As we come to the end of the Easter season, I keep returning to one of Jesus’ resurrection appearances — the moment when he stands among the disciples, shows them his wounds, and says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). It is a scene that holds together resurrection, vulnerability, and mission in a single breath. And it prepares us for Pentecost, when the Spirit will empower this wounded community to become the Body of Christ in the world.
The risen Christ stands among his friends as the Wounded One, bearing in his resurrected flesh the marks of violence and vulnerability. He does not conceal them. He leads with them. This is the starting point of disability theology.
The theologian Nancy Eiesland famously named this image “the Disabled God.” When Jesus appears to the disciples, he does not present a perfected body. Instead, he reveals a God who has taken disability into God’s own life — not as a temporary condition to be overcome, but as part of the divine identity. This is not a God who stands apart from human fragility, but one who carries it.
Many of us assume that healing means “getting back to normal.” We imagine resurrection as the undoing of weakness, the restoration of strength, the return to a body that works “properly.” But the Gospel tells a different story. The risen Christ is not “fixed.” His wounds become the very means by which he is known. They are not erased; they are glorified. Disability, then, is not a deviation from the image of God. It is a place where God’s life is revealed.
If Christ’s wounds are part of his resurrected identity, what does that mean for the church — the Body of Christ? It means our wounds, too, are part of who we are.
Every parish carries its own scars: griefs that linger because there is an empty pew where someone used to sit; bodies that have changed and no longer move with the ease they once did; abilities that have diminished, leaving once-familiar ministries harder to sustain; stories that have shaped us in ways we did not choose. And we also carry the deeper wounds of the church’s past — moments when the church caused harm instead of healing. These, too, are part of our shared woundedness.
We often treat these wounds as liabilities. But the Disabled God invites us to see even the wounds in our corporate body as places of encounter. The church is not called to be a community of the perfect or unbroken. We are called to be a community that tells the truth about our lives — and finds Christ already present in the places we would rather hide.
When we take the wounded body of Christ seriously, we begin to see bodies bearing disability not as objects of ministry but as teachers of the Gospel. Christians who live with disability reveal the limits of our assumptions about “normalcy” and “strength.” They show us what interdependence looks like, what honesty looks like, what embodied prayer looks like. They remind us that the Christian life is not about self-sufficiency but about belonging to one another.
After showing his wounds to disciples locked behind doors in fear, Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And then, immediately, “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22). This is not incidental. It is the shape of Christian mission.
The Spirit does not descend on a flawless community. The Spirit comes to a group still afraid, still uncertain, still carrying their own wounds. The Spirit empowers this Body — fragile, limited, humbled, beloved — to continue the mission of the Wounded Christ. Pentecost is not the triumph of the strong. It is the sending of the vulnerable, breathed upon by the Spirit who makes courage possible.
A missional church shaped by the Disabled God becomes a community that leads with honesty; a people who meet others in their wounds; a body that practices interdependence; a companion to the neighbourhood, not a saviour of it. Mission becomes less about what we bring and more about what we discover — Christ already present in the lives and bodies of our neighbours.
The risen Christ invites us to recognize him not by perfection, but by love made visible in vulnerability. Perhaps this is our calling, too: to be a church that does not hide its scars, but discovers Christ in them — and is sent into the world in the same way he was sent, not in strength, but in love, and not alone, but in the power of the Spirit.
The Disabled God and the Wounds We Carry Together
As we come to the end of the Easter season, I keep returning to one of Jesus’ resurrection appearances — the moment when he stands among the disciples, shows them his wounds, and says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). It is a scene that holds together resurrection, vulnerability, and mission in a single breath. And it prepares us for Pentecost, when the Spirit will empower this wounded community to become the Body of Christ in the world.
The risen Christ stands among his friends as the Wounded One, bearing in his resurrected flesh the marks of violence and vulnerability. He does not conceal them. He leads with them. This is the starting point of disability theology.
The theologian Nancy Eiesland famously named this image “the Disabled God.” When Jesus appears to the disciples, he does not present a perfected body. Instead, he reveals a God who has taken disability into God’s own life — not as a temporary condition to be overcome, but as part of the divine identity. This is not a God who stands apart from human fragility, but one who carries it.
Many of us assume that healing means “getting back to normal.” We imagine resurrection as the undoing of weakness, the restoration of strength, the return to a body that works “properly.” But the Gospel tells a different story. The risen Christ is not “fixed.” His wounds become the very means by which he is known. They are not erased; they are glorified. Disability, then, is not a deviation from the image of God. It is a place where God’s life is revealed.
If Christ’s wounds are part of his resurrected identity, what does that mean for the church — the Body of Christ? It means our wounds, too, are part of who we are.
Every parish carries its own scars: griefs that linger because there is an empty pew where someone used to sit; bodies that have changed and no longer move with the ease they once did; abilities that have diminished, leaving once-familiar ministries harder to sustain; stories that have shaped us in ways we did not choose. And we also carry the deeper wounds of the church’s past — moments when the church caused harm instead of healing. These, too, are part of our shared woundedness.
We often treat these wounds as liabilities. But the Disabled God invites us to see even the wounds in our corporate body as places of encounter. The church is not called to be a community of the perfect or unbroken. We are called to be a community that tells the truth about our lives — and finds Christ already present in the places we would rather hide.
When we take the wounded body of Christ seriously, we begin to see bodies bearing disability not as objects of ministry but as teachers of the Gospel. Christians who live with disability reveal the limits of our assumptions about “normalcy” and “strength.” They show us what interdependence looks like, what honesty looks like, what embodied prayer looks like. They remind us that the Christian life is not about self-sufficiency but about belonging to one another.
After showing his wounds to disciples locked behind doors in fear, Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And then, immediately, “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22). This is not incidental. It is the shape of Christian mission.
The Spirit does not descend on a flawless community. The Spirit comes to a group still afraid, still uncertain, still carrying their own wounds. The Spirit empowers this Body — fragile, limited, humbled, beloved — to continue the mission of the Wounded Christ. Pentecost is not the triumph of the strong. It is the sending of the vulnerable, breathed upon by the Spirit who makes courage possible.
A missional church shaped by the Disabled God becomes a community that leads with honesty; a people who meet others in their wounds; a body that practices interdependence; a companion to the neighbourhood, not a saviour of it. Mission becomes less about what we bring and more about what we discover — Christ already present in the lives and bodies of our neighbours.
The risen Christ invites us to recognize him not by perfection, but by love made visible in vulnerability. Perhaps this is our calling, too: to be a church that does not hide its scars, but discovers Christ in them — and is sent into the world in the same way he was sent, not in strength, but in love, and not alone, but in the power of the Spirit.
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