Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence
How Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega of Gender Identity
Introduction: Jesus the Outcast
Jesus and Gender Development
Analogical Divine Gender Dynamics
Current Application
Jesus was an outcast when he walked on this planet in every way imaginable. This is something we have to constantly remind ourselves as we meditate on his mission and on how we view those different than us or those we feel beneath us. It is also important when we are ourselves outcasts, because Christ shares our suffering and gives our suffering meaning. How was Jesus an outcast? The gospels make clear he was a born in poverty and spent his end years homeless. He was born in a conquered nation, and in that nation he was born in a province that was poorer and despised by the rest of Israel (Jn 1:46). He was conceived outside of wedlock and by the end of his life he was a legally convicted criminal, subjected to the harshest punitive measure, capital punishment. The day that he died his death was not noted by anyone who would be considered in anyway important to the wider dominant Roman society.
These things should be hard to hear about your hero, but we have a tendency to whitewash them to suit our purposes and continue on with life undisturbed by what the nature of his situation says about the demands of our faith. The easiest method used to do this is the “he’s God” excuse. “He’s God, so he was teaching us something by being poor. But other poor people are just lazy.” It is common to pick a member of a group to be your token friend, as Jean Paul Sartre points out in Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), “Such protestations of friendship are not sincere, for anti-Semites do not envisage, even in their statements, sparing the ‘good Jews,’ . . . [even], while they recognize some virtues in those whom they know”. Jesus is the best kind of token friend because he is very quiet and never protests as one goes about being hypocritical regarding friendship with him. One aim of this paper is to reinstill a sense of Jesus as an outcast in the mind of the reader in order to help us be more accepting of the outcast as a harbinger of Christ and to help outcasts identify with Jesus so that their suffering can be made redemptive through binding with him.
The lack of understanding with regards to how much of an outcast Jesus was in his time has detrimental effects on one’s understanding of his teaching in both word and deed. The same mistake is made regarding the good samaritan, and in every class that mentions the subject the instructor has to constantly remind the audience that the samaritan is supposed to be assumed to be a bad guy. But whenever you have to explain a joke the joke is lost, and similarly when you have to explain a tension the tension is lost. The best thing to do is reintroduce the tension. You have to know your audience and pick the exact person that they would say, “that person would never do that!” in order for the emotional impact of the parable to be felt.
The tension one feels when one recognizes Jesus as an outcast performs important spiritual work for us, and help us be open to the grace of acceptance. After knowing it in the deepest sense when one hears of the state executing someone the possibility that that person is christlike is not out of mind, or, more commonly, when one meets a poverty stricken homeless person, criminal, foreigner or “bastard”. Secondly understanding Jesus as an outcast helps those who feel they are outcasts identify with Jesus’ suffering in a particular way and helps awaken in them a sense of purpose and a stock in redemptive suffering. In order to reintroduce the necessary psycho-spiritual impact required for all this to take place we need an example that shocks, is possible and believable. There are only two real restriction in how we go about our meditation in order to make it possible as an experience of Jesus. Hebrews and the creed remind us that Jesus is “one like us in all things but sin”. Therefore anything we think about Jesus has to be a human condition and it can’t be sinful. You will notice none of the previously mentioned qualities, (poverty, homelessness, legal criminality etc.), are objectively personally sinful. If these two criteria are met then it is at least possible (probability is another matter), even within the bounds of orthodox thought, for Jesus to have been however way you may want to describe him as long as you don’t contradict scripture or tradition. Couple that with what scripture and tradition actually does say about Jesus and you are on your way to a usable description of who Jesus is.
The example that I am going to use to identify Jesus as an outcast is, what I would describe as, offensive to pious ears. By my definition, the phrase “offensive to pious ears” means the statement is possibly theologically orthodox, or at least not defined as unorthodox, but certainly easily misunderstood and therefore would easily lead the untechnical or unreflective astray. Often this is not the most desirable tact to take, but one major point of meditating on Jesus the outcast is to obtain sympathy for those one considers an outcast. This process will necessarily be uncomfortable. Therefore this work will center on the possibility that Jesus is a transgendered person, a minority that only very recently has even begun to gain a voice for itself, but which has been around for all of human history. In order to play this example out we will need to discuss some possibilities concerning gender and transgender people, secondly who Jesus is as a person and then discuss the usefulness of such a meditation.
