Do the Scriptures say anything of relevance for the church’s pursuit to care for those with mental illnesses or mental health challenges? The Scriptures do not directly address every question that twenty-first century North Americans may ask, and yet the Scriptures do provide wisdom, guidance, and challenges for all questions of human existence and this includes the problem of mental illness. It will not do for ministers of the gospel to avoid this topic by claiming that they are not medical experts or professional counselors, for while professional help (e.g., counseling, medication, hospitalization) is necessary it is not sufficient to provide the care, love, and understanding needed by those who struggle with mental health challenges. It likely will not surprise anyone to hear that mental illness is rarely addressed in an explicit manner in most churches or sermons. There is an almost universal fear and prejudice against the mentally ill that results in them feeling unwelcome, stigmatized, and alienated from others within most settings—including many (probably most) churches. But if it is true that close to three percent of the adult population in the United States (nearly six million people) has experienced a severe and ongoing mental illness, then continuing in fear and a lack of understanding of mental illness is at best irresponsible and at worst a willful turning away from those created in the image of God.^[1] The statistics elucidate the fact that, to use Amy Simpson’s language, “mental illness is mainstream,” but it is likely that one’s own experiences, including those of their families, would suggest that everyone is surrounded by mental illness.^[2]

The ensuing thoughts will offer biblical and theological resources for how the church ought to think and act with respect to mental illness. Specifically included is a thought experiment oriented around Luke-Acts that asks the question: What does the witness of Jesus and the early church have to say about how the church engages people who are challenged with mental health illness? What follows is not so much specific and prescriptive application, but rather an examination of the witness of Jesus and the early church, and how they engaged suffering, stigma, and human vulnerability.

1. Jesus the Healer

Luke makes it plain that Jesus’s short sermon in the Jewish synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth is programmatic for the entirety of his Gospel. Here Jesus draws upon Isaiah to proclaim that God’s Spirit is upon him: “to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19). To state it simply, the object of Jesus’s ministry is the vulnerable (i.e., the poor, blind, incarcerated, and oppressed), and his task is to reverse their conditions which prevent human wholeness and flourishing. If Jesus’s initial sermon occupies a programmatic role in the gospel, then one should expect to find Jesus enacting this program of release and divine favor to all people, including the oppressed and needy. This is exactly what Jesus does in his Galilean ministry (4:31–9:50) where Luke presents a series of scenes depicting Jesus instructing and liberating human beings. This is the literary function of Luke 4:31–44, where there are a series of short vignettes that present what Jesus’s ministry looks like in condensed, representative form:

(i) 4:33–37: Jesus provides release from demonic oppression for a man “with an unclean spirit” (4:33). The text gives a preview of the cosmic battle that takes place over humanity between the healing Messiah and Satan.

(ii) 4:38–39: Jesus heals a woman and the fever “left her” (ἀφῆκεν αὐτήν, 4:39); thus showing that healing is one way Jesus provides release (cf. 4:18–19).

(iii) 4:40–41: Luke provides a typical summary statement of Jesus’s ministry: “as the sun was setting, all who had charge of persons who were sick with various illnesses brought them to Jesus. And placing his hand on each one of them, he healed them. And demons also went out from many people, shouting, ‘You are the Son of God!’”

Jesus’s Galilean ministry is peppered with accounts of his healings and exorcisms: a leper (5:12–16); a paralytic (5:17–26); the slave of the centurion (7:2–10); the son of the widow in Nain (7:11–17); Jesus’s response to John the Baptist’s question of whether or not he is the one (“At that time Jesus healed many people of diseases, afflictions, and evil spirits, and he granted sight to many blind people. He replied to them, ‘Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are told the good news,” 7:21–22); the Gerasene demoniac (8:26–39); the daughter of Jairus (8:40–42, 49–56); the woman with the flow of blood (8:43–48); and the ministry of the twelve in the Galilean villages to heal and proclaim the gospel (9:1–6).  And this is only within Jesus’s Galilean ministry! The point here seems to be as emphatic as one could hope for—one of the primary ways in which Jesus enacts his ministry of release and welcome is through healing the sick and oppressed. A basic question to ask now is: What is the logic here? Why would release from sickness and disease be spoken of as enacting the kingdom of God?

