In the popular mind, there are two kinds of people: normal and abnorma1, normal and deformed, normal and disabled. Some are okay, others are not. But if pressed, we soon discover that almost everyone has disabilities, and that we are not talking about an either/or, but a continuum that runs from slightly disabled to extremely disabled. Let me use myself as an example. I have been relatively healthy all my life, so that neither I nor those who know me would describe me as a person with disabilities. Nevertheless, in certain ways I am. My feet have hammertoes, and they have become increasingly painful, so that now I am unable to walk much more than a mile. I have had chronic back pains since injuring my back as a child. I have had irregular heartbeats, so I don’t drink caffeine. I have hypoglycemia so I don’t eat sugar.
Minor things, all, but that is precisely my point. Press anyone who looks “normal†and you will probably find, instead, a person with disabilities. Yet such people do not define themselves as “disabled.†They think of themselves as normal people with disabilities. Now those who are sensitive to these issues are trying to help us see that all of us are acceptable, regardless of our disabilities. The problem, then, is not with those with disabilities, but with the very idea of “normalcy.†I want to work this idea of normalcy over, because I suspect that it is the source of the real trouble.
There are three sources of this pernicious notion of normalcy:
- Hebraic cultic thought,
- Greek aesthetic norms, and
- Values of the Enlightenment.
The idea of normalcy is not only at the root of the mistreatment of people with disabilities, it is a pathological notion that creates illness, persecution and the rejection of our God-given uniqueness.
Blemish in Hebraic thought
In Hebraic sacrificial practice, both the gift offered to God, and the priest who makes the offering, must be “without blemish.†This phrase, “without blemish,†does not refer to some standard of perfection, as in later Greek thought. It flows rather from the belief that the gift must be the best one has — not the culls from the herd, not the runt lambs and three-legged goats, but the very best. One does not offer God the cast-offs but rather the most valued.
And the priest making the offering is to be fully representative of the people. Thus, according to Leviticus 21:16-24, the priest cannot be one who is blind, lame or a dwarf, or one who has a mutilated face, a limb too long, a broken foot or hand, a hunched back, a blemish in the eyes, an itching disease, scabs, or crushed testicles. In short, the maimed, diseased and deformed are excluded from priestly service.
What unites these quite diverse items is the notion of abnormality. These are not evil qualities; the person possessed of these disabilities is not cast out of the priesthood into which he has been born. He is still allowed to eat at the Temple table, and draw all his sustenance from the Temple economy. He is unable to represent the people of Israel in the Temple before God. He is excluded from sacrificing.
Note also that these are not necessarily aesthetic categories. While a few of the items are explicitly noted as being “unqualified by reason of unsightliness†(such as fallen eyelashes and lost teeth), the rest are simply deviations from the norm. The issue is not one of perfection or beauty; others might consider a priest ugly, but he could still officiate, as long as he was normal—that is to say, unblemished. Blemish denoted a negative standard of exclusion rather than a positive standard of perfection. This demand for unblemished sacrificial beasts and priests arose directly out of Israel’s sense of God’s holiness. Holiness was like a vibratory energy. Anyone who drew near to God picked up this energy.
Israel’s very separateness as a people was a consequence of ideas of holiness: God’s holiness has fallen on Israel and has thus set it apart from all others. God’s holiness must therefore be protected, almost, we might say, quarantined. Thus the closer one got to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the greater the holy power one encountered.
By the same logic, one avoided everything unclean—anything that might contaminate God’s holiness. Therefore people in unclean trades, like tanners, people in immoral occupations, like tax collectors and prostitutes, or people outside the covenant, like Samaritans and Gentiles, were to be avoided, because they would sully the holiness of God.
Jesus’ rejection of purity
Jesus’ table fellowship with social outcasts was an acted parable of the dawning of the age of reconciliation. Jesus deliberately contravened the entire program of holiness of the Pharisees and other groups in first-century Judaism. He denied the equation of holiness with separation. He rejected the notion that external things defile or pollute a person’s essential being:
There is nothing outside a person, that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. (Mark 7:15/Matthew 15:11). Jesus scandalized his hearers by his positive attitude toward Samaritans. He threw out altogether the notion that blemishes disqualify anyone before God.
