This oration won the binational contest for the 2024 C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest.
Watch Josué give his speech and read the text below.
Healing the human spirit, particularly the spirits of people wounded by collective and systemic violence, hasn’t been a central theme in my Mennonite faith community. Overwhelmingly white and middle-class, we seem to feel little inherent urgency to engage with the suffering caused by human violence. I find this troubling.
Growing up, I witnessed, and participated in, the important but painfully slow healing process of my father, a Q’eqchi Indigenous Guatemalan whose community has been traumatized by both chronic and acute systemic violence for over 500 years. I experience this process of healing as an essential component of peacebuilding; of attempting to live as a family with the internal wholeness and healthy relationships that undergird the biblical concept of shalom.
Today I make the case that confronting and healing the wounds of trauma is inseparable from and essential to Christian peacebuilding. I briefly overview political and systemic peacebuilding, acknowledging their essential contributions, and recognizing who they leave behind. I then incorporate aspects of black, womanist and liberation theologies on suffering into an exploration of a Gospel story in which Jesus heals a blind man. This story serves as a lesson on how Jesus engaged directly with and healed traumatized people, and I believe, offers us all a guide for a holistic peacebuilding approach in a deeply wounded world.
The progressive, white, and middle-class Mennonite community I grew up in tends to understand the teachings of Jesus on peacebuilding largely as a calling to engage in reforming or re-imagining political systems and policy. This is understood as the way to face injustice and its consequences.
We call it by many names, including antiracism, decolonialism, demilitarization, and dismantling patriarchy, among others. They lead us to policy reforms like slavery reparations or returning land to indigenous peoples, which we often achieve by voting, protesting, giving money or writing to politicians.
This work is good and hard and meaningful, but it is rarely as complete as we wish and often believe. Political and systemic change are essential to peacebuilding. They are necessary for interrupting and preventing violence and even facilitating recovery. Alone, however, they cannot take us to shalom.
Political change does not address the spiritual needs of any of us. Jesus understood this. He understood that Shalom requires many things, including the collective spiritual healing that was at the heart of his ministry. Civic engagement as discipleship living allows us to avoid the difficult, personal journey of walking alongside the wounded in a long and complicated process of mutual healing.
How did Jesus’ life and ministry face this need, and how does it serve us as a guide? While Anabaptist theology has often failed to address spiritual wellbeing in the context of structural injustice, other theological communities have not. In “Jesus and the Disinherited”, African American theologian Howard Thurman writes, “[The masses] live with their backs against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?”
Let us consider a story of Jesus healing a blind man, through a lens of Black, womanist and liberation theologies. It is a story in which Jesus is challenged to recognize the spiritual suffering created through the social narratives of his time and place, about the righteous and the unrighteous, about the clean and the unclean.
In Luke 18:35-43, a blind man is sitting by the side of the road, begging. This man hears a crowd passing by and he asks, “What’s going on?”. “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by”, they tell him. So, the blind man starts to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”. The folks at the front of the crowd quickly tell him to be quiet, but instead, the man shouts again, even louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”.
Then it happens that Jesus stands still. He tells them to bring the man to him and Jesus says, “What do you want me to do for you?”. The man responds, “Lord, let me see again”. Jesus answers, “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you”.
In 1989, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a founder of Latin American liberation theology, gave a sermon in which he spoke to the complex nature of illness in Jesus’ context. He pointed out that blindness was more than just a physical ailment; it was a mark of impurity and marginalization. This man was not just a man without sight. He was an outcast told by his society that because of his blindness, he was lesser and deserving of ill will and mistreatment.
In her book “Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil” Emillie M. Townes writes about stories created and manipulated by dominant cultures to do evil, to inflict suffering on the oppressed, and permit and explain away injustice. Society fabricated stories that denied this man his full humanity based on an arbitrary trait: blindness. Society bought into a lie that said that because he is blind, he is inferior.
As the blind man was begging at the side of the road, he was silenced by those in the crowd who refused to recognize his humanity and the validity of his claim on Jesus. Womanist theologian Shawn Copeland, in her essay “Wading through Many Sorrows”, writes, “Suffering can render us powerless and mute, push us to the borders of hopelessness and despair.” It is painful and disruptive and too often experienced by people like the blind man: those subjugated to societal injustice and told that they are worth less than others.
When the blind man hears Jesus walk by, he cries out. Copeland writes that a womanist theology of suffering is characterized by these cries of the marginalized, by “remembering and retelling, by resisting, by redeeming”.
The blind man hears Jesus passing by and he yells, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me”. “Lord, recognize my neglected humanity, have mercy on me!”
The blind man will be redeemed! Jesus accepts his challenge.
In “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”, James Cone, the founder of Black liberation theology, emphasizes Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed. Jesus identified with those who were suffering, those who were wounded and living on the margins. Cone writes: “The real scandal of the Gospel is this: … humanity’s salvation is only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst”.
Jesus sees the blind man and has compassion. When Jesus hears the blind man’s cries, he stops. He asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” In asking this simple question, Jesus steps into an alternate social narrative in which the blind man’s needs are as valid a demand on Jesus’ time as those of anybody else.
Towne’s writes about reimagining stories precisely in the way Jesus and the blind man do here. They challenge “images that denigrate and asphyxiate”. This is a “tool and strategy”, a source of strength and hope “in the midst of degradation”.
The blind man and Jesus tell a new story that returns to the blind man his autonomy and worth. He is no longer defined by his blindness. He is not inferior on account of an arbitrary trait. This transformation is captured in the powerful words of Jesus, “Receive your sight. Your faith has saved you”.
Living with my father taught me to hear the cries of the blind man, and to recognize the power and truth of his pain. As I have participated with him in his healing, as he has found strength to give voice to his own story of recognition and redemption, we both have become more human.
Let me be clear: the trauma of 500 years borne by my father has not been healed in my short lifetime, and perhaps he will never be made fully whole. But this is the essential work of Shalom. If we seek to follow Jesus, we should go where he went—among the wounded and marginalized – listening as he did, to their stories, and affirming, as he did, the power of redemption and liberation contained within them.
Josué Coy Dick was born in Guatemala, C.A., and grew up in North Newton, KS. He has roots in the Mennonite community in Kansas, and in the Maya Q’eqchi community in Alta Verapaz, Coban, Guatemala. He is currently a student at Bethel College studying Bible and Religion, Peace and Conflict, Music Performance, and Social Work. He is also a violinist and plays in the Bethel College Chamber Orchestra and various other regional ensembles. He is a member and attendee of Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, KS.
Works Cited
Cone, James. “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”. Orbis Books. Maryknoll, New York, 2011, p 160.
Copeland, M. Shawn. ““Wading through Many Sorrows”: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective.” 2012.
NRSV English New Testament.
Thruman, Howard. “Jesus and the Disinherited”. Beacon Press. Boston, 1949, pp 2, 3.
Townes, Emillie. “Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil”. Palgrave Macmillan. 2006, pp 27, 4.