Christ’s Healing of the Lame Man in the York Cycle’s Entry into Jerusalem: Interpretive Challenges for the Newly Healed

Summary

The Entry into Jerusalem play performed in late-medieval York depicts a representative selection of Christ's miracles, most strikingly his healings of the physically impaired. As Christ rides through the city on a donkey, a crippled yet ambulatory man approaches Jesus as a humble petitioner, seeking expungement of his malady but needing salvation even more urgently.1 One might say that the disabled man remains unremarkable, rendered invisible as he is within the crowd of well-wishers, united in jubilatory spirit; yet Jesus’ healing of him (as the latter moves forward) is nonetheless provocative. Because the lame man's infirmity is starkly apparent — witness his weapon-like crutches, skeletally compromised posture, and limping gait — spectators would not miss seeing his physical malady as being instantly eradicated that moment when Christ lays hands upon him. In fact, as if to enunciate the magnitude of the regenerative act Christ has just bestowed upon him, the lame man in the York play flings his crutches far afield, using two hands. Since the cured man hurls these potentially dangerous props in such a strength-epitomizing fashion, disavowing his former condition, viewers are led to recognize that the mobility-enhancing devices are unsuitable in this sacred space — site of the miracle, city of York, represented by wholebodiedness — just a moment earlier marked by deformity (through accident, illness, or disease). While there is no disputing that the crutches reify the Savior's thaumaturgical efficacy, there are facets of this particular miracle which warrant further investigation. Disabilities-studies scholars have recently pointed out that, within the biblical context of Christ's healing of cripples, cured persons are accepted into the religious community only after their handicaps are eliminated. 2 What we do know of somatic integrity and body metaphor during the late-medieval period corroborates such an outlook applied to the Corpus Christi plays, and evidence is plentiful that communal bodies (cities, competitive networks, groups of practitioners) maintain wholebodiedness by subsuming or otherwise erasing what is deemed to be “deformed.” By focusing upon a type of disability (lameness) — admittedly, a nomenclature associated with a number of maladies — and exploring its implications, this essay extends the range of what can be said about the plight of the physically disabled in York as represented by characters in the plays.