Instead of holiness as separation, Jesus offered an economy of mercy that extends to all, especially outsiders. By abrogating the laws of purity, defilement and blemishes, Jesus was announcing a new image of God: a God not concerned with normalcy, a God who loves precisely the marginalized and rejected, whose tender womb aches for the uninvited and the unloved: a compassionate parent, transcending gender, the Mother and Father of us all.
In contrast to the traditional view that God’s holiness had to be sequestered in a special place and protected against contamination, Jesus regarded holiness/wholeness as outgoing and contagious. Holiness was not a power to be guarded, but a force exploding into the world to bring it more into line with God’s purposes.
The physician is not overcome by those who are ill, but rather overcomes their illness. Thus Jesus touches the leper, the unclean, women, the sick without fear of contamination. Jesus is not rendered unclean by the contact. Rather, those whom society regarded as defiled are made clean.
Holiness was not something to be defended or rationed. It was God’s numinous transforming power. God’s holiness cannot be sullied. It is a cleansing and healing agent. It does not need to be shut up and quarantined in the Temple. Through Jesus’ healings and fellowship with the despised and rejected, it was breaking out into the world to transform it.
Therefore, Jesus taught, when normal folks give a banquet, they should not invite their friends—that is, other normal people of the same class, status, and persuasion, but rather they should invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. (Luke 14:13, 21)
This phrase virtually summarizes the lists from the Old Testament of those who are blemished and unable to serve before God. Jesus is not, then, simply suggesting that the well-off practice charity. He is directing them to go out of their way to break down the barriers that have previously excluded those with disabilities. Not only are they to be included in the festal celebrations, but they are to be given preferential attention. The last shall be first.
This means the very basis of human fellowship before God has been altered. Only when the previously excluded are ingathered can the feast commence. Only when the pernicious idea of normalcy is destroyed can normal life begin.
The curse of perfectionism
If Jesus threw out the holiness code with its exclusiveness, why are people with disabilities today still subject to exclusion, bias, prejudice and discrimination? Churches themselves have a poor record of treatment of those with disabilities. How did that come about?
Let me suggest at least one cause: the biblical command to be perfect as God is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Matthew had just said that God loves everyone equally (5:45), and then three verses later he springs the demand for perfection on us. The gospel appears to be saying opposite things: God loves everyone, good and bad alike, unconditionally; and God does not love everyone, but only those who are perfect.
This closing line seems to fly in the face of everything Jesus has just taught. Normalcy seems to have been slipped right back in through the back door. Our heavenly Parent no longer seems to be kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, but has now become exceedingly choosy.
It may come as immediate relief to learn that Jesus could not have said, “Be perfect.†There was no such word, or even concept, in Aramaic or Hebrew. And for good reason.
The Second Commandment had forbidden the making of graven images (Exodus 20:4). Israel consequently never developed the visual arts. The word used by Matthew, teleios, was, however, a Greek aesthetic term. It described the perfect geometric form, or the perfect sculpture. It was seldom used in ethical discourse, since moral perfection is not within the grasp of human beings, and would even have been regarded, in Greek piety, as a divinely-punishable pride.
In Israel, the closest thing to the notion of perfection was being without blemish. This was a purely negative and functional idea, however. Remember, a priest whom we might regard as physically grotesque could still officiate at a Jewish sacrifice. There were no positive norms of beauty, only negative criteria of exclusion.
Among the Greeks, perfection did not accrue to people, but only to works of art. In the Christian Middle Ages, Greek and Hebrew thought coalesced, with sin taking the place of blemish. Perfection was negatively defined as not behaving or even thinking in certain ways. But the sense of sin was so profound that moral perfectionism was no factor at all except among the “spiritual athletes,†the ascetics, who made it their whole life’s task to achieve moral perfection.
Protestants transform heresy
It was not until the Enlightenment, with its reintroduction of Greek aesthetic norms in neo-classical art and its search for universa1s, that widespread moralistic perfectionism became really imaginable. The merger of Protestant and Enlightenment thought now for the first time made the achievement of perfection—a heresy on its face—not only a cultural goal but a profound obsession.
That many Protestant churches officially espoused justification by grace alone scarcely checked the advance of perfectionistic moralism. The Enlightenment ideal of humanity making itself had so deeply penetrated Western culture that deviance was defined as failure to live up to social norms that one now had no excuse, such as human sinfulness, for violating, and for which no restitution, such as forgiveness, was offered. Unprotected by the doctrine of sin, secular people were thus held to standards of perfection impossible to achieve. Thus perfectionism is not simply a characteristic of Protestantism, but an artifact of Western culture generally.
