[midrash] temptations in the wilderness

[let's just all agree to headcanon Jesus as a trans girl, ok? I'll go first.]

[content notes: intentional food deprivation, suicidal ideation]

[inspired by bestie's version of the temptation story and her reflections on Jesus' baptism]


Temptations in the Wilderness
Matthew 3:13-4:11

Her cousin greets her with a grin and a peace sign, like he has a thousand times before.

Her stomach flutters -- less from the presence of so many bodies as from the knowledge of what's inside them -- the oppressive intent of repentance, the turning, turning, that's tugging her too. The crowd's fervor tugs at her, pulls her where she wouldn't go, or wouldn't go yet.

A press of hands all around, John's smiling refusal to baptize her, an argument they've had many times before, half-joking, about worthiness and precedence, elder cousin and younger kinswoman, greater and lesser, first and last, and then Jesus kneels and John kneel, and John dunks Jesus like they're kids again, rough hands on her shoulders.

Dripping wet, she emerges from the river, and the skies open.

This is what God looks like like, a reflection of her own soul, diving from heaven into the waters, fearless, landing on her sodden robes and becoming enveloping light, saying, "You are my beloved child. I'm so pleased with you."

belovedchild

She wades out of the water, teases John, says something under her breath about needing some time alone, and John nods and tells her, "Go into the wilderness. It's what I do," but God is already pulling her there, no longer visible or audible, but a tug on her heart like the strongest winds. Like riptide.

She spends a lot of time in prayer.

Some things she can see clearly -- a long, narrow road. Many secrets. Friends, close as her breath, and betrayal. And God's kingdom, all around --in the stillness of the wilderness, she remembers children, and lepers, widows, and sinners, each of them in their way perfectly reflecting God. And the grains of the earth and the birds of the air, and all the things that are given for human consumption, and all the work that people do, building and crafting and weaving, and it is all an image of God.

Then she'll walk for awhile, pulled by that invisible wind, and she sees nothing at all.

She hears John's voice, calling for repentance, and she thinks yes, yes, he's right. And remembers the fate of prophets, and would stop to weep, but she's tugged further along.

belovedchild

Pieces of it are already in her hand -- she can feel herself reaching out, touching stopped ears and broken limbs, can feel the place whence the power comes -- she could do it now, she's ready now, and her muscles are tense with anticipation.

She could stop storms in their paths, multiply bread and feed every starving child. She could do it now.

But it's not time yet, says the wind, blowing stronger, whipping her robes around her until they're the enemy, preventing her from taking another step.

And yet she stumbles further.

She thinks perhaps she knows how it should end, but all she can see there is darkness, and death, and she is nowhere near sure she's strong enough.

belovedchild

She sits and thinks about death and Rome and desire, and all the good she would do if there were only time, and if only people listened.

Whenever she's visited John, since she was child fresh out of Egypt until this last time at the Jordan, John has explained that people won't listen. John, with a voice that could fell trees and ignite nations. People won't listen, and so she will fail.

She walks further into the wilderness, away from failure and from success, into the heart of the mystery that whispers belovedchild and gives her glimpses of a world where grown-ups sit at God's feet like children, learning, playing.

The shape of her body is strange and growing stranger. Muscled, weak, tired, restless. She walks, she doesn't know how far, and the wind blows up around her. At night she lies down, but doesn't sleep. She listens, and the desert tells nothing.

She thinks maybe she can recognize this body as her own, for the first time.

God saw her in the Jordan, and God was pleased with what God saw.

If she saw God doveshaped and lovely, maybe God, too, saw her as she really is.

Her feet hurt, and then become calloused, and then she loses them altogether, has no sense of them belonging to her. Then her hands, and her voice, and her beard and her hair and her eyes and her ears. There is still something that's her (belovedchild) but it's shapeless and starving.

Feed me.

She longs for braided bread and fresh fish, but there is nothing but dust and stones.

Hungry.

If she ate a stone (like an infant, innocent) or two or three or three thousand, she would feel full. If she changed the rocks to bread, she would be full. She can feel the shape of it (in that part of her that isn't hand or foot or voice or even thought, but Power), silt and sediment becoming wheat and oil. It would be easy. It would be nothing.

And she would be full and forget what hunger means.

She must remember hunger, must remember starvation, hollow agony, and the feeling that she would do anything, anything, to stifle that pain for a moment. She would cheat, or steal. She might murder, and she wouldn't even know when the Sabbath was to care if she broke it.

Remember hunger.

But that will be later. Now, starving, she holds the hunger at bay and reaches into the tug of the desert winds, so wild now she has no choice but to follow, and the wind takes her up and far away from her life, and it seems to her that she is in Jerusalem, although she may just be on a cliff, overlooking desolation.

Either way, she is ready to jump.

It ends in death, why not end it now?

Of course it ends in death, and in Jerusalem, and at the Temple, where, unseen and unnoticed, a woman could preach Good News forever and be ignored. Why not begin it the way it must end?

