I heard a programme on the radio the other day called ‘Pick up your stretcher and walk.’ It was an investigation into different Christian understandings of disability.
The journalist who made the programme is an atheist. He is also blind. He started the programme by recounting a time when he was approached on the London underground by a Christian who said he wanted to pray with him so his sight could be restored. He went on to say that he is often approached like this and finds these approaches very annoying.
He then spends some time with people who believe they can heal people of their illnesses and disabilities in the name of Jesus. On the programme anyway he only records their failures to do so.
But then he starts interviewing Christians who are disabled and finds a very different theology of disability. There is one very powerful interview with a young woman who was severely injured in a car crash. She is confined to a wheelchair as a result of her injuries. She finds herself, not unnaturally asking ‘why me?’ She became angry with God.
Then her mother showed her a verse from the Bible. It was Daniel chapter 7 verse 9 which we heard tonight. As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire.
The mother pointed out to her daughter that in this vision of God in heaven, God is sitting in a chair with wheels. He is sitting in a wheelchair. And if God himself sits in a wheelchair, he must know and understand her daughter who sits in her wheelchair.
The daughter found this very comforting. She had been losing her feeling of being connected to God and now she had recovered it again.
Daniel’s vision of heaven includes a vision of the person we would call Jesus ascending into heaven. The text reads;
I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.
Jesus, who was crucified, who died and rose again from the dead, is presented to God, having ascended into the heavens passing through the clouds. He is given an everlasting dominion over all the world.
This Jesus who ascended into heaven was also disabled. We know from John’s Gospel that Thomas was able to put his hands in his side and see the holes in his hands and his feet. The human being presented to God was a human being with a mutilated body. It was a body that would have difficulty walking and difficulty picking things up. It was a disfigured body. A body that bore the marks of its suffering.
For those people whose bodies are considered imperfect, it is a real revelation of God’s mercy that in this vision of heaven they see signs of disability which many of us have generally not seen or considered.
Now the image of a throne of flames with wheels of fire may not have always had the wheelchair connotation that people who use wheelchairs today immediately see. The people who heard Daniel’s vision and who first read these words and passed them around may well have seen some other significance in the throne with wheels.
The obvious implication seems to me to be that this God who sits on a throne of wheels is a God who is on the move. He is a God who is not always to be found in one place.
This would have had profound implications for the people of Israel who were trapped in a Babylonian captivity. They felt they had been removed far from their God. They would have felt cut off and unworthy. They would have spent their days thinking mainly about how they could appease those who held them captive so that their very thoughts were constrained and imprisoned. God was far away. God had forgotten them.
But Daniel shared with them a vision of a God who sat on a throne with wheels. This is a God who is on the move. A God who had come to them. A God who had come for them.
And this vision of God in heaven, is the image of heaven that those who saw Jesus ascend into heaven would have shared.
They saw the disfigured Jesus, bearing the wounds for the sins of the whole world, going to be with the God who has come for his people. Jesus ascends to rule the nations alongside him.
Who is it who rules the world? The world where we are abused and oppressed? The world is ruled by a God who is coming to find us. He is a God who sits in a wheelchair with his Son by his side; his Son, who is disfigured by the scars of his love for us.
Are we ourselves not whole, not perfect? Then we may gaze at the object of the worship of the heavenly hosts, gazing not at perfection but at understanding, at solidarity, at empathy and at love.
And as we gaze we hear the words of the angels who spoke to the apostles; who told the apostles to return their gaze to the world.
‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’
We return our gaze to the world in the knowledge that Jesus, the disfigured Son of God will come again. He will return to rule for ever.
Amen