Persistent Pain and Promised Perfection:The Significance of an Embodied Eschatologyof Disability

Abstract

People with disabilities experience different kinds of pain. That said, they are told in the Jewish and Christian scriptures that, in Heaven, their experiences of suffering will be relieved, and their disabilities normalized. Is that true, or will suffering (as distinct from pain) be allowed to persist in the afterlife? In order to explore this question, this paper will perform three tasks using biblical reflection, scholarly discourse, and autoethnographic narrative. First, it will define disability both as a physiological phenomenon and as a social construct, and similarly identify ableism, pain, and perfection; its definitions of pain will depend on Sarah Coakley’s polyvalent 2007 description. Second, having affirmed Jesus’ definition of perfection from Matthew 5:43–48, the essay will use scholarly reflections on pain and disability, Kathy Black’s explorations of a Gospel healing-narrative, and some of the author’s life-experiences, to demonstrate that kind of perfection. Third and finally, it will expand on that definition of perfection by drawing on both Amos Yong’s Christian meditations on resurrection, and Sharon Betcher’s postcolonial paradigm of illness as a creative matrix that promotes wholeness.