Disability theologians have offered life-giving, non-ableist ways to make sense of Jesus’s healing stories, like the one in today’s gospel. Healing narratives cause harm when the takeaway is that Disabled people need to be healed from their disability in order to live a full life, or that disability is connotated with sin. Even everyday speech is full of ableist metaphors – such as using blindness for ignorance or the phrase “falling on deaf ears.”

Disabled writers, such as Amar D. Peterman, help us see Jesus’s healings as communal healings more than physical healings. Jesus restores right relationships, affirms people’s dignity and humanity in a context where they were dehumanized, ridiculed, and excluded. Jesus brings them back into community and challenges the community to love and do likewise. 

In today’s gospel, a group of people bring a Deaf person before Jesus and beg him to heal this person (not unlike some Christians today who pray over and lay hands on Disabled people without their consent).

But Jesus takes the Deaf person away from the noise of the crowd so they’re not reduced to a spectacle. Jesus spits on the ground and mixes it with the earth and in an act of intimacy offers the Deaf person a loving and non-exploitative touch. Jesus does this so that this person can return to their community and not be excluded any longer, so they could communicate with others. In a more just society, perhaps the group of people who brought the Deaf person to Jesus would have instead honored the needs of this person in community and learned to communicate with them.

Another story is on my mind while reading today’s gospel. In the article “What it means to be Deaf and Palestinian in Gaza,” Ryan Al-Natour reports on stories of Deaf Palestinians in the aftermath of October 7th. The IDF destroyed the community center for Deaf Palestinians in Gaza City, scattering their community. A 22-year-old Deaf Palestinian, Mohammed Nahd Banar, was murdered in February 2024. Al-Natour writes that he could not hear the bullets fired at him, and as “he lay dying on the ground surrounded by hearing people who could not sign, he wrote his name in the sand so he could be identified when he died.”

War disables people. In addition to PTSD, the top two health conditions among military veterans are hearing loss and tinnitus (ringing in the ears). Civilians with disabilities, including Deaf and hard of hearing people, often lack access to important information to keep them safe. There are stories coming out of Gaza of people who can’t hear bombs and have to be woken up.

I think about Jesus’s encounter with the Deaf person in the gospel, mixing his saliva with sand and touching their ear, and Mohammed writing his name in the sand so people would know who he was. That he existed, that his life and breath and gifts mattered.

Jesus calls everyone by name. He offers loving acts of intimacy – by intimacy I mean being fully known, loved, and held completely as we are – and solidarity in the midst of violence. Only God has claim to our very beings – no oppressive system or rhetoric can claim that part of who we are. Jesus brings us away from the crowd to that intimate place, grounding us in our dignity in the midst of a scary political landscape and global violence. 

Through Jesus’s example, what acts of solidarity can we offer to other human beings to remind us of our humanness and belovedness? Can we go where society detests? Can we be brave and bold even if we might be judged or misunderstood? How can we ask for and find intimacy with Christ to strengthen us and give us sustenance in the face of harsh realities? In the temptation to give up and be hopeless, we pray along with Isaiah:

Strengthen all weary hands,
steady all trembling knees.
Say to all those of faint heart:
“Take courage! Do not be afraid!

Contemplative exercise

1. Learn a few phrases in sign language (Amar Mangat is a fun follow on Instagram), and read stories about people with disabilities living in warzones. (For example: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2879438818888196)
2. Reflecting on Jesus’s care toward the Deaf person in today’s gospel, and disability justice activist Alice Wong who writes that “Intimacy is more than sex or romantic love. Intimacy is an ever-expanding universe composed of a myriad of heavenly bodies. Intimacy is about relationships within a person’s self, with others, with communities, with nature, and beyond” (Disability Intimacy, Vintage, 2024) – take some time to reflect on the ways you experience intimacy in your life, and what this intimacy teaches you about justice and how it gives you sustenance in a harsh world.

Nancy Rourke is a Deaf artist who uses sign language, ears, and hand imagery in her primary-colored paintings. In this one, called The Heart Hand Tree (2016), she paints a tree with arms for the trunk and roots, palms and fingers for branches and leaves, with a beating anatomical heart in its tree-chest. It reminds me of Jesus’s act of spitting and touching the ground, human flesh and vulnerability being the site of growth and shared futures, our connection with the earth and how we are radically bound up in one another.