Within Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’s healings reflect his compassionate concern (note this compassion is an enactment of his own teaching, 6:36) for holistic human flourishing and the restoration of humans to total-capacity health, well-being, and social functioning. It is important to look at “Jesus’ acts of healing first and foremost from the perspective of his beneficiaries, those who were sick. Jesus was remembered as having healed people out of compassion for their needs.”^[3] For example, Jesus’s cleansing of the leper dramatically overturns and reverses the leper’s place in society (5:12–16). Of primary importance here is not the healing from actual physical ailment, but rather the implications of the leper’s healing; namely, that it restores him from a place of banishment on the margins of society and from being unable to participate in the religious, communal life of Israel (Lev 13:14; 13:44–45) to now being in a place of full communion within the people of God. The result is similar with Jesus’s healing of the woman with the flow of blood. Her disease was not life-threatening, but it was socially debilitating (8:43–48). Jesus’s healing is a form of compassion that allows her to reenter society, religious life, and to rejoin her family. In Luke 7:11–17 Jesus restores life to the widow’s son. Luke says that Jesus sees the vulnerable, marginalized widow and “the Lord feels compassion for her” (7:13). His restoration of life to the dead son essentially secures her ability to have life and subsistence due to her son.

There are two healing narratives in particular in Luke that specifically exemplify how Jesus’s healings are enactments of release and liberation from Satanic/demonic oppression which usher in shalom—peace, freedom, and life as intended by God. First, in the story of the Gerasene demoniac, the man is described initially as “one who had demons” (8:27) and later as “the man from whom the demons had gone” (vv. 28, 33, 36, 38). The man’s fundamental characteristic is one who is in bondage and oppression to demonic power (4:18–19). The picture is that of a totally dehumanized person, driven from society (house and city), and forced to live in the abode of the dead. He is literally “shackled in chains and bonds” (v. 29) and lives amongst the tombs—as one who is essentially dead (v. 27). Jesus’s healing of the man results in a point-by-point overturning of the man’s prior condition: he had many demons (v. 27) // demons gone from the man (v. 35); he had worn no clothes (v. 27) // he was clothed (v. 35); he did not live in a house but tombs (v. 27) // he was called to return to his own home (v. 39); demons seized him and he was out of control (v. 29) // he was in his right mind (v. 35).^[4]

Second, the story of the healing of the bent woman demonstrates most obviously that Jesus’s healings are enactments of liberation or release from the power of Satan (13:10–17). Thus the story is filled with language of “binding and loosing” (v. 12: You have been set free; v. 15: each of you frees his cow/donkey; v. 16: the woman is set free from the bonds of Satan). Her affliction is due to “having an unclean spirit” (13:11). Note Jesus’s pronouncement: “ought not this daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has oppressed for eighteen years, must she not be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath”? (13:16). Her healing, then, is a form of release which signifies wholeness and freedom from diabolic and social oppression. Further note Jesus’s word of inclusion to her when he refers to her as “this daughter of Abraham.”

Though this point will not be greatly expanded upon, it should be noted that the healing ministry of Jesus continues in the early church as evinced by the book of Acts. Peter’s Pentecost speech is significant here as it both provides explicit evidence that Jesus was remembered as one “attested by God among you through powerful acts, wonders, and signs which God did among you” (2:22) and indicates God’s Spirit will continue to act among the church with signs and wonders (2:19; cf. 2:43).^[5] Peter’s healing of the lame man at the temple gate (Acts 3:1–10) and Paul’s healing of the lame man in Lystra (14:8–10) are so clearly patterned after Jesus’s healings (esp. Luke 5:17–26). They are both performed through prayer to Jesus and in the name of Jesus; the obvious conclusion is that Jesus’s apostles continue what Jesus himself had done, but only now through the power of the risen and heavenly enthroned king (this is explicit in Acts 3:12–16).^[6]

