At last week’s Lent course as we considered the life of Jesus we thought about Jesus and Disability and the things we can learn about Jesus from the way he interacted with disabled people.
Maybe the first thing we need to learn is that Jesus asked disabled people what they wanted. We considered blind Bartimaeus and the man at the pool in Bethesda, noting that each time Jesus posed a question to the disabled person about what they wanted before he acted. It made me reflect that too often the church acts towards disabled people before they have asked what they want - this is particularly true in relation to healing. Maybe we need to be more Christ-like in our approaches to those of us who are disabled, asking questions rather than making assumptions.
Secondly we noted how radical Jesus was in interacting with the disabled people that society would shun. At the great banquet, which Jesus used as a parable for the Kingdom of God in Luke 14, the table was filled with “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” (v.21). We learn that in the topsy turvy world of Jesus where values are upside down and inside out, those who are overlooked and cast out are actually important.
The challenge to us therefore is whether we can be more like Christ in our interactions with other people, giving them value and importance when society treats them in the opposite way. Can we learn to view people differently? As the poem we concluded with suggests, we will need God’s help to do this:
When we are blind to your presence
in the eyes of the poor,
blind to the perfection
that lies visibly before us,
blind to your handiwork,
blind to your care,
blind to the signs
that you scatter all around us:
Father, heal our sight.
“Blindness and Sight” Gerard Kelly Spoken Worship
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