Jesus and the Blind

Our theme verse for the week is that Jesus came “to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). In that same message, Jesus talked about poverty and incarceration as signs of where oppression flourished. And then Jesus mentioned health. In particular he said he came to proclaim “recovery of sight for the blind” (Luke 4:18), which for our purposes today we’re going to think about in the general terms of health care.

Katy White has often mentioned a book that has influenced her medical practice: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington. Chapter after chapter underscored how systems of oppression have existed in health care such that skin color has often been a key determining factor in what kind of care you could get. And, as we saw on Sunday, the health outcomes for Black Americans are still drastically worse than for White Americans (see graph below about deaths by age 1 per 1,000 births).

For some of us, this information can seem far away. Perhaps we don’t work in healthcare, or, more likely, these sorts of numbers feel overwhelming when there seems to be little we can do about them. And yet this was Jesus’s inaugural sermon. He thought it was really important for us to be having these exact sorts of conversations and to be disturbed by them, even. Perhaps that’s what we are being invited into today.