Jesus never commanded this kind of perfectionism. Placed in its context within the rest of the paragraph, his saying about behaving like God becomes abundantly clear. We are not to be perfect, but, like God, all- encompassing, loving even those who have least claim or right to our love.
Jesus does not call for “wholeness,†though that would have been a better translation than “perfect.†For wholeness places all the focus on us, and Jesus points us away from ourselves to love our enemies. All-inclusive love is his goal, even if broken, contaminated by elements of our own unredeemed shadow, intermittent.
Jesus is not urging us to a perfection of being in ourselves, but to abandon all dreams of perfection and to embrace those we believe are least perfect, least deserving and most threatening to our lives. And we are to embrace all of that within ourselves as well.
We today are still living with the curse of perfectionism. For people with disabilities—and few are without them—perfectionism is the condemnation we feel for not having an acceptable body. This judgment is felt even by those who have what seem to be altogether adequate bodies.
Girls, and now increasingly, boys, feel they are not thin enough and so develop anorexia or bulimia. Fortunes are spent at health spas, not simply to get healthy exercise, but to try to measure up to some invisible and elusive standard of normalcy or perfection. Barbie dolls, Playboy or Penthouse centerfolds, and muscle and fashion magazines all trumpet an ideal figure to which we are all supposed to conform.
All people are not created equal. Do you see why I said at the outset that the problem is not with disabilities, but with the notion of normalcy? That seemingly universally held standard—the norm—is in fact an engine of the devil. It destroys people’s capacity to accept their bodies. It creates an ideal, with those who conform most closely to that ideal getting the most attention, the most money, the most praise, and those farthest from that ideal being treated as the scum of the earth.
The Enlightenment taught that all people are created equal. If that is so, then it is your own fault if you have a mental or physical disability. The curious result of the Enlightenment doctrine of equality is the worst kind of inequality, built upon a denial of the obvious truth. We do not all begin from the same starting gate in life. Some are born to wealth, health and opportunities, while others are born to poverty, physical disabilities and malnutrition. It is an outrageous lie that all people are created equal. It is just another version of the blame-the-victim scam.
The gospel teaches not that we are all equal, but that we are all incomparable. Each person is unique in the eyes of God. All people, regardless of how they score on the popularity ratings of normalcy, are of infinite value, are infinitely treasured and are infinitely interesting. There is no end, no limit, to the love of God for each one of us.
My wife June never tires of comparing us to flowers. There is no such thing as a flower that is not beautiful. And we feel that way about each flower, even if it is missing a few petals. The beauty of individuals is not limited to those who fit cultural norms.
In fact, “falling in love†means being blinded to cultural norms so that one can see the divine uniqueness of a person and value her or him ultimately. Love is the trick God plays on us to tear us free from the cultural delusion of normalcy.
Disabilities are not the problem
So the problem is not people and their disabilities. We are all disabled in significant ways, and who is to say what is the more severe disability? Perhaps we must pity most those whose approximations to normalcy have been so successful that they are completely unaware of what is most unique about themselves.
Without doubt, the problem is rather with the idea of normalcy itself. Those who struggle most acutely with disabilities are a continual accusation to those who have sold their souls to normalcy. No wonder they are sometimes hated, mistreated, shamed or ignored. They are an ultimate threat to a normal person’s very self-definition.
As we age, most of us will experience increasing disabilities. Rather than becoming depressed over these new limitations, we need to respond with compassion to these constraints. Perhaps they have something to teach us. They should certainly help us develop increased capacity to be present to those with more serious disabilities.
So the world is divided up into two groups after all. Not, however, the normal and the abnormal, or the able and the disabled. Rather, the line is drawn between those who are aware of their disabilities, and those who are not. Those who are more obviously disabled, or who have been forced by life to come to terms with their disabilities, have a prophetic task to play in awakening the rest of us to the uniqueness of who we are under God.
Walter Wink is professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary, New York City. Portions of this essay were taken from his book Engaging the Powers, Fortress Press, 1992, and are used with permission. This article first appeared in a longer form in Auburn Views, Spring 1993. This article first appeared in the February 1994 edition of Response published by United Methodist Women.