“Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God … These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.”


Longstanding narratives about disability shaped our emotional responses, our caregiving responses, and our social commentary, and our treatment of the disabled. But what if we saw disability as the site of divine revelation about God’s kingdom and our place in it? As an expression of power and wisdom and agency, rather than a merely a source of suffering and lack and ignorance.


Calli Micale (Palmer Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa to discuss how disability reframes our humanity in the Bible. They reflect on three passages: starting in the Old Testament—in Genesis 32—with the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and walking away with much more than a limp and a new name. Continuing with the Gospel, John 9, the story of the Man Born Blind, famous for at least two reasons: the utter stupidity of the disciples to assume “Rabbi, who sinned that this man was born blind?” and the utter visceral of having Jesus make mud with his spit and rub it in the man’s eyes. And finally The Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, the story of the bleeding woman—a story of reaching out in desperate faith, an act of incredible agency and audacity, to touch the edge of Jesus’s garment and be healed.


Whether its intellectual disability or physical disability, and regardless of how its acquired, disability plays a role in what we might call God’s subversive kingdom. God’s upside-down-ness (or, maybe we should say human upside-down-ness). The least of these in the eyes of human society are chosen by God to communicate the good news of shalom and justice and salvation—that even those who are already “whole” can be saved.


This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.


Show Notes

• Artwork: “Untitled (The Bleeding Woman)”, Unknown, Fresco, 4th Century AD, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, Rome, Italy
• Artwork: “The Healing of the Man Born Blind”, Duccio, 1311, Tempera on wood, National Gallery, London
• Artwork: “Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)”, Paul Gauguin, 1888, Oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery
• Genesis 32:22-32 (see below for full text)
• “Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God”
• Disability as a plot device: exploit
• Elaborate disguise of Jacob’s impersonization of Esau
• Each of us wrestles with our identity
• “No one can see God and live”
• Jacob’s limp: a narrative and metaphorical significance
• Is disability a sign of or consequence of one’s sinfulness?
• Is disability a divine punishment?
• Subverting our understanding of disability
• “Disability extends beyond Jacob’s physical form and continues to influence the the community—how they relate with their tradition and their practices.”
• “The memory of the struggle with God and the intimate presence of God in the wrestling in the body, and then is preserved in memory of the body.”
• Is being struck on the hip socket a blessing to Jacob?
• The wounds of martyrs as battle wounds
• Disability becomes inextricable from histories of violence
• Is it Jesus that strikes and maims Jacob’s hip?
• John 9: The Man Blind from Birth
• Jesus rejects the assumption that disability is a punishment for sin.
• “Dumb and blind”
• Disability as the site of divine revelation
• Jesus spitting in the mud is kind of gross. It takes a lot of spit to make that much mud.
• Vulnerable and visceral moment of pasting dirty mud
• The question of Jesus’s sin (for breaking Sabbath law) is now in play
• An extended metaphor about where knowledge and wisdom apply.
• Mark 5: The Hemorrhaging Woman
• Agency and Power
• Mutual caregiving within disabled communities
• “These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.”

Genesis 32


The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God fac...