Wednesday, January 29, 2025: Healing Beyond the Cure

 

Disability rights activist and author Amy Kenny challenges the implications of Jesus’ healing of “the blind man” in John 9, whom she refers to as Zach or Zechariah, which means “God remembers.” 

Jesus Heals Zechariah, a Man Born Blind

9 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus

6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

8 His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some claimed that he was.

Others said, “No, he only looks like him.”

But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”

10 “How then were your eyes opened?” they asked.

11 He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”

Zach is so much more than his blindness…. Structurally, the focus [of John 9] is not on the physical but on something deeper and richer that Jesus offers to Zach. It is true that Jesus cured people’s bodies as part of his ministry, but this passage is often misinterpreted to perpetuate the notion that disabled people require physical modification to be complete. 

Jesus’s ministry is not all about a physical cure but about holistic healing. 

Today, we typically think of illness (and sometimes disability) as biological, with Western medicine set up to find and cure disease directly…. Folks in Jesus’s day thought about healing in much broader terms. They talked about healing as restoring relationships and integrating someone back into social and religious systems. 

The Greek word often used in Scripture for healing is sozo, which means “to make whole” or “to save.” It’s the same word used to talk about salvation. Jesus’s healing is not purely about a physical alteration but about reestablishing right relationship between humanity and God and, hopefully, between individuals and community. 

Healing allows people to flourish. Modern medicine still recognizes the difference between curing and healing. Curing is a physical process…. [Healing] focuses on restoring interpersonal, social, and spiritual dimensions. It’s lengthy and ongoing because it’s a process of becoming whole…. 

Zach received a physical cure … when he emerged from the pool able to see, but his true healing does not occur until much later in the chapter when he declares, “Lord, I believe.. (9:38). That’s the moment he’s restored through a conversation with the living God and is finally able to reach the place of worship he’s been excluded from. 

Jesus is always tearing down the boundaries we put up, and here Jesus reveals the unnecessary barriers of kingdom exclusion. Everyone is now welcome at the table!  

Kenny writes of the fullness of God’s image found in the diversity of people’s physical and mental abilities: 

To assume that my disability needs to be erased in order for me to live an abundant life is disturbing not only because of what it says about me but also because of what it reveals about people’s notions of God. 

I bear the image of the Alpha and the Omega. My disabled body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. I have the mind of Christ…. I don’t have a junior holy spirit because I am disabled. To suggest that I am anything less than sanctified is to suppress the image of God in my disabled body and to limit how God is already at work through my life. 

Maybe we need to be freed not from disability but from the notion that it limits my ability to showcase God’s radiance to the church.