Jesus’s healings, then, are a form of release and welcome that liberates humans from bondage and oppression, restores them to proper physical and social engagement, and flow from Jesus’s compassion for human suffering and vulnerability. Henriksen and Sandnes state this well: “As healer, Jesus reveals a God of love and compassion, who does not turn away from the suffering of creation but instead makes possible concrete hope for redemption and fulfillment by acting in, with, and under creaturely conditions in order to reveal the kingdom. … [Jesus] engages the powers of creation in his graceful approach to humanity in order to alleviate the suffering of the sick and destitute.”^[7]

What does Jesus’s healing ministry mean, however, for the church’s call to care for those with mental illness? Heather Vacek’s Madness examines how a variety of Protestant responses to mental illness were grounded in their Christian sense of obligation to show compassion and care for the mentally ill.^[8] Despite a host of theological differences, these responses were deeply attentive to the human experience of suffering and vulnerability. The words of Dorothea Dix seem to not accidentally echo the words of Jesus: “I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane, and idiotic men and women; of beings sunk to a condition from which the most unconcerned would start with real horror; of beings wretched in our prisons, and more wretched in our almshouses.”^[9] One hears in Dix’s plea echoes of Jesus’s care and advocacy for the vulnerable. Dix has internalized Jesus’s compassion as one who sensed the need and vulnerability of the specific people he encountered.^[10]

Jesus’s healing ministry functions as a reminder that Jesus cared deeply about human flourishing and stood opposed to death and that which inflicted harm and evil upon humanity. Those who seek to continue the healing ministry of Jesus, then, will “stand with those whose lives or whose flourishing are threatened and to withstand the disorders that threaten them, however we explain those disorders.”^[11] Amanda Porterfield has argued that the church’s care for the sick continued in the early centuries of the church’s existence and that this was rooted in Jesus’s healing ministry. She states this well: “[C]are for the sick was a distinctive and remarkable characteristic of early Christian missionary outreach. Early Christians nursed the sick to emulate the healing ministry of Jesus, to express their faith in the ongoing healing power of Christ, and to distinguish Christian heroism in the face of sickness and death from pagan fear.”^[12] The church’s indiscriminate concern for the poor was one of the major factors that led to the creation of institutions such as “poorhouses” that supported widows, the sick, and the poor, as well as hospitals, which were, “in origin and conception, a distinctively Christian institution, rooted in Christian concepts of charity and philanthropy.”^[13]

2. Hospitality and Friendship

The fundamental problem in Luke-Acts is not simply humanity’s alienation from God but also its alienation from one another.^[14] Humans were created to be friends with God as well as friends with one another. One of the surprising features of Luke’s Gospel is that Jesus’s analysis of those in need of “the year of the Lord’s favor” and welcome includes all people, including but not limited to those who are poor, blind, and oppressed (4:18–19). Luke portrays Jesus as a host who dispenses God’s hospitality by sharing meals with strangers, sinners, outsiders, and those on the margins of society. In the ancient world, hospitality to strangers was the means whereby an enemy or outsider was converted into a friend. The “table” was reserved, then, for friends or those with whom one wanted to initiate friendship.^[15] Thus, one of the primary ways in which humanity’s alienation from God is overcome, within the Gospel of Luke, is through sharing meals with Jesus.

But what is surprising about Jesus’s eating practices is that he does not eat only with the religious elite; his hospitality seems to be indiscriminate and offered toward all people: tax collectors (5:27–32; 19:1–10); a sinful woman (7:36–50); two women (10:38–42); the poor and ritually unclean (9:11–17); his disciples (22:15–20); and the Pharisees (7:39; 11:37–54; 14:1–16). It is no surprise, then, that Israel’s leaders consistently grumble and complain about those with whom Jesus shares meals (5:30–32; 15:1–2; 19:6–7). Their immoral lifestyle—or at least lack of serious devotion to the Torah—has disqualified them from participating in the kingdom of God. And yet Jesus interprets their joyful participation in his hospitality meals as the enactment of God’s recovery of his lost sheep and formerly lost children who have now been reconciled with God (throughout Luke 15).^[16]