Jesus and Gender Development
Just for foundational purposes it is important define some terms before we proceed. First it is important, for the sake of clarity, to note that there is a differnece between a transgender person, a homosexaul and a transsexual. For the purposes of this paper, a homosexual is a person disposed toward sexual attraction to members of the same sex. Transgendered people are not necessarily homosexual. Because our focus is on transgender people only, we will not be discussing homosexuals or homosxuality for the remander of this paper. In order to define the other two categories we need to distinguish between biological sex and gender. Biological sex is identified by the generative organs an individual human happened to be born with. It is not important here to get into all the variances that even this can take, but suffice to say between sex and gender, sex is the less ambiguous of the two. So a trans-sexual is a person who has had an operation and has changed their biological sex. Gender refers to the socially identified roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. The easiest way to distinguish is to think of sex as male and female and gender as masculine and feminine. With regards to gender one should note that those social realities have true and foundational psychological impacts on individuals. The more ancient, general and universal the social belief regarding gender the more possible it is that the gender of a person in that respect is a product of nature over nurture and a person may not be able to immediately choose where they align with regards to gender. Couple that with basic biological facts like hormonal cycles and how varied physical realities impact one’s sense of self and it becomes obvious that, though gender may be a fairly fluid reality, it is a reality none the less and not simply chosen at a certain point in life or purposely developed over one’s life. Therefore a transgender person is a person whose biology and gender don’t fit the normative expectations, a person who is biologically female and gender masculine or vice versa.
To wonder what the gospels may have to say about Jesus’ gender identity is laughably anachronistic, however the scriptures do have much to say in their own way about the issues of gender and relations between the sexes, and often with surprising conclusions. The gospels themselves say little about the internal life of Jesus so any conjecture about it is simply that, conjecture. Therefore I will draw my analysis of Jesus from both scripture and tradition starting with the classic dogmas of the trinity and the incarnation. If one is to believe Christianity then there is an aspect of Jesus’ personality that is preexistent to his human nature. He is the eternally begotten Son of God. This seems to support the case for a masculine gender identity for Jesus, but remember that all knowledge of God is apophatic in the end. The terms we use to describe God are analogous at best, and anyone who thinks beyond 2nd grade religion class knows God has no sex or gender, God is gender transcendent. Thus the title “Son of God” , the eternal second person of the trinity, is always to be understood as fundamentally as a useful image, but not a sex or gender specifier.
If one is invested in an extremely high christology and conceives of the internal life of Jesus of Nazareth as being invested with all divine knowledge from the beginning, then Jesus would have been trans-gender, but in this case that means beyond gender not traversing gender norms. He would be neither masculine nor feminine, or better yet he would be both masculine and feminine, the Alpha and Omega of gender reality so to speak because he knows immediately all gender and in his humanity experiences it. However if one is invested with a low christology and uses Jesus humanity to understand his relationship to his divinity then many more familiar psychological dynamics can be used to speculate on Jesus’ inner life, dynamics such as ignorance and learning.
Could Jesus have ever been ignorant of anything given he was God? One can only speculate on such questions without really knowing, but the answer seems on the face of it to be no. God knows everything. On the other hand, Jesus is Human and ignorance is a universal example of the human condition. The only thing that needs to be cleared up now is whether or not it is sinful to be ignorant of a fact. I don’t think anyone would say that simple ignorance is sinful, there are an infinite number of facts that any given person does not know. I don’t know the distance between Jupiter and Mars. I don’t know the temperature of some specific cat’s toenail. These are not moral failings, but simply examples of my status as a finite being, the learning process is part of the human condition. It could be argued that we see Jesus’ learning process demonstrated Mt 8:10 when he is amazed by the centurion's faith. To be amazed, one must be suprised, and to be surprised, one must be unaware of the circumstances, then have the circumstances made known to you. If one assumed that Jesus underwent the standard learning process as a human and grew into the type of person he was on this earth (as we all do and by that we are not sinning) then he would have grown in awareness of his gender identity as well (as we all do and by that we are not sinning).
