The Loft LA - Progressive Christianity in Podcast Form
Oct 27, 2026 · 33 min · 11 segments
What if the thing you were taught to be ashamed of about your body was never true? In John 9, the disciples ask Jesus who sinned to cause a man's blindness — and they ask it in front of him, without…
Most of the language or the conversations that you will see in the Bible that discuss disability use it as a metaphor to describe the A broken relationship or understanding with the divine or with the sacred is used in a way to describe disconnection.
Similarly, I would say with respect to how the Bible typically talks about aging, it's measured in terms of your accomplishments, which you have been able to acquire.
And a lack of what you've been able to perhaps pass down is seen often as a kind of judgment.
There are many stories in the Bible that fit this particular kind of pattern and there are many ways in which we could discuss and I could go through and like disentangle them and talk about the importance of context.
I want to tell you a different story, a very different story about disability and aging than ones I think you typically hear in church.
And thankfully, I will be doing so by following the lead that Jesus sets for us in this passage.
Now, an informed reading of the Gospels, one that takes seriously cultural context and also the metaphorical language that we see present throughout, shows us that Jesus prioritizes teaching theology or constructing a theology from the perspective of the bodies of the most vulnerable.
This much is clear at the very beginning of chapter 9, because upon seeing the blind man, the disciples ask who had sinned to cause his blindness.
And we should be, to an extent, give the maybe disciples a little bit of grace because the question that they ask reflects a very traditional understanding within Jewish thought on the relationship between illness and sin.
It's one that's not altogether too dissimilar from the ways in which we've kind of been socialized to think, implicitly think about illness in contemporary Christianity.
But what I do think makes this question terrible, quite honestly, in my mind, is how they ask the question.
to
This, I think, is the complexity that reveals some of the biases I believe that we carry and the ways in which we might essentialize people based on this particular category of their existence.
But to be fair, the disciples, to be fair to the disciples, I guess I should say, the times haven't changed all that much.
Because research by the Disability Equality Organization scope indicates that roughly 67% of people feel awkward or uneasy communicating with individuals who have disabilities.
67%.
Most of the language or the conversations that you will see in the Bible that discuss disability use it as a metaphor to describe the A broken relationship or understanding with the divine or with the sacred is used in a way to describe disconnection.
Similarly, I would say with respect to how the Bible typically talks about aging, it's measured in terms of your accomplishments, which you have been able to acquire.
And a lack of what you've been able to perhaps pass down is seen often as a kind of judgment.
There are many stories in the Bible that fit this particular kind of pattern and there are many ways in which we could discuss and I could go through and like disentangle them and talk about the importance of context.
I want to tell you a different story, a very different story about disability and aging than ones I think you typically hear in church.
And thankfully, I will be doing so by following the lead that Jesus sets for us in this passage.
Now, an informed reading of the Gospels, one that takes seriously cultural context and also the metaphorical language that we see present throughout, shows us that Jesus prioritizes teaching theology or constructing a theology from the perspective of the bodies of the most vulnerable.
This much is clear at the very beginning of chapter 9, because upon seeing the blind man, the disciples ask who had sinned to cause his blindness.
And we should be, to an extent, give the maybe disciples a little bit of grace because the question that they ask reflects a very traditional understanding within Jewish thought on the relationship between illness and sin.
It's one that's not altogether too dissimilar from the ways in which we've kind of been socialized to think, implicitly think about illness in contemporary Christianity.
But what I do think makes this question terrible, quite honestly, in my mind, is how they ask the question.
to
This, I think, is the complexity that reveals some of the biases I believe that we carry and the ways in which we might essentialize people based on this particular category of their existence.
But to be fair, the disciples, to be fair to the disciples, I guess I should say, the times haven't changed all that much.
Because research by the Disability Equality Organization scope indicates that roughly 67% of people feel awkward or uneasy communicating with individuals who have disabilities.
67%.
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