Thus, Jesus’s meals create a context whereby sinners, outcasts, and those on the margins become friends with God and fellow participants in the kingdom of God. It is this reconciliation with God or friendship with God that should result in their common fellowship or union with one another as fellow friends with God and one another. This is seen, for example, when Jesus publicly declares Zacchaeus to be “a son of Abraham” (19:9) and the bent woman a “daughter of Abraham” (13:16); when the father in the parable tells his older son that “we must rejoice” at the restoration of the lost son (15:29–32), and when Jesus exalts the woman’s hospitality and her recognition of her need of forgiveness but then shames Simon the Pharisee for his lack of hospitality and attendant failure to see his need (7:44–50). Luke’s sequel to his Gospel, the book of Acts, portrays the early church as a community of friends who celebrate and continue to remember Jesus’s hospitality to them. The Summary Statements of Acts 2:42–47 and 4:32–35 show the church remembering Jesus by breaking bread with one another (2:42, 46; cf. Luke 22:19). Luke employs the language of philosophical friendship—“all things in common” (2:44; 4:32b), “one heart and soul” (4:32), and “fellowship” (2:42)—to show that the early church is a community of friends comprised of all people—rich and poor, Hellenist and Hebrew, man and woman, and soon Jews, and every ethnicity under heaven. The primary point here is that Luke’s story presents a correspondence between divine and human hospitality or stated differently, humanity’s restoration with God results in restoration with one another. Friendship with God has as its result the creation of a community of friends. Samuel Wells states the theological dynamic well: “For Jesus, our real problem as human beings is our alienation from God and one another. That is what changes in Jesus. Jesus is the solidarity between us and God that makes those links tangible and visible and permanent and unbreakable.”^[17]

What is the relevance of Luke’s vision of hospitality and friendship for those who are challenged by mental illness? A community of friends is precisely the gift that Christians can share with all people that experience deep vulnerability, stigma, and suffering. It would appear that there is a deep correspondence between the fear, exclusion, and stigma experienced by many of the characters in Luke’s Gospel and mentally ill persons today. Christian community and friendship provide the possibility for vulnerable persons to experience meaningful relationships, relational wholeness, loyalty and commitment even in the midst of pain and brokenness, and fellow humans who are committed to countering the stigma and exclusion many mentally ill persons experience.^[18] John Swinton has made a powerful argument that “Christian friendships based on the friendships of Jesus can be a powerful force for the reclamation of the centrality of the person in the process of mental health care.”^[19] Despite the importance of professional help offered by psychiatry and medicine, a community of friends can provide a focus upon the person (instead of the pathology) and thereby enable people “to explore issues of human relationships, personhood, spirituality, value, and community….”^[20] Just as Jesus and his friendship overturned society’s evaluation of tax-collectors, women, the poor, and the sick so the church as a community of friends is able, through its friendship with the mentally ill and other vulnerable and marginalized peoples, to witness to a new, kingdom-oriented standard of evaluating one another.

One of the common refrains from people who struggle with mental illness is the challenge their behavior often presents to their friends and family. How should they interact with their loved one in the hospital? Why does their friend/loved one seem unpredictable and/or resist opportunities for social engagement? Could the erratic behavior of their loved one result in harm? Why does their loved one seem sad, angry, timid, etc., at all the wrong times? The challenges these questions pose to friends and family almost certainly have no real satisfying answers. Persons with mental illness are not problems to be solved, but persons that require faithful, loyal, persistent, not-easily-offended friends who are willing to simply be with them.^[21] Samuel Wells has argued that the most faithful form of Christian witness is what he describes as “being with” (rather than working for or working with), precisely because God’s act in Christ is an act of the restoration of “being with” his people; it is an overcoming of the alienation between God and humans that is fundamentally an act of hospitality that results in friendship.^[22] This is a helpful way of conceptualizing the church’s engagement of those with mental illness (and those with other forms of vulnerability and suffering). Rather than treating the person as a “problem” that needs to be fixed and needs to find victory or success, the call here is for the church to simply remain with those who are challenged with mental illness. The call is an ordinary one of friendship, presence, fellowship, and all of the joys and struggles that characterize friendships with one another.