On the face of it we can only assume that Jesus underwent the same coming of age as any average first century palestinian. Historical evidence to the contrary is impossible to obtain, and the gospels, which narrate Jesus’ life, show little concern for relaying the development of his gender self awareness. Oddly the tact that I intend to use to construct my thought experiment is more in high christological in nature starting with the pre existent Word or Son of God and working from there to the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth.
Analogical Divine Gender Dynamics
The first piece of evidence I am going to submit is the creedal assertion that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. When one lines this teaching up with the narrative woven in Genesis of the creation of human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, it has some intriguing parallels. In the first creation story the man and woman are created simultaneously and it is proclaimed that they are in the image and likeness of God. Now, that image and likeness is obviously meant to be understood as borne by each individual human, but I don’t think it is at all out of place to see it borne in human relationships as well, especially the unique relationship of man and woman. The humans created here are perfectly mirroring the loving relationship that is the Father and Son in the loving relationship of the Spirit. It’s probably out of place to ask who symbolizes who. Love is love and the Spirit is the Spirit, but of the humans, which is the Father which is the Son? At a certain point all analogies break down, but let’s go ahead and push it as far as we can and see if we hit a breaking point.
The quick answer here is obviously neither, the Father and Son are both male, so there’s no need to go further. But as was pointed out previously the unknowable God is beyond sex and gender so those names and sex or gender identifiers are useless. Are we at a stand still? Maybe, but we do learn something about each trinitarian person from the creed that may be of help. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. That is, their relationship is one of begetting, the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten by the Father. In chapter two of Genesis the creation of humanity is retold in a more temporal and terrestrial way. Eve is pulled out of Adam’s side, the female birthed from the male, in a gender twist that harkens to begetting more than birth and, when grounded in a trinitarian lense, harkens to equality. The odd part of this story is that she is pulled out of his side and then from that point on all other humans are pulled from her and her biological sex, but only after they are instilled by the male. Indeed that installation in the ancient mind was of the complete human into the woman by the man, the man who makes people through the woman.
This leads us to another interesting piece of creedal information about the Trinitarian Godhead. According to the creed and the prologue of John’s gospel, the Second Person of the Trinity is the one “through whom all things are made.” This is extremely feminine in nature. So much so that after contemplating it one may wonder at the great wisdom of The Spirit and the church fathers for calling the second person the “Son”. Otherwise a creator/consorte view of God would have been almost inevitable. From that husband and wife analogy the trinitarian view of the oneness of God would have been almost impossible for the human mind to accept because of the familiarity of husbands and wives as distinct co creators. Here gender norms are dramatically broken to throw us off the scent of any self marriage of God with the noble and good goal of avoiding the polytheism that would certainly follow. The analogical flip worked so well that the staunch feminine qualities of the Son are completely unnoticed by most Christians. Add to that the fact that God in “his” wisdom then became incarnate as a man, but the person that became incarnate was the feminine aspect and you have excess validation that gender and biological sex are in no way applicable to God. The amount of gender paradox involved throws the mind into a spin, and from the Christian point of view that is not a bad thing. God’s ways are not man’s ways.
