In my early twenties, during my first year of divinity school, illness profoundly disrupted my life: I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I struggled with how to cope with this new reality, unable to imagine what my future would hold. I had never considered that I might become disabled, much less how God related to disability. Of course, this was shortsightedness on my own part: while not everyone will experience chronic illness, almost all of us will experience disability if we live long enough. Coming to terms with this reality is essential for all Christians, because we experience God in and through our bodies.

My diagnosis, as well as myriad new medical experiences, led me to pursue a career in theological bioethics. I now split my time between research, teaching, and service to a local hospital as a clinical ethicist. In my clinical work, I spend a lot of time with people who are ill and facing difficult choices in the hospital. I meet with patients and families who are distressed because illness has turned their lives upside down. I meet with physicians, nurses, and other care providers who are experiencing incredible levels of moral distress. Being ill and caring for those who are ill have always been difficult, but the US health care system and health care workers are stretched thinner than ever. As we struggle to cope with this level of collective illness we might ask: Why would God allow this? Why weren’t our bodies made more resilient?

There have been times when I have longed for a different body – a body that could keep up with the physical and mental demands of my life. It seems I am never alert, strong, or coordinated enough to meet the demands of my job or to parent my children. It is easy to be disappointed or frustrated when our bodies seem to fail us. As Christians, we may hope that our resurrected bodies will be different. We hope that in the kingdom of God, our society will be perfected and so will our bodies.

Historically, theologians imagined that perfect resurrected bodies would not only be perfectly abled and “blemish free,” but would also remain at the perfect age (likely thirty-three years old, the age of Jesus when he died), and some even guessed we might all be thin, tall, male, and bearded (Saint Augustine thought beards made men more handsome). Recently, I came across writings from a twelfth-century Cistercian monk who believed “Ethiopian skin” would turn white in the resurrection. These depictions of “perfect” bodies would offend many people today, but we are likely just as beholden to our contemporary ideas of beautiful, perfect bodies. Many of us long for a body that our culture tells us is valuable. I meet some Christians who long for a young, beautiful, athletic, physically strong body and sharp mind. Movie stars and professional athletes give us visions of so-called bodily perfection that are impossible for most of us to achieve in this life, and so instead, we hope for those bodies in the life to come.

Of course, if Jesus is our example for what our bodies are and should be, then we may be disappointed. Jesus does not inhabit the beautiful, strong, capable body that we desire, despite the numerous paintings and memes of Jesus’ toned, CrossFit body you may have seen. What we know of Jesus’ resurrected body from the Gospels reveals something altogether unexpected. Before ascending into heaven in his resurrected body, Jesus spent forty days surprising his friends, who do not all immediately recognize him. Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener when she comes to visit his tomb, only recognizing him when he says her name. The disciples are out fishing, and they do not recognize Jesus on the beach until he instructs them to cast their net on the other side of the boat and they catch more fish. On the road to Emmaus, the disciples are walking with Jesus, and they do not recognize him until he breaks bread with them.

What is perhaps equally striking is that the resurrected Jesus appears wounded. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to his frightened disciples and invites his followers to touch his hands and feet (Luke 24:39). Here are the places on Jesus’ body where he bears the marks of his crucifixion. The Gospel of John describes Thomas doubting the other disciples have seen the resurrected Jesus. Thomas will not believe the other disciples until he sees Jesus for himself and touches the marks left by his crucifixion (John 20:24–25). Caravaggio’s 1602 painting, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, displays this memorable scene: Thomas putting his finger inside of Jesus’ open yet bloodless wound. Of course, in the Gospel of John, Thomas does not actually need to touch Jesus. Jesus merely needs to point to his wounds and Thomas is convinced. Jesus’ wounds are marks of disgrace, of punishment and death. And yet Jesus is known to those who loved him by his wounds.

Why does Jesus’ glorious, resurrected body have wounds? Why were they not eradicated or fixed or covered over in the resurrection? This is scandalous. It didn’t immediately make sense to the first Christians or to the early church fathers who had to account for why the resurrected Jesus did not have a more perfect body. They, too, longed for bodies that were physically perfect. How can we expect to have perfect bodies in the resurrection, if Jesus’ own resurrected body appears so imperfect?

Jesus anticipates this question. He reminds his disciples that he is fulfilling scripture. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you – that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). The “suffering servant” in Isaiah is typically understood by Christians as anticipating Christ’s crucifixion: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity” (Isa. 53:2–3). According to Isaiah, the suffering servant was sent to carry our diseases. He is wounded, afflicted, and upon his broken body we are made whole.

When we long for perfect or perfected bodies, most of us do not imagine bodies that bear wounds. What a strange comfort, to long for a glorious, resurrected body, only to be shown one so marred. We hoped for an Adonis, and we are given a disfigured man. Perhaps we longed for the wrong thing. The bodies we hope for are not the resurrected bodies we receive.