3. Challenging Stigmas and Stereotypes

One of the defining features of God’s hospitality in Jesus for his people is that this welcome does not correspond to some prior existing social worth or status of the individual. God’s welcome is for male and female, Jew and (in Acts at least) Gentile, Pharisees and sinners, rich and poor, apostles and outcasts. Luke demonstrates that God’s friendship is for all people apart from their social status by frequently raising a negative cultural stereotype only to reject or subvert it. A few examples will suffice. I have written at length about how Paul’s shipwreck on Malta plays on the stereotypes of the supposedly exotic islanders as uncivilized barbarians. Only here does Luke use the language “barbarian” (Acts 28:2, 4) and it seems this is almost certainly his intention to raise the stereotype of the barbarian, the non-Greek, as one who is prone to prey on shipwrecked strangers and who lacks the civilized custom of hospitality.^[23] The reader is prepared, then, for an impending inhospitality scenario as Paul and his fellow prisoners wreck on the island. But Luke raises this stereotype only to reject it as a poor means of making sense of the Maltese, for Luke pairs “barbarian” together with φιλανθρωπία (“philanthropy”) and this is intentionally jarring for the reader. By way of summary, the Maltese execute hospitality protocols as well as any of the other characters throughout Luke-Acts. They make a fire to warm the prisoners (28:1–2); Paul receives a friendly and hospitable welcome in Publius’s home (28:7–9); and the Maltese provide Paul with what he needs for his journey as they grant honors to him (28:9–10).

Luke does something similar, of course, with the so-called Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. One aspect of Jesus’s genius—to use an insight from John Dominic Crossan—is seen in his forcing the lawyer and reader “to put together two impossible and contradictory words for the same person: ‘Samaritan’ (10:33) and ‘neighbor’ (10:36)…. The story demands that the hearer respond by saying the contradictory, the impossible, the unspeakable.”^[24] The story packs the punch that it does precisely because the reader struggles to say: “The Samaritan was the neighbor to the man,” and perhaps even harder, “The Samaritan obeyed and fulfilled the commands of the Law of Moses.”

A third instance of Luke’s transformation of stigmas and stereotypes occurs in Luke’s portrait of the first Gentile convert, the Ethiopian Eunuch, for he is both black and a sexual deviant by most ancient standards. The Torah forbid castrated men (those with “crushed testicles”) from full participation in the temple (see Lev 21:16–23; Deut 23:1). The prophet Isaiah in fact draws upon the eunuch as a representative for the kinds of outcasts who will be welcomed into God’s people when God fulfills his promises (Isa 56:3–8). Eunuchs were frequently portrayed as soft, feminine, and sexually deviant as they did not conform to the masculine stereotypes of virility and strength.^[25] But despite Luke’s fronting of the man’s identity as a eunuch (Luke 8:27, 34, 38, 39), he activates none of the stereotypes about eunuchs. Rather, the man is silent, humble, and inquisitive as he reads Isaiah and seeks interpretive help from Philip. He welcomes Philip’s interpretation and pursues baptism and goes back home rejoicing—a model Lukan character to be sure.

