of us, rather than solely about those who were healed. John also argues that we are all blind or deaf before God opens us to his presence. However, while this universalises the stories, it also reinforces the equation between blindness or deafness and sin.
A different understanding of healing can emerge from these stories if we begin, as Jeffrey John does, with the understanding that the purpose of Jesus' healing ministry was to restore those who had been excluded to worship and to community. That is why the healing miracles often end with those healed going to see the authorities of the day in order to be readmitted to society. John notes that the healing miracles cover most of the excluded groups from Jesus’ time.
Healings were the way – the only way at that time - to return those who had been excluded to worship and community. Today, however, the social model of disability is based on the understanding that society disadvantages disabled people; that society is not set up to support the needs of disabled people and, therefore, it is society, not disabled people, that need to change. If we remove the barriers in society that exclude disabled people we can achieve the end that Jesus intended, which is the Messianic banquet in which everyone is included. That banquet is symbolised for us by the Eucharist.
Believing is not primarily about seeing supernatural healings that prove the existence of God but instead about seeing a vision of communion and community in the Eucharist, a place where all can come and where all are valued, where people can get in and join in.
A key part of that inclusion is that everyone has insight and understanding. Everyone has perceptions of God to share. As a result, physical blindness is not a barrier to knowing God or to sharing aspects of that relationship with others. The writings and experience of John Hull, a theologian who was blind, clearly show this to be true. In his ‘Open Letter from a Blind Disciple to a Sighted Saviour,’ he notes that it is not necessary to the witness of faith, regarding the way our ignorance, sin and disobedience prevent us from responding to the love of God made known in Jesus Christ, that that witness ‘should be cast into the form of the metaphor of blindness.’ That it was is surely, he suggests, ‘a case where the metaphor kills but the spirit gives life.’ He argues that it is necessary that all those who are spoken to by the Bible, including blind people, ‘should have an opportunity to reply, and thus the conversation which is within the Bible can enter into conversation with us today, and through offering a voice and a hearing to everyone, we can create a community of genuine free speech.’ There should be ‘a proliferation of many meanings until everyone's meanings are gathered in.’ ‘This is the way that the Bible becomes truly ecumenical, truly catholic.’
Alan Stewart's marvellous drawing of the Last Supper gives us just such an ecumenical or catholic image through its depiction of a diverse group of disciples surrounding a blind Jesus at the Last Supper. This is an image of many who have experienced barriers to inclusion getting in and joining in with the recognition that experiences of exclusion are central to a faith that sees Jesus become the scapegoat for humanity in order to remove the barriers to encounter with God that we had previously erected. The Jesus who does that bears on his body the marks of his Passion, carrying those signs and experiences into an eternity of unity and communion. His experience of being scapegoated and excluded becomes revelatory and is the route by which all can return to community.
In the same way, the experience of disabled people must become central, as in this image, not through the eradication of disability by means of supernatural healing, but by the eradication of all barriers to communion so that the insights of all can be received for the benefit and building up of the whole people of God. When one is excluded, the body of Christ is not whole and currently many remain excluded. To reverse that situation, we need to see the vision of communion that Jesus institutes through the Eucharist, that he shares in parables of the Messianic banquet, and which will become our experience in eternity in order that we begin to live that future now.
That is the vision that we need to see in order to believe, because belief is not primarily intellectual or propositional, instead it is about practice and demonstration – living God’s future now. It is a vision in which those who are blind or deaf or otherwise disabled have a valued place as those who, like Jesus, have come through exclusion to join in at the table. That is the vision that Alan Stewart sets out so compellingly for us in his Last Supper image. See and believe.
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June Boyce-Tillman - We Shall Go Out.
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