John 9:1-41
A year later he would end up dead in his City Hall office, assassinated with the same gun that was used to murder Harvey Milk, but in 1977, George Moscone was still the mayor of San Francisco.
That April, advocates for people with disabilities occupied federal offices around the country, demanding that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 be implemented. The legislation prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities by any organization receiving federal funds.
San Francisco rallied to the cause. Mayor Moscone sent mattresses to the activists occupying the office of Joseph Maldonado, the regional director for what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The local Black Panther Party sent ribs and fried chicken.
Twenty three days later, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed off on the implementation of 504. It would take another thirteen years before the Americans with Disabilities Act would extend protection for those with disabilities to all public spaces.
Judy Heumann, who died earlier this month, was one of the young activists in the San Francisco office. She would go on to serve in the Clinton Administration, and as an inspiration to many. It is hard to imagine, today, that she was turned away from school as a young child, called a “fire hazard.” Some in this room were alive when people with disabilities were routinely hidden away, institutionalized and warehoused, considered a family’s shame.
Discrimination against those with disabilities is a cross-cultural phenomena. The Nazis perfected the art of mass killing with Aktion T4, the state slaughter of the physically and mentally disabled in 1939. Though initial reports in the West found over 70k victims, the discovery of archival material in the former East Germany suggests the actual death toll was three to four times that amount.
Today’s reading, from the gospel traditionally attributed to John, often gets glossed over, the tie to that classic hymn “Amazing Grace” providing the preacher with an excuse to avoid a long and difficult subject. If a preacher does dare to dig into the text at all, they might mistakenly focus on the sabbath violation, or on the general antagonism between Jesus and the group identified in this text as Jews, though the former would be to miss the point and the latter would be to misuse it.
We, on the other hand, are going to take it head on, hoping to discover why this story is so unique, different than the numerous healings we find in the four gospels.
First, let’s bracket off the worst part of the gospel reading, the supposed dispute between the movement led by Jesus and the Jews. It didn’t happen, at least not when Jesus was around.
Saying Jesus was in conflict with the Jews is like saying we are in conflict with Christians. We disagree with some expressions of Christianity, might even go so far as to consider them heretical, but we are Christians, unwilling to surrender our birthright and belief to extremists.
In the same way, Jesus was a Jew, at least as we understand the term Jew in that context, Judea and Galilee in the last decades before the Jewish War of 70 C.E. Jews were not one thing in that time anymore than Christians are one thing today, and they certainly were not throwing the followers of Jesus out of the synagogues in 30 C.E. After the war, some Jewish movements would fade away, some reform, and the Jesus movement would take on a distinct identity. With the Temple destroyed, the synagogue would become the center of Jewish religious life. It is true that at that moment of crisis and reconstruction, more than four decades after Jesus was executed, some of his followers were banned from local synagogues. As often happens in scripture, later authors are inserting their concerns into an earlier era.
Second, let’s be honest about how people with disability were treated in the biblical age and specifically in the Israelite religion. We get a clue early on in the reading, when the disciples ask Jesus whose sin caused the man to be born blind. Just like today, when people didn’t understand something that happened, they made stuff up, but they understood a whole lot less about things like biology then than we do now. They believed that bad things happened to bad people and good things happened to good people, that the invading army was God’s punishment for idolatry, that the sin of the parents could cause a child to be born blind, a sort of direct karma, though not always instant as it was often passed generationally, blessing and curses going to the undeserved. We know better these days, except when we don’t, when we do mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that the poor deserve to be poor, when we go on and on about “bootstraps.”
Not only did the ancients believe that disability was divine punishment, they also believed that people with disabilities were unclean, not suitable for inclusion in the cult practices of the religion, not suitable for inclusion in the socio-economic system, for contact with the unclean made you unclean. We might be horrified that the man born blind was forced to beg, that his parents, who are part of the story, were not caring for him, that he wasn’t given the opportunity to learn a craft that didn’t require sight, but in that context he was not only worthless, he was a threat to social order.
And this is the real power of the story, the part that is lost when we turn our attention to the inspiring story of John Newton and “Amazing Grace” or when we fall into the easy antisemitism of making this about the sabbath healing and legalism. For this is a story about inclusion.
Jesus is not a “woke” 21st century human. He does not deny or debate the idea that sin causes disability. It is as misguided to try to bring Jesus into our time as it is to drag our culture back to the misogyny and tribalism of the First Century. But what Jesus does do is miraculous and meaningful in his context, for he completes an unfinished creation.
In some ways, this story is a more powerful demonstration of divinity than his words, for he takes clay, “adamah,” in the ancient Hebrew, and completes the man born blind, for the mythical Adam is a being of clay. Jesus then sends the man off to bathe, not in order to wash away the clay, but in order to be made clean, for the Pool of Siloam was the equivalent of a mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath. The Jerusalem Talmud describes the Pool of Siloam as the spot where Israelites underwent purification as part of their pilgrimage to the Temple, the lowest spot in the city before they ascended to the highest.
The idea that he would be excluded from community because he was born blind is so foreign to us that we keep defaulting back to eyesight as the miraculous outcome. But it is community that is the miraculous outcome.
Go back and re-read the story, paying attention to the forms of address. The challengers, the interrogators, continue to refer to the man born blind as “he” or when addressing him, as “you.” They refer to themselves as “we.” He is, to them, still outside. They cannot conceive of a way he might become part of the community.
But when he responds, he intentionally uses “we.” “We know that…” He is already part of the community, no longer unclean because he is no longer blind, is now a complete creation, and has been ritually purified at Siloam.
There is this whole back and forth with the man, with his parents, accusations, crazy stuff really, the sort of thing you might hear on Fox News or Infowars or 4chan these days, all buried under the concerns of later decades, but at the heart of the story is this thing we so easily overlook and so terribly important.
This is the story of someone who has always been other, has never been one of us, now integrated into the community. He was a sign of sin, and is now a sign of grace, the very thing in that beloved hymn.
When Judy Heumann, quadriplegic polio victim, was denied an early elementary education, it did not demonstrate that she was less human. It demonstrated that those who were blocking the doors were less human. And when she and her companions won, first with the implementation of Section 504 and then with the Americans with Disabilities act, it did not make anyone less. It made us all more.
And I don’t need to tell you that. Sure, you might have learned to read this particular story in a different way, but it wasn’t like you believed all of that primitive stuff about sin and disability and ritual purity anyway. We are good, progressive, and inclusive, committed antiracists, womanists, LGBTQI+ affirming. We don’t need lessons in extravagant welcome.
Or do we?
Some of us have been the outsider and are not really sure we are welcome.
Some of us have doubted that the one who has been restored to our community is really whole and clean.
We may not lock the doors to those born blind, but there are so many doors locked to those who have suffered from addiction, mental illness, have been convicted of a crime. And in this nation where slave patrols simply took a new form, where brutality comes in the form of men with badges, politicians with budget cuts, and C.E.O.s with the latest neoliberal scam, there will always be the unclean.
The man born blind is no longer a man born blind. There is a queer kid in Florida who doesn’t believe they are God-made and God-loved. There is a young woman in Missouri not ready to be a mother. There is an elder trapped in a home as the waters rise, microplastics and toxins, as we rush headlong into climate-change suicide. Flint is broke and the water is poison. Must be their own fault, right? If a bad thing happened, they must be bad, right?
And the innocent man, who heals and preaches love, moves closer to Golgotha. Amen.