‘It was true in the ancient world, and it’s still present today’

In the lead-up to Disability Inclusion Sunday, Presbyterians for Disability Concerns offers a webinar on healing stories recorded in Mark’s gospel

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

Photo by Nathan Anderson via Unsplash

LOUISVILLE — Ahead of Sunday’s gospel lectionary passage found in Mark 7:24-37, Presbyterians for Disability Concerns hosted an informative webinar on having a disability theology perspective headed into Disability Inclusion Sunday, which is celebrated on Sept. 8.

Watch the 36-minute webinar, featuring Hunter Steinitz, the Rev. Dr. Bethany McKinney Fox and the Rev. Dr. Joanne Van Sant, by going here. A worship packet created by PDC for Disability Inclusion Sunday is here.

Steinitz is a candidate for ministry in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Moderator of PDC. Fox is the PC(USA)’s consultant for intellectual disability and neurodiversity and pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. Ordained as a PC(USA) pastor, Van Sant serves Friends to Friends Community Church, a Reformed Church of America congregation in Ridgewood, New Jersey, that is made up primarily of people with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

The three speakers divided the Mark passage into its two main parts: the account of the Syrophoenician woman’s faith, and the account of Jesus curing a deaf man.

“I am intrigued by the little girl and the spirit she has, whatever that means,” Steinitz said of the first healing story.

The Rev. Dr. Joanne Van Sant

Van Sant noted in New Testament times, “it was people with disabilities, people with mental illness, people who were not like the others who were determined to have sicknesses or evil and demonic spirits because people just didn’t understand what that was.” Van Sant talked about a woman she volunteers alongside who has a daughter on the autism spectrum who “needs pretty much 24/7 support. We were talking about healing and what that means” for her daughter in her context, Van Sant said. The woman’s daughter “doesn’t necessarily need to be healed from who she is. But in this context of the ancient times, she would have been looked at very differently.”

Steinitz noted the girl in Mark’s gospel “never actually appears in the story itself.” Her name is not mentioned, and no quotes are attributed to her. “For all intents and purposes, the text treats her like an object,” Steinitz said, “and the hard part is, she’s a person. The people we interact with on a daily basis, with and without disabilities, are fully complex people, and not always is that represented fully in the way the text describes these individuals.”

“What does the advocacy look like?” Fox asked. “I wonder how this woman came [to the house where Jesus was staying].” Also startling is that this part of the text “has nothing to do with faith. It’s really that this woman bested Jesus in an argument.”

The Rev. Dr. Bethany McKinney Fox (Contributed photo)

“At the end we see Jesus affirming that he has been bested by the way she has talked to him, and for that reason her daughter is now without the unclean spirit,” Fox said. “I think I would be careful how we talk about the advocacy of the mom.”

“It’s hard, right? Because I’m thinking about my own story,” said Steinitz, who was born with a rare genetic skin disorder and says she “would not have survived” without her mother’s advocacy.

“And there’s the challenge when a parent doesn’t know what their child actually wants,” Steinitz said. “If that child wants to try this new treatment or wants to try out this new accommodation or wants to go see this doctor for the 11^th time. … Sometimes parents assume they know what their child needs or wants, and thus don’t consult them. Conflicts can ensue because the agency of the actually disabled person takes a backseat.”

“That dichotomy is strange and strained,” Steinitz said. “It was true in the ancient world, and it’s still present today.”

“It’s a complicated and difficult system to navigate, especially when you are the person’s voice,” Van Sant said. “Like most of the people I work with, the people the parents are advocating for don’t really have the capacity to advocate for themselves.” In the Mark passage, “We generally unpack the mother’s conversation with Jesus and rarely look at the actual subject or object of the text, which is the daughter.”

The fact that the woman is Syrophoenician means “she would be expected to be rebuffed based on her status,” Fox said. “People are treated differently based on all kinds of interactions.”

Jesus cures a deaf man

Mention of the man’s speech impediment in the second account got Steinitz to thinking of Moses. “It was the whole reason that he said to God, ‘Why me? I can’t do this. I can’t event talk.’ And God’s like, ‘No, man. I’ve got you,’” Steinitz said. “What God didn’t do was take away his speech impediment. He gave Moses an accommodation that was his brother. That’s a very different story, but I feel like this kind of echoes it in some interesting and strange ways. … I have to imagine this poor man had a terrible time trying to communicate with anybody because he couldn’t hear them, and he couldn’t communicate with them.”

Again, the man “is kind of a passive participant in his story,” Fox said. The “they” who brought him to Jesus isn’t made clear. “Is it folks from his community? Is it his family? Is it people who love him? Is it people who are annoyed by him?” Fox asked. “One place we need to focus, just like in the first text, is recognizing that this is a human in his own right, with dignity.”

Not everyone in the Deaf community “think of it as a disability at all,” Fox said. “It’s just kind of a cultural difference that has its own language and its own cultural expectations and norms and isn’t something that’s wrong that needs to be healed.”

Van Sant pointed out the text can be read as people putting Jesus to the test. “They want to see if Jesus really can do it, because we know that Jesus was tested all the time about his divinity and the power that he had.” Often Jesus healed people “for the glory of God or to show the community and restore the community.”

“Is his response compassion for the person to be healed from these disabilities, or is it to just respond to the crowd or the people who brought him along?” Van Sant asked. “Again, did the person actually ask to be healed of these things? As ableist as we are, we assume if you were deaf you would want to hear, and if you didn’t have language, you would want to speak. But is that just really an assumption on our part? We don’t ask someone. We just assume they would want what we would want.”

Hunter Steinitz (Photo courtesy of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)

“I am particularly drawn to the fact that Jesus takes him off” into a private conversation, Steinitz said. “The text doesn’t tell us that they had a conversation, but I would like to think that they had some sort of interaction with one another” because “there are times when Jesus can read the hearts of the people around him and truly feel compassion for them.”

The implication that this man’s tongue was released “implies that it was being bound” and was “preventing him from speaking ‘properly,’” Steinitz said. “I think it gets to the idea of barriers, the idea that there are barriers between people with disabilities and full participation in the world and community around them.” While the most obvious barrier is the man’s deafness, “maybe the bigger barrier was that he couldn’t communicate with his community, and his community clearly seemed to not be super interested in communicating with him the way he was. They wanted to communicate with him in a different way.”

Fox noted the “interconnection between people who have diverse bodies and [diverse] brains. Are we all interconnected enough in our communities to care about the flourishing of everyone? Are we that invested that when somebody experiences some kind of transformation that takes them toward wholeness, whether or not that looks like a cure, that we’re all rejoicing so much that it literally cannot be contained?”

“Even Jesus cannot stop it,” Fox said, “because the power is so profound.”

From 1 p.m. through 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, Sept. 10, the Office of Christian Formation will hold its Faith Formation Leader Connection Community Circle on disability inclusion. Learn more here. Register here.