Roman centurions, women, and those with physical disabilities could be examined in detail to see that the previous three examples are not accidental but instead point to a fundamental feature of Luke-Acts, namely, the worthlessness of stigmatizing stereotypes for making sense of human existence. The recipients of divine welcome in Luke-Acts are some of society’s most stigmatized (and often vulnerable) persons: sinners, tax-collectors, eunuchs, Samaritans, the poor and the hungry, the physically disabled, and barbarians. Jesus is remarkably unconcerned with a fear of the stranger, being polluted by a sinner, or conforming to good societal standards and cultural norms.^[26] Amos Yong has suggested that this theme indicates that those on the margins of society are included within God’s people as they are so that they can stand “as a testimony to the power of God to save all of us ‘normal’ folk from our discriminatory attitudes, inhospitable actions, and exclusionary social and political forms of life.”^[27]

In today’s context one of the most stigmatized groups of people are the mentally ill. This stigma is demonstrated in a variety of ways. While some progress seems to have been made regarding the language used to describe people with physical disabilities, the same cannot be said for those who struggle with mental illness.^[28] Again, John Swinton describes this dynamic clearly:

Running alongside the biological and psychological history of people with mental health problems is a form of social experience that is fundamentally degrading, exclusionary, and frequently dehumanizing. When we look into the social experience of people with mental health problems, we discover a level of oppression, prejudice, exclusion, and injustice that is deeply concerning. Negative media images, powerful stigmatizing forces, and exclusion from basic sources of value are just some of the negative experiences that many people experience on a daily basis, simply because they are diagnosed as having a mental health problem.^[29]

When persons in one’s own local church are no longer identified as people but as a pathology (i.e., a crazy person, a loon, a schizoid, etc.), when the illness of a person becomes a source of fear or an opportunity for anxiety that one might be contaminated, then their primary identity as one who has received God’s welcoming hospitality is sadly lost. One of the primary insights from those who work within disability studies is how the broader culture’s perpetuation of using mental disorders as insults or for the purpose of humor directly and negatively influences engagement with persons who are actually suffering from these disorders.^[30] Amy Simpson has detailed the ways in which the church often contributes, with its own unique spiritual twist, to stigmatizing the mentally ill. Some of these include: the false narrative that Christians should be happy all the time; the naïve belief that mental illness is always a spiritual and never a medical matter; the desire for churches to be comprised of socially acceptable people; the worry that the mentally ill will create social disruptions; and a theological inability to engage human vulnerabilities.^[31]

The subversion and rejection of stigma is dependent upon the previous point regarding hospitality and friendship. Everyone is dependent upon meaningful relationships and friendships for a sense of meaning, joy, and self-worth, but if those with mental illness are deprived of these friendships as a result of others’ judgment and fear then these inevitably will lead to a deep loss of their sense of personhood.^[32] Again, the call here is something that is as ordinary as it is essential and distinctly Christian, namely, the necessity for the church to engage in regular, ordinary friendships with one another and to reject stereotypes that unduly prejudice one’s perceptions of the other. For persons with mental health challenges, the illnesses of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can too easily turn into labels that define people as sick or worse, if people are not vigilant in seeing and befriending the actual person.^[33] Part of the church’s mission, then, is to become friends and allies who stand in solidarity with persons with mental health challenges by rejecting societal stereotypes of individuals labeled as dangerous, risky, or pollutants. Of course, this stems from one’s own recognition that they too are desperately in need of Christ’s welcome and a recognition of their own human vulnerability.

In Saved by Faith and Hospitality I voiced my agreement with Heather Vacek’s powerful conclusion by suggesting that the church can only continue the same mission of Jesus and the early church in Luke-Acts by rejecting its obsession with the so-called normal, with its safe and exclusive boundaries that are privileged over the witness that the church is a stigmatized community.^[34] Vacek stated the matter this way:

[T]o be a stigmatized people: to resist social norms contrary to Christian belief and practice, to eat with outcasts and tax collectors, with sinners, and with those who fail, and to remember that Christian identity is defined by baptism into the body of Christ, not by adherence (or lack of adherence) to social norms…. Being damned by association should be an expected part of Christian witness, but it is a reality difficult to embrace in a society, like modern America, where a safer, more sanitized Christian belief and practice are deemed normative.^[35]