With the incarnation you have the birth of a completely human being who is also the second person of the trinity. I have argued that that human being, if typical, would have to go through a process of self discovery and come to understand himself as the second person of the trinity. I will try not to stray into any modalistic heresy, but I want to draw out the relationship of the Son to creation and see how it bears on Jesus’ own self understanding. While doing This there is a standard narrative for gender norms and the family to be taken into account. The Father is seen in relation to the children as the distant provider who is also the stern rule keeper. The mother on the other hand is stereotypically seen as the closely connected nurturer and protector of the children. The children spring from her body, through which the children are made with the man, and subsist on her being for the beginning of their life, then they are coddled by the mother and protected from the distant stern father figure. The impact of this stereotypical gender narrative can be seen in the punishments of the Fall in Genesis 3. The man is now going to experience pain in his labor to produce bread, the distant or transcendent way that he provides for and feeds his family and takes care of his children. The mother will bring forth children in pain, which is usually strictly interpreted as labor pains proper, but let’s not discount the pain of carrying children. I would add to that the pain of that original sustenance, breastfeeding, which is required for the child to live. I have coached and comforted my wife through the breastfeeding of children and despite the insistence of the community that “it’s not supposed to hurt” I have observed that it almost necessarily does, from the initial rawness to the bitter biting end of teething I was stressed out, and I wasn’t even doing anything. In this situation the woman is seen as completely connected to their creation and absolutely immanent to the child, that child first existing within her being, then living off of her very body. All of this is also typical of the immanent Trinity (that is how the trinity is interpreted with regards to temporal procession and engagement with creation as opposed to the “economic trinity”, theologically, how the trinity is interpreted in and of itself). The Father is absolute transcendence, distant sustainor and law giver. The Son is the person that creation is made through. The Word sustains creation in an imminent way coming to creation itself in the form of the incarnation to bring relief from the burden of law and visiting compassion on the creation. In the typical gender roles the father is outside of the home and from the child’s point of view, sustains the home in effective but mysterious ways. The mother is in the home with the children and demonstrates caring and understanding along with them. So too the immanent trinity, The Father is the stereotypical father and the Son is Emmanuel, God with us. From the parent’s point of view the two are a unit bound by their nuptial relationship, three as one. So too with God who is Father and Son bound by the Love of the Spirit.
Once again, one cannot know the inner life of Jesus of Nazareth as he walked this Earth, but I can imagine that he would have to come to terms with his identity as the second person of the trinity, who as we have described seems to be a very feminine reality. The most painful part of this would be having to come to terms with a powerful sense of imminent nurturing and a mysterious sense of being the vessel of creative power in a very feminine sense, yet at the same time being a man in first century palestine, a society which is extremely patriarchal in its focus. Yet the more one acknowledges Jesus’ awareness of himself as the Son of God, either from his conception or as he developed that understanding through his life, the more one would have to admit that he would identify as that feminine person of God’s creative power.
To reveal that femininity in any but the most subtle ways would be near impossible, but it could be that he found ways to get across the feminine as well as masculine nature of his mission of salvation. Jesus seems to have taken thirty years to come to terms with his mission, time to mature, time to get comfortable with who he really was, then he did not fail to act out of compassion. Before the summation of his redemptive action he stopped to share a last meal with his closest companions. In this meal, “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood” (Mt 26:26-27) This sign and sacrament is extremely impactful and traditional Christianities have celebrated it as a reality they consume for two thousand years. But on the face of it it does seem odd and even random. In John’s Gospel the fact is brought up in the eucharistic discourses, “The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat?’ Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” (Jn 6:52-53) The idea of Jesus giving his body to eat gave rise to accusations of cannibalism against the early church and today non-believers seeking to get a rise out of Christians jestfully call for defense against the same charge. It is a just question, men usually do not give their bodies for others to eat. But how typically masculine an outlook because, of course, women do all the time and a person aligned to the feminine would be keenly aware of how a person can give someone their flesh to eat, and why that would not even slightly conjure the image of brutal cannibalism, but instead an image of maternal nurturing. The sacrament given to us every Sunday is itself a very transgender reality. It crosses gender boundaries in that it is ostensibly the masculine form of sustenance and life by tradition of the Bible, that is, bread. Yet at the same time in it’s essence it performs sustenance in the most feminine way, that is, from the very body of the being doing the sustaining. The interior and unseen (essence) sustenance is feminine (body), while the exterior (accidents) sustenance is masculine (bread). It embodies every aspect of life giving power as we know it, both transcendent and immanent, masculine and feminine. This was the sign that Jesus left us and the way to true communion with him.
