A Community of Failure

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

‘And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.’
We don’t often hear about Jesus’ failures. We hear about the incredible things he could do – just a couple of weeks ago, we heard about his ability to calm the wind and waves of a storm in which the disciples were in danger of drowning. His deeds of power were as varied as they were miraculous. He gave sight to blind people, miraculously multiplied food for thousands, provided wine for a party and raised people from the dead. Was there anything he couldn’t do?

The Early Church Fathers were very anxious about this particular question. During the period when the doctrine of the Trinity was becoming defined, there was a concern to establish absolute equality between the Father and the Son. Any suggestion that’s the Son’s powers were in any way limited ran the risk of denying his full divinity, his full equality with the Father. So passages like our gospel reading today had to be figuratively interpreted: so, for example, Gregory the Theologian interprets the phrase ‘could not’ in this context to mean ‘couldn’t bring himself to’ or ‘wasn’t prepared to’. We might say, ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ when offered a second piece of cake (when in fact, we could possibly!). Of course, it was and remains important to protect our understanding of Jesus’ divinity. But I think Mark maybe meant what he said – owing to the disbelief of those around him, he could do no deed of power there. He could not. He was not able to.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a move to redefine our understanding of disability. When this movement began, disability was seen as a problem suffered by individuals, who were defined by their inability to do certain things. Thus, for example, a deaf person was defined by their inability to hear. In this understanding, disability was something to be prevented, contained, or cured, and the problem lay entirely with the disabled person. During the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, a new model began to be proposed. This was called the social model of disability, and proponents of it argued that the problem lay with society at large. People may experience impairments to their ability to hear, to see, to walk and so on, but the actual dis-abling happens when they encounter a society which discriminates against them. With full accessibility, inclusion and liberation, impairments do not automatically become disabilities. In a fully accessible building, no one’s ability to do things is reduced. At a fully accessible event, all can participate equally.

The social model of disability takes the weight of responsibility off disabled people, and puts it back on society at large. It makes no claims about people’s fundamental identities, but asks searching questions about our relationships. So I think it may be a useful way to think about this difficult moment in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus’ identity as the Son of God is not in question here, but the hostility and disbelief of those around him limited their ability to see him as he really was. His great and extraordinary abilities were disabled by those around him. This makes me wonder about those few people whom he healed, mentioned in an off-hand manner in this passage. I wonder whether, if Jesus had performed those healings elsewhere, they would indeed have been deeds of power – not because the healing would have been different, but because the people around him would have seen these deeds as they really were. They would have seen these miracles to be a sign of a potential world in which all are loved and valued, and no one is lesser because of their perceived limitations.

There are several important criticisms of the social model of disability, one of which has been pointed out by disabled activists who suffer from chronic and acute pain. These people point out that no amount of accommodation from society at large can level the playing field for them, when pain affects every aspect of their lives. Some accommodations can help, particularly larger structural level changes which lead to better access to high level medical care for all; but sometimes, pain just has to be felt. 
Sometimes, pain just has to be felt. This seems to be the message of Paul in the passage from 2 Corinthians we heard this morning. Paul writes allusively about his ‘thorn in the flesh’, some unspecified ailment. He considers it to have been a gift from God to prevent him boasting about the exalted position he has been given in spreading the Gospel. Much has been written about what this might have been – migraine, epilepsy, bacterial conjunctivitis, to name but a few suggested diagnoses. We will never achieve a definitive answer, and it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that Paul suffered. But note that Paul only came with time to see this pain as a gift from God: three times he appealed for it to be taken away. Whatever it was, it remained a debilitating affliction, and its lesson for Paul was not about God’s ability to overcome all obstacles, but about God’s weakness.

The God that Paul loved so fiercely is a God who became fragile flesh, who submitted to human limitedness, who could do no deed of power in Nazareth, who died, who was raised with his wounds still visible. Through Christ, Paul found community in his pain, and through Paul, that community began to grow – but it was a community of weakness, a community of failure.
Christianity, at its best, should be a refuge of the failures. It should be a place where all can come, admitting defeat, shaking the dust of the disbelieving world off their feet, to rest and lick their wounds, to feel the pain that demands to be felt. It should be a place where we do not make assumptions about people based on their parentage, their ability to do this, or that, but instead work to make all truly welcome. 

And this is not a glorification of failure. And this is not giving up on the world. And this is not a valorisation of pain. Because however limited Jesus’ power was in Nazareth, his failure there became the clarion call of the twelve, as he sent them out. He stripped them of any outward signs of success: no bread, no bag, no money in their belts. Wherever they went, their poverty would label them irredeemably as failures. Jesus foresaw this, and instructed them in what to do when they were rejected, as inevitably happened in some places. But in others, they drew to themselves the crazies, the strange ones, those with minds and bodies all bent by pain. The ones who needed them. The ones who were like them. The failures.

However great our outward success, we can never satisfy the demands of our world to be rich, beautiful, powerful, well-adjusted, romantically successful, our skin and our inboxes perfectly clear. Nor, as Christians, should we be attempting to. We have all been called into this community of failures, admitting defeat by a world obsessed with victory. But that isn’t where the call stops, because we are also being sent out. The broken body and spilled blood that we share is what compels us back out into the world to bring the others in, to be witnesses to the love that heals and the pain that thirsts for justice. Amen.