But we should not be surprised. When God’s people longed for a mighty, all-powerful warrior God, they received a helpless infant. They wished for a conquering Lord and received a man put to death, unjustly crucified by the state. We hope for mighty resurrected bodies, but we are shown a wounded one. Jesus’ resurrected body is not so different from his mortal body. He came into the world vulnerable, and he leaves it bearing the marks of that vulnerability. Ours is not the God of strength and might, but the God of vulnerability, some may even say the God of disability.

Biblical scholar Jeremy Schipper claims that the disability imagery used in Isaiah 53 has been lost in translation. When Isaiah says the suffering servant is stricken, the word used in the Hebrew Bible refers to a disfiguring skin disease; when the suffering servant is referred to as marred and infirm, the Hebrew words chosen usually describe diseased animals unfit for sacrifice. When he is described as silent, this word is associated with being mute, and when Isaiah says the servant is ostracized, he is reflecting the social experience of people with disabilities elsewhere in the Bible. If Jesus is indeed the suffering servant described by Isaiah, the prophets anticipated that he would be disabled.

To call God disabled is likely to offend some people. Our all-powerful, all-knowing God cannot be disabled. If anything, God is super-able. Able to know all, see everyone, create everything. But how can we relate to an all-powerful God who knows nothing of our suffering? The suffering Christ has historically been a comfort to those who suffer. The all-powerful God who created everything from nothing gave up everything to be like you and me. To suffer as we suffer, to die as we will die.

In a time of plague, sickness, and despair, what we need is a suffering God who understands our suffering. A vulnerable God, who takes on our vulnerability and carries it to heaven. The historical Jesus may be gone from our presence, but he has not forgotten or forsaken us.

The disability theologian Nancy L. Eiesland struggled for years to feel as though she belonged in the church. Born with a bone disease that caused chronic pain and a mobility impairment, she was used to people telling her that her body was flawed and imperfect. Perhaps she or her parents had sinned, and her disability was the result. Perhaps it was the result of the Fall, of our collective original sin. If she only had enough faith, she would be made well. Perhaps God gave her a disability to build up her character. Perhaps her suffering was virtuous. After all, God never gives us more than we can handle. And if nothing else, her disability would be fixed in the resurrection.

Such platitudes and theodicies did nothing to help Eiesland relate to an all-powerful God. Why were people so willing to connect her body to sin or to virtue? Why had God made her this way? And if, in heaven, her resurrected body was no longer disabled, how would God recognize her? How would she recognize herself?

The resurrected Jesus bears witness to God’s promise to be with us, embodied as we are.

Then Eiesland had an epiphany: God came to her in a vision, but the God she saw was not the God she expected. God came to her in a sip-and-puff wheelchair, the kind used by quadriplegics that enable them to maneuver by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device. This was not the omnipotent, self-sufficient God she had been told to worship, but neither was this God a pathetic, suffering servant. Instead, she saw the disabled God as a survivor, unpitying and forthright. This was a God that Eiesland could relate to, because this was a God who knew her suffering. The disabled God did not pity her but instead glorified her body.

The resurrected Jesus bears witness to God’s promise to be with us, embodied as we are. Eiesland writes, “In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God … and the disabled God reveals that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability.” In inviting his disciples to touch his hands and side, Jesus overcomes the taboos of disability. His wounds connect his resurrected body to his earthly body and connect him to his friends – we know Jesus by his wounds.

The disabled God was good news to me as well when I first came across Eiesland’s book. Like Eiesland, I do not use a sip-and-puff wheelchair, but her vision of a disabled God helped me to see that my own disabilities put me in solidarity with Christ. Eiesland showed me a God who became disabled in the crucifixion and remains disfigured in his glorified body. I’m not sure that God caused my disability, but I do know that God is with me, because God understands what it means to live in a fragile, limited body. And I cannot know how my resurrected body will look, but I do know that it will be like Jesus’ body.

All our bodies are holy; not in spite of the fact that we are limited and fragile creatures, but because we are. This is how God made us, and this was the body that Christ assumed. It is not always comfortable living in such bodies, in fact, living in a body, any body, is sometimes painful and difficult. But we can take comfort in knowing that Christ knows our pain, because he also lived it. The incarnate, historical Jesus may be gone from our midst, but the body of Christ remains disabled, because there are disabled Christians among us. We are the body of Christ. We who are disabled do not need to overcome our disabilities to be in Christ. Those of you who are not disabled do not need to pray our bodies away. In fact, we enter the body of Christ by breaking him open again and again in the Eucharist. The broken, disabled body of Christ nourishes us, so that we can continue to carry out Christ’s ministry. In Christ’s broken body, we are made whole.