Current Application
The evidence and thought processes that lead us to the conclusion that Jesus is a transgender person are comically speculative. I don’t foresee a wide devotion in the church to “transgender Jesus”. Yet, I don’t believe they are unorthodox. The idea is obviously not defined doctrine or dogma, and apart from a strict definition as such there is wide room for speculation and to my knowledge nothing here has broken any tradition or teaching of mainline ancient varieties of christianity (I have to add the modifier ancient because of the sacramental focus of given to the eucharist, but everything asserted would be true if it were a one time transubstantiation). If is not sinful to align with a gender different from your biological sex, it’s just socially unacceptable, but then again so is dining with the poor and prostitutes.
Recently the magisterium has made comment on current gender ideologies, and many people have taken particular criticism and widely applied them to denounce transgender existence as sinful. However, the statements are all directed at choice. For example Francis does talk about being comfortable with the body God gave you in Laudato Si. But this does not disparage transgender people as sinful, only people who choose to radically change the nature of their bodies out of discontent. Also Pope Francis has voiced distaste for ideologies that teach people, especially children, that they can choose their gender. But in this paper the reader will notice that we have not made gender a choice but an inborn aspect of a person. We have simple noted that it doesn't always align with how one may expect, but can display a paradox to be pondered and possibly learned from. People who see a transgender human as somehow sinful may not see the difference between a paradox in nature and a disorder of nature. A disorder is when things that are good are turned to negative ends. A paradox is when things one doesn't expect to go together, but they do and great value comes to Christianty and the world because of them. A perfect example would be the existence of a truly human truly divine person. The litmus test for a possible paradox is the presence of goodness on both side. Is humanity good? Yes, is Divinity good? yes, it seems to be impossible for two goods to equal a bad in every instance. How such a pairing would work for good is a paradox. Now we can apply the metric to the topic at hand. Is bio-sex good? Yes, male and female bodies are good. Is gender good? Yes, masculinity and femininity are good. So how can a blend or mix and match of two fundamentally good things turn out to be sinful every time?
The standard answer is that God made man and woman in the beginning, and their genders are necessary to their being. But this is a strict first creation story interpretation, though gender doesn’t is not even hinted at in that story. Also this specific interpretation completely ignores the first story of creation which contains “original man”, as St. John Paul II calls him, who is gender transcendent. There are a plethora of possible paradoxical as well as disordered ways that these combinations can work out. Pope Francis seems to be pointing to some disordered ways, but the identification of disordered ways does not rule out paradoxical ways of being transgender.
Identifying strictly with the gender opposite of one’s biological sex may be rare, but it is not absent in the human condition and all people on a spectrum have to come to terms with their gender identity through their life. So it fits the criteria for who Jesus is said to be, “one like us in all things but sin.” But why bother to do it? One could make all kinds of crazy speculations about who Jesus was as he walked this earth without breaking tradition without being sure if your right. Why would it be helpful to understand Jesus this particular way even as a private devotion? The reasons, as pointed out above, are twofold and my hope is they will change everything that has happened here from a lofty and pointless academic exercise to a useful introspective and pastoral tool.
