day 12 / embodying an anti-ableist Advent

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day 12 / embodying an anti-ableist Advent

Thursday, December 9, 2021
BCP Readings: Psalm 37:1-42 | Amos 9:1-10 | Revelation 2:8-17 | Matthew 23:13-26

Advent heralds hoped-for transformation. But what “after” photo are we holding on the “before” side when it comes to the bodies we are? What alterations to our bodies and the bodies of others do we envision? What experiences in the “before” photo are absent in the “after” one? What things appear in the “after” photo that were not in the “before” one?

In the contemporary U.S., a host of norms about how bodies are supposed to function, look, grow, and change vies to determine the whole photo shoot. Among them, inequitable ableist judgments label certain genetic, anatomical, physiological, and developmental differences that bodies express as problems. These judgments not only disregard the very humanity of bodies with disabilities, but also work to shame all bodies into striving to measure up to their narrow, unrealistic ideal.

Some of Christianity’s Advent rhetoric only compounds the harm of America’s ableist social order when that order is left unchallenged. Consider the Luke 1 story of Zechariah developing a speech impairment when he does not take the angel at their word. Or take Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:16 as “blind” in their teaching and practices. When these stories show up in the Advent season in an ableist social context, a series of false beliefs about God, redemption, and new creation can arise:

  • Christians may assume that body features and processes that American society labels as impairments or disabilities can only be counter-imagery for Advent hopes and fulfillments. [1]
  • They may conclude that non-disabled bodies are the theological ideal and interpret disabilities as consequences of sin (like the disciples in John 9)—or worse, divine punishment.
  • They may even become convinced that God shares American society’s ableist perspective when God looks at the bodies God made.

Advent, however, is not about a God intent on changing bodies to conform to an ableist kingdom. Advent transformation looks like another image that Jesus invokes in Matthew 23: swallowing.

When Jesus says to the Pharisees, “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel” (Mt 23:24), he brings the question of how to live faithfully into bodies that need to eat and drink. His analogy presents more than a figurative appeal to discerning better how to follow God’s law so that neither gnats nor camels end up in the cup. Swallowing connects “the weightier matters of the law” that Jesus names, “justice and mercy and faith,” with the body. His comparison shows human bodies that they need justice, mercy, and faith like they need water and food. They may even need justice, mercy, and faith in order to meet their needs for clean water and nourishing food in the middle of unjust systems.

The bodily activity involved in swallowing also illuminates the active, ongoing work that justice, mercy, and faith need from bodies. These weightier matters are not passive, disembodied notions. They are embodied practices for embodied people. They dwell in and among bodies. No bodies are excluded from doing these practices, and no bodies are excluded from receiving the justice, mercy, and faith that they need.

This is the “after” photo that I think Advent is about. Bodies loved by God as they are. Bodies transforming inequitable systems that disempower people with disabilities. Bodies hungry and thirsty for an anti-ableist life with God and one another.

How might you embody an anti-ableist Advent?

Notes & References

1. The post as a whole, but especially this point in particular, is indebted to and inspired by the work of biblical scholars like Rebecca Raphael that have drawn critical attention to prophetic texts’ portrayal of God’s salvific activity as involving the elimination of disabilities from bodies. See Rebecca Raphael, Biblical Corpora: Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature (T&T Clark, 2008), 10.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Image of “Film” is by Kumiko Shimizu on the Unsplash website.