“And then she said ‘Sometimes I wonder if Jesus had Down Syndrome?’ And the whole place went silent.” John Swinton, Scottish theologian, academic and Presbyterian minister, was telling the story of an incident at a conference in France that impacted him. “And the place just went silent,” Swinton continued. ”What does that mean? Um, and we all began to think, what does it mean when somebody says something like that? What does it mean to say, I wonder if, if Jesus had Down Syndrome? Cause he opened up spaces that weren’t available to other people. He had relationship with people. And it became a real challenge. If we can’t imagine Jesus, who Paul says is the image of God, if we can’t imagine Jesus having Down Syndrome, then what does that tell us about, uh, the image of God?
”What does that tell us about the way in which we respond to and understand people who live with Down syndrome? What does that that idea in our mind tell us about how we have conceived God to be probably in our own image in that sense?”
Swinton was giving the keynote at an evening on disability and the church, organised by Anglican Deaconess Ministries and our Place Christian Communities. The audience was challenged by Swinton, in Australia for Hammondcare, and panellists Louise Gosbell and Kirk Patston from Our Place, which seeks to create “places of belonging for people living with disability.” ‘It was an evening of challenging many assumptions, both conscious and unconscious.
Swinton suggested that reading Scripture “reframes” the way we see things, opening up new ways of seeing, much like a therapist seeks to do.
“God chooses disabled people at key moments in his history of redemption. He chooses them as people who, without them being there, couldn’t do the things that God wants. So let me give you a couple of examples. So Moses in Exodus 4,:10–17, it’s a lovely story. So Moses more or less receives his vocation at that time. So God gives him that task to do, to lead the people of Israel to do all the things that move towards the promised Land, right?
“And what is Moses’s response? He says, ‘I can’t do it. I’ve got a stutter.’ And God says, ‘Well, do what you’re told.’ Now, the key thing there is God doesn’t say, ‘I’ll heal you when you do it.’ He says, ‘Do what you’re told. I’ll give you people to help you, but do what you’re told and go and do that thing.’
So there’s something very important in there. And even in that passage, there’s something even more mysterious. Because God says, who do you think does these things? Who do you think makes blind people blind? Who do you think does, makes people who can’t speak unable to speak and so on? I don’t know what that means. It’s a mystery that God [says that]. But what it means at a minimum is that the experience of disability is a place where God is.”
Swinton also raised the issue of our word-based practices of faith. “But one of the things that always struck me as a Christian as difficult, because I’m a Presbyterian, right? So that’s, that doesn’t make me a bad person, it just makes me a Presbyterian. The, uh, and so like everything for us is, uh, is words, right? So you preach the word, you share the word through evangelism, you, uh, listen to the words, you find your salvation through words and so on. And so everything comes around, uh, ends up in, in some kind of words, which is, uh, there’s nothing wrong with words. But when you find yourself sitting with somebody who’s a profound intellectual disability who has no words and no possibility of ever having words, or if you find yourself with somebody with advanced dementia who’s lost all of their words in that sense, then you have to, you have to think again. if God can only be understood through words, does that mean that these guys are never going to hear or understand who God is?”
In the panel discussion, the question of the image of God was raised once more. Dr Louise Gosbell discussed the consequences of thinking that it is about rationality. “Speaker 8 (51:52):
I think it ends up being this dehumanizing process. If we start to think, well, somehow that person with an intellectual disability carries less of the image of God than the rest of us. And so do we really need to work that hard to make our church communities inclusive for those people? Because, you know, they’re not quite the same as us. And I, I think there’s a real danger in that that ends up, um, that ends up thinking, yes, you carry less of the image of God and therefore you’re not perhaps as valuable or worthwhile as everybody else is here. And so there are huge consequences for that.”
Moderator Staff Judd drew attention, later to what many of us in the audience may have been thinking – there is an irony in a meeting discussing this in thousands of words.
Judd challenged the panel on whether the Bibles use of disability as metaphor was problematic. Kirk Patston gave a robust response.
in our Australian culture at the moment, there’s a, a movement to think of disability only in terms of diversity. So autism we’re saying less and less in neurodiversity, we’re saying more and more, and we’re celebrating difference in variety. And I’m really pleased about that…
Speaker 5 (01:05:55):
But it’s, it’s not the whole story. Um, we want to be able to stop, honestly, as humans and say, sometimes the varieties of ways of being human are painful and difficult, and they, we don’t enjoy them. So, um, and so then if I was to pick out an experience and say that was a difficult experience, I’m not saying that the whole person is undervalued. So, um, a biblical writer might be searching for a metaphor and will go to blind thinking, well, that’s a, you know, that’s an experience that misses out on something. But I’m not making a value judgment or describing the whole of the life of a, of a person who’s blind.
“So, I’ve got a son with intellectual impairment. The first time I took him to some sporting thing, cricket or rugby league or something, probably cricket, knowing him.
“I took him to use the bathroom. He uses the cubicle. When he’d finished using the cubicle out he came, he knew he had to wash his hands, and he headed to the urinal to put his hands in to wash it, because he could sense that water was coming down there. Now, um, well, what do I say? That’s part of the variety of being human.? Some, people wash their hands in the urinal? That’sa lovely point of difference.? Well, I actually said, ‘No, Jerrah, you, you’re not gonna wash your hands in the urinal. This is a basin over here, and this is where we’re going. Go wash your hands.’ So now imagine if I was preaching that week, I might have said, you know, ‘God offers us living water, and it’s like, we want to go over and wash our hands in the urinal.’
“You know, that might have been my illustration because of what I just experienced. Was I dissing Jerrah or was I saying that everyone with intellectual disability is not valuable? I don’t think so. I was just saying that that particular experience had something wrong in it. AI feel like I’m sort of, I may be walking on politically difficult territory, but I’d like to think that there’s a way of us being able to say, um, variety is a great way of thinking about the human experience, but it’s also valid to say some human experiences are painful.”
Full video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssm8qz2S0oo
Our Place Christian Communities: http://ourplacecc.org.au
Image: Professor John Swinton speaks at the Church and Disability evening. Credit: Church and Disability via Steff Judd facebook