The first reason is introspective. It is helpful to think of Jesus as transgender person because it makes most of us uncomfortable, and thereby makes us reflect on our own discomfort. To think of Jesus in anyway that attaches him to sexuality, biological sex, or being in tune with his own sexual nature brings us to a point of uneasiness. But these things are inextricably tied to human nature and sexuality, biological sexual identification and gender identification are not sinful, so however all these things work out for Jesus, transgender or otherwise, they most certainly did happen. To think otherwise denies the humanity of Jesus as a result of apollinarian heresy, docetism, or an unsystematic hybrid of both. Jesus was historically situated and though the human nature of Jesus reigns supreme now, bound to the Son of God hypostatically in glorified form, he lived as a human in first century palestine and could not have escaped his context and his human development within that context (the human nature having a starting point in time as human nature does). To then make that discomfort with Jesus’ gender identification amplified by ascribing a transgender identity to him places him as not just human, but a human outcast. This is the worst kind of outcast society can create because, similar to a racial or tribal outcast, there’s no moral reason to have it, nor is there any threat here to survival or well being. It is simple outcast for the sake of outcast. As I said at the beginning you must meet Jesus as an outcast to truly embrace his message and understand how he teaches humanity. The pinnacle of his teaching and redemption (his suffering and death) is the pinnacle of his status as an outcast, totally abandoned. The more one can awaken a sense of horror at the distance of the type of human Jesus is, the more we can see him as less of a glorified comic book hero and begin to see him as those around him saw him, as one with no stately bearing. At this point one must recognize the savior and in that recognize the redeemability of every variety of human and the ability of every type of human to offer a key to grace and redemption. When one is faced with Jesus the outcast one is forced to ask, how do I treat those who are outcast in my eyes? Given the answer, would I even recognize the savior? The more one can internalize this aspect of the savior, the more one can begin to awaken compassion for all one’s fellow humans. There are a thousand tropes to employ in this same vein. The nativity scene of St. Francis was meant to serve this exact function. Though probably not anything like the actual scene of Jesus’ birth, the point remains. Then the point is taken, glorified itself and made less impactful through familiarity, hence the need for constant re-employing of the methodology. Who are the outcasts? How can we intellectually and artistically represent Jesus as that?
The second reason to meditate on Jesus this way is pastoral. To be a transgender person in modern society is to be an outcast, but for no reason other than cultural bias. To identify Jesus as transgender person in meaningful ways and linking it to his ministry specifically could help the transgender person see what graces they bring to humanity through the ministry of Christ. They embody for us the fact that gender is not the same as biological sex, they are closely but not universally connected. Every male and female must be able to balance the compatible duality inherent nature as Jesus did and the transgender person is a living Icon to that effect. The struggles they go through are also indicator of their purpose and the fruit they bear for humanity.
The narrative I wove gives the Eucharist a specific meaning because of the transgender context. It’s not the complete context of the eucharist, but it is helpful. Transgender people face much persecution and much suffering in our society, but that can be redemptive suffering. This is something that modern thought eschews. Suffering is seen as something to be eradicated. One Christian view of suffering is laid out, once again, in the story of The Fall. The humans are punished via hard labor in tilling the earth and hard labor in child rearing. But one will notice at the end of each of these punishments goodness and particularly life comes forth. The knowledge of good and evil the humans receive is, as Paul says “We know that all things work for good for those who love God.” (Rm 8:28). Thus the suffering of Christ is imitable and compassion, as the name implies, is sharable. Again in Colossians 1:24 it states, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church,”. Any persecution one feels is a shared persecution with Christ if one binds to him. With the interpretation offered here a transgendered person can look upon the suffering Christ In John’s Gospel, dying at the hands of patriarchal brutality, stripped naked, his biological sex revealed, he is pierced by a spear (an unmistakable phallic symbol) excreting water and blood out his side, the vaginal secretions of an, in this case raped, female virgin. Then in the biblically classic way Jesus takes that suffering violation and gives birth out of the opening in his side, after the nature of Adam, to the Church. This brutal rape scene hints at sexual and gender situations that can resonate with a transgender person concerning their personal persecutions by society and the gift brought through it by Christ can awaken their sense of personal charity to share their gifts despite persecution.
In conclusion to see Jesus as a true human who one can identify with is important and when one does lessons can be garnered about how one is to fulfill their own humanity. But also to recognise him as a unique human, different than oneself can help one reflect on how one regards other human beings as people who bring grace to us and helps one check his or her sense of prejudice and superiority. The entire exercise helps us to recall that those things we see as fixed and manipulable, such as gender norms, do not apply to God essentially and God can use them in any way God sees fit. In the Kingdom of God “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28) Gender norms are operable and can be unified into a oneness and distinctness that is beyond empirical or categorical explanation. The meditation is also helpful to remind us that things we see as fixed are not always as fixed as we may think and that alternate ways of thinking may have much fruit to offer. We must be open to looking for fruit as a default as opposed to finding fault as a default. Otherwise our focus on a triumphant, priestly, royal messiah will not lead us to the possibility of the cross of Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment