That "Lazy" Disabled Man at Bethesda
In John 5, Jesus encounters a “weakened” man lying by the pool of Bethesda. Surrounded by disabled people—blind people, mobility-impaired, and those who were paralysed—Jesus asks the man if he wants to be made healthy?" The man explains that he has no one who can slip him into the pool to get healed. Ignoring the water, Jesus tells him to stand up and walk and immediately the man gets up and walks.
On the one hand, Jesus’s question is audacious. What kind of question is “Do you want to be made well?” You might think. Of course, he wants to be made well. Don’t all people with disabilities want to be made well? Being “made well” is not the same for everyone. If you spend any time listening to people with disabilities speak about their experiences you’ll soon understand that the “healthy” life that nondisabled people live, the one they call “normal”, is a kind of social ideal. What is “normal” depends on the norm.
In the case of the man from John 5, the man does want to be healed—that is his prerogative desire. What is further shocking about the way this healing narrative is received is how many interpreters perceive him to be lazy.
In a recent splendid article, Helena Martin draws attention to the ableist ways that interpreters have cast this man as “tragic,” “unimaginative,” “crotchety,” “dull,” “unimpressive,” and having a “chronic inability to seize opportunity.”1 Martin re-reads the narrative and draws our attention to the way the story focuses not on any apparent “dullness” but on the man as a person.
Although translators often say that the man is merely “sick” or “weak,” Martin argues that the author of the Fourth Gospel probably understands him to be paralyzed. The idea of being paralyzed is not just about mobility, however, but in the ancient world is connected to ancient medical ideas of the bodily balance between wetness and dryness. Paralysis was sometimes understood to involve someone’s body “withering up” or “drying up” and thus losing mobility. This explains why the man was not able to get into the pool fast enough—not due to his “chronic inability to seize opportunity” but because of disability.
Martin brilliantly points out the irony of having a man whose body is affected by being too paralyzed by “dryness” sitting next to a large body of water—for 38 years no less! Jesus’s ability to heal the man’s paralysis might also be connected to the previous chapter of John, where Jesus boasts about creating springs of water gushing up in those who believe (John 4:14). As Martin notes, “In the humoral sense, Jesus’ water sounds, well, wet. It easily counterbalances the man’s dryness.”2
One of the most important parts of Martin’s analysis is her focus on the statement Jesus makes later on in the narrative. Jesus says to the man, “No longer sin, so that nothing worse may happen to you” (5:14, translation by Martin). Traditionally, interpreters have understood this verse to hint that the man’s disability and sin are interconnected. This desire by readers to try and find a cause for the man’s physical condition is due, argues Martin, to the desire to “seek the origins of difference…in order to protect themselves from deviance.”3
As Martin argues, “In this story, Jesus’ instruction must mean that the man was originally sinful, and his deviant body is proof. This belief turns impairment into something that can be controlled. If we avoid sin in our own lives, we can avoid a similar fate.”4 But Martin argues that “something worse” in John 5:14 doesn’t refer to more impairment, but to eternal judgment. The man no where openly follows Jesus yet, and so the words of Jesus are a way to nudge him forward on his path of trust.
What Helena Martin’s close reading of John 5 shows us is how easy it is to assume cultural ideals of the body and to assume the motivations and mechanics of disability in ancient scripture. Uninformed readings of passages like John 5 don’t just affect individual devotion or piety, they affect the lives of people with disabilities today. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard sin invoked as a cause for physical impairment of disability. With renewed readings of passages like John 5, like those offered by Martin, hopefully we can turn the page of that notion of disability for good.
Martin 2021, page 5.
Martin 2021, page 14.
Martin 2021, page 16. Martin draws on the work of Mitchell and Snyder, both important North American voices in the field of disability studies.
Martin 2021, page 16.