“Truly, I saw to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40. This is how Jesus says we minister to him, when we serve the least of these. Maybe that phrase translates better in our context as the marginalized, the unseen, the disabled, the minority. But these are also people who God highly honors, loves, loves so much even to the point of death on the cross. This reality is what Taylor discusses in chapter nine of A Body of Praise.
As he’s been discussing our physical bodies in the church and in worship, he wrestles with the aspect of our broken or disabled bodies. Our bodies are broken, no one has a perfect body. But, there are people who have bodies that don’t fit in our idea of a “normal” body. Taylor describes these bodies, these people, as: the disabled body, the invisible body, and the digital body. Whether someone is of an ethnic minority, paralyzed from the waist down, or not physically present, these are all bodies and people that get overlooked or less attention than the rest. But, God loves them just as much as he loves the “normal” bodies. He still broke his body for the disabled ones. Jesus himself wasn’t incarnate into a “perfect body,” he had scares, he had blemishes, he was unassuming, just like everyone else, despised and rejected.
However, one of the things I wrestled with in this reading and the content of what was discussed, was how to live in the tension of honoring the disabled but also longing for restoration of all things. I grew up believing that all disabilities should be healed, that that is God’s desire for humanity. But from what Taylor wrote, it leaves me to question that belief. Does God actually design people to be disabled? Do all disabled people actually want to be healed, or just seen? If we pressure people to just keep praying for the disabled then it can become toxic for the person, implementing beliefs that they need to be fixed and God doesn’t like them how they are. But, God actually does really love the least of these. He really loves them because he made them and their his child. It is a tension that I know won’t be resolved overnight, but leads me to ponder how the Church should respond to such things.
Commenti