If today’s churches are filled only with those whom broader society sees as safe and normal, then in what way are churches continuing the legacy of Jesus and the church in Luke-Acts? Or do churches unwittingly testify that God’s welcome and friendship come only to those who are socially acceptable? Luke-Acts demands reflection upon those who are vulnerable and stigmatized in society as well as the broader cultural narratives that result in social exclusion and dehumanizing experiences for these persons. And it demands reflection upon how to provide friendship, welcome, and care for all persons within the church. One rather obvious way to do this, in addition to simply being ready and prepared for new friendships with people outside of one’s social circle, is to host different kinds of support groups (or partner with other churches who already are doing this) that provide help for those with mental illnesses. Pastors and leaders (and seminary professors) might do just a little work to educate themselves on the challenges of mental illness and seek to speak, preach, and pray for one another in ways that deconstruct rather than reaffirm fears.^[36] Further reflection could also be done upon whether today’s ministries empower all people to serve and share their gifts rather than cause them to remain in a perpetual guest-like position.

4. God’s Presence in Suffering and Weakness

The experience of suffering can quickly make one question God’s presence and goodness within their life, but the Scriptures witness to the reality that God is present within one’s suffering and weakness, that God often reveals himself through human vulnerability, and that God accomplishes his mission through suffering. The witness of the Scriptures with respect to human suffering is complex (see section 1), and this point should not be taken to imply that suffering or mental illness is an inherent good or something to be sought after. But one should consider how the Scriptures often deconstruct people’s notions of power, masculinity, and normalcy as privileged goods. God is often portrayed as acting and working within situations of human vulnerability. This theme is present throughout Scripture but most emphatically declared by Paul’s surprising claims that God’s power is revealed in the cross of Christ and in his bodily suffering: “I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me. So I take pleasure in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and in difficulties, for the sake of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:9–10). But the theme is present in the Lukan writings as well. For example, in Jesus’s experience of his deepest moments of suffering and vulnerability, he forgives his executioners (Luke 23:34), enacts salvation for one of the criminals on the cross (23:39–43), and entrusts himself to his Father with his last breath (23:46). Paul, as an incarcerated prisoner on his voyage to Rome, offers faithful proclamations of the gospel before his fellow Jews and Roman governors (Acts 22–26) and is instrumental in saving his fellow crew when they shipwreck on the way to Rome (27:1–28:10).

There are a variety of lessons here for ways in which one can learn from suffering and vulnerability, but the ways God works within suffering are particularly important. First, one’s own personal experiences of suffering can enable them to sympathize with others. This is rooted in the remarkable reality that God himself has entered into human suffering through the Son of God who himself “learned obedience from the things he suffered” (Heb 5:7). Christians have the call to sympathize with the pain of others and this is a participation in the divine compassion of the Messiah who had compassion on the sick and the weak.^[37] Second, God’s decision to work through suffering and weakness testifies that vulnerability does not detract from personhood. Everyone is beset by the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that characterize human existence, and these can function as reminders that everyone is needy but that they can live into their full personhood when they embrace and acknowledge their vulnerabilities and need for one another. This embrace can expose idolatrous attempts to obtain false security through “the cult of normalcy” and the rejection of one’s own limitations. Thomas Reynolds says it this way: “Vulnerability is a positive feature of every human life, a life that becomes its own through dependency upon others in relationships of belonging…. [W]hen we engage another human being at various levels of weakness and disability we confront in ourselves something of their weakness and need.”^[38]

The goal here has not been to offer specific and concrete prescriptions for what the church should do but rather to provide some theological resources from Jesus and the early church that can help people think about the church’s mandate to care for those challenged by mental illness. Remembering Jesus as healer challenges the church to continue the healing ministry of Jesus through offering compassionate care and services that lead to human flourishing. The church as a context for friendship and hospitality with one another offers the possibility of it being a place that celebrates difference and cares for one another in the midst of suffering and vulnerability. The remembrance of Jesus and the early church as those who rejected the fears of cultural stigmas and stereotypes can challenge the church to reject obsessions with normalcy and misguided notions of purity and, instead, look for means to include those that broader society has stigmatized.^[39] And the realization that God is present and works within suffering can encourage people to find their joy and full personhood in the recognition of mutual dependence upon one another even in the midst of vulnerabilities.