From Healing to Liberation

The miracle stories featured heavily in Sunday school lessons during my childhood. These include accounts in the gospels of Jesus healing sick and disabled people, like the paralysed man at Capernaum and the bleeding woman on the way to Jairus’s house. I was taught that these stories evidence Jesus’s power and love, but also that they proved that with enough faith a person could be healed of any ailment.

It was only in adulthood that I started to appreciate that the lessons I’d received are incredibly damaging. Firstly, the disabled protagonists in these stories were reduced to objects, rendered nothing more than plot devices in the Bible in ways that mirror how disabled people alive today are often objectified and turned into moral lessons for non-disabled people.

Secondly, when taught in this way these miracle stories can produce attitudes that are eugenic. The end-goal of any encounter with disability becomes its eradication, usually via prayers that God’s power and love intervene again until there are no longer any disabled people. There is no room for conversations about how to meet the needs of disabled people exactly as they are, let alone for accepting that disabled lives, just as is the case with non-disabled lives, are fruitful as well as frustrating, beautiful as well as painful.

Disability theologians like Kathy Black have countered such damaging readings of the miracle stories. In A Healing Homiletic, Black zeroes in on the point in the narratives when previously disabled people are restored to their communities. Their healing makes them able to participate in society without the restrictions of sickness and its alienating rules. On this basis, one of the most important aspects of these stories is that disabled people were brought back into the fold. Rather than fixating on curing disabled people, we should instead be healing our communities by making them inclusive.

I value this interpretation because giving disabled people a seat at the table has the potential to produce meaningful social change. However, I’m more drawn to arguments that would have us overturn the table entirely.

In her book Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, the postcolonial theologian Sharon V. Betcher grapples with the miracle stories as events that took place under empire. Betcher recognises that the Roman Empire, like all empires, was disabling. She writes that it was common for prisoners of war at that time to be physically disfigured as punishment and for that disablement to be used both as a marker of their social status and a means of preventing their escape. The nature of work for Rome’s most marginalised citizens was disabling, and many of Jesus’s followers will have been disabled.

Read with this political context in mind, it becomes harder to claim the miracle stories are simply about individual lives being transformed by God – powerful, essential, and truthful as that messaging can be. Rather, the fact that many disabilities were caused by imperialism means that the reversal of any disability in that context could be read as a threat to the social order. Betcher distils her position by reference to the following liturgical refrain, which is carried from Isaiah to Luke and Matthew: “the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear”. Under empire, this refrain turns into a political mantra; the expression of a desire for the reversal of disability as a common consequence of imperialism can speak to a desire for the reversal of imperialism itself.

Perhaps this seems like a stretch, but what happens when we remember that what was true of ancient Rome is also true of colonial and imperial powers in modern history and the present day? As one of countless examples, between 1885 to 1908 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the chopping off of limbs by Belgian colonial administrators was a common punishment for failure by enslaved Congolese people to meet rubber quotas. Today, cobalt mining in the DRC (undertaken to make the rechargeable batteries in our smartphones and laptops) is greatly increasing the risk of spina bifida and limb abnormalities in Congolese children, while all miners face the risk of decreased lung function as a result of inhaling cobalt particles.

A senior UN official recently stated that Gaza, subjected for decades now to apartheid rule and currently the site of a catastrophic genocide, has the largest number of amputee children in modern history.[1] Palestinians are being disabled en masse by bombings, PTSD, and lack of access to food, water, and sanitation.

Oil companies have stripped the lands of indigenous people in Alberta, Canada and set up toxic oil operations that poison the air for indigenous communities still living in the area. Short-term exposure to the types of chemicals emitted can increase the risk of cancer and respiratory illnesses.

Not all disabilities are occasioned by state or corporate violence, but the political content of the liturgical refrain becomes clear when we recognise that modern-day colonialism and imperialism[2] are dependent for their success on the mass disablement of marginalised people around the world. The point isn’t to simply use those Bible verses to express a desire for a literal reversal of these disabilities or for individualised or medicalised cures. Instead, the refrain can be read as a use of the imagination in political resistance; a world where the disabilities described above cannot be occasioned or can be reversed is necessarily one in which empire’s table has been overturned and vastly different economic relations exist. This would benefit us all, including those of us living at the heart of an empire (albeit a dying one) in London, given that much of the disabling violence practised abroad is replicated within England’s borders.

We could, therefore, expand the refrain to include reversals of disabilities caused by today’s imperial powers: the blind see, the maimed walk, the deaf hear, the suffocated breathe, the poisoned depurate, the traumatised are unburdened. This is a threat to sing into the heart of empire. Enacting this promise alongside the world’s oppressed is how we could allow ourselves to be manifestations of God’s power and love, capable of performing the miracle of abolishing empire’s violent structures in all their forms.

[1] Following a claim brought by South Africa at the end of last year, the International Court of Justice found that it’s plausible that the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza could amount to genocide. Moreover, the UN Special Raporteur Francesca Albanese stated in March 2024 that there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to state that the specific legal conditions for the government’s actions to be described as genocide have been met. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976

[2] Broadly speaking, the political and economic exploitation by highly industrialised nations of less industrialised nations.