And if you are God's child, then God wouldn't let you die.

A child hiding in the Temple, testing her parents, waiting to see if they'll come back.

If they really loved you.

If God means for you not to die, then God will rescue you.

Jump.

(But God probably wants you to die.)

Jump.

Death, and flight, and the sensation of falling, and the possibility of rising, and surrender to the forces of nature, wind and gravity, and the forces of darkness, oblivion and destruction -- if she just stops holding on --

Jump.

belovedchild

There is no second vision, no intervention. God descended once and wrapped her in light, and if she holds her mind just so, she can remember beyond the physical senses (dove, warmth, whisper) what it felt like to know that she was God's.

Is God's.

She steps away from the cliff.

And walks higher.

(Whenever she looks down, for the rest of her life, she'll think about jumping

but she never will.)

She sits down, as if to rest, or teach, and the world goes gray, then clarifies into a vision, golden at the edges -- the farthest valleys that she can see from this pinnacle, where vineyards grow, and goatherds tend their flocks, and she can taste:

sweet wine, tangy cheese, salted fish, mother's bread (so, so, so hungry, still). There are friends at either side and a cup that overflows with joy, the fatted calf has been slain, and there is feasting without end. This is the taste of God, but pleasure is not God, and she makes herself swallow and taste the desert grit that fills her mouth.

"Repent! Repent and return to the God who brought you up out of Egypt, the God who sets before you the ways of life and death. Listen, sinners! There is still time to turn again to God. Hear what God demands of you -- that you do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God. That you love your neighbor as yourself..." This is John's voice, but it is also her voice, and the voice of every prophet. It is the voice of Law, and also the voice of Love, and it sounds like God, but it is not God, so she closes her mouth and stops preaching, and listens to the uncanny winds.

She holds a child in her arms, and in the distance an ephemeral spouse does chores. This is her family, and every family -- it is Elizabeth and Zechariah and John, her parents and her siblings, Mary and Martha and Lazarus growing old together, building a life. She nurtures a child, and teaches it, feeds it and clothes it and when it grows old, it will care for her. This feels like God, but it is not God. She lets go of the child, and feels the ache and cold and strangeness of her body, sitting on a mountain, learning the posture of a teacher.

The Temple smells of livestock and blood sacrifice, and under that finest resins, and smoke without end. When they no longer bring animals, they bring praises and incense and oils wrought at great cost, and their labor and their joy, their sacrifice and their worship, are pleasing to God. This is the scent of God, but it is not God. The desert smells ancient, and cold.

She opens her eyes and sees a ladder dangling in front of her. She can see the throne that is hers, covered in glitter, draped silks so fine they are like water and covered in mirrored gems that reflect glory upon glory, the throne she dreamed of when she played at being a princess as a child. If she climbs the ladder and sits in that throne, then everyone to the furthest reaches of the valleys that surround her pinnacle will obey her softest command: "Share," or "Heal," or, "Love." The light that comes from that throne refracts into rainbows, -- and this looks like God. Wherever she looks, this looks like God.

belovedchild

This looks like the heavens opened up, and a voice calling her home, to the place where she belongs, where she will be clothed in finest robes and honored like an eldest daughter, where she will be God's princess child and where her siblings and children will gather, uncountably numerous, to feast with her and to worship her Parent. No one will be lonely, and no one will know what hunger means. Home.

belovedchild

A God who comes to her tenderly, who tastes of love and deepest sacrifice, who feels like her mother, and a little like herself, the God who named her, and who summoned her into the wilderness -- the God of love and family and pleasure and joy, who demands worship and evokes awe, the God who summons her home to Galilee, where it all begins.

[Christology] Jesus is my Girlfriend

[my usual disclaimers about being lesbian and Christian are relevant here, but perhaps most importantly and inescapably in this reflection, I am an English-speaker. While the limitation of language is, of course, part of the point, it is also worth mentioning upfront and remembering throughout: I am fluent in English and only in English.]

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing." - Luke 13:34, NRSV.

What if you never used gendered pronouns for God?

Well, if gender is a deeply ingrained marker for you, if it's part (perhaps an important part) of how you perceive people (including yourself), you might feel God was a wee bit impersonal -- a bit like the Platonic Form of a Person, maybe, without gender or sex or sexuality or skintone or eye color or an accent or affectations or mannerisms or in fact any of the things that make us people.

And perhaps if you have lived in (and still live in) a culture where "people" default to white middle-class college educated cisgendered WASPy straight men, perhaps you might envision God -- in the privacy of your own head -- as being an old white man, just like He God is depicted in so many works of visual art.

Perhaps the discipline of never using gendered pronouns for God would make your experience of God distinct, would remind you that God is transcendent, unlike us, unlike you, and you would be careful not to attribute to God your own human thoughts and feelings.

Perhaps you would adopt a discipline of using personal pronouns, of addressing God, and thus experience God not as Mother or Father or Bride or Bridegroom but as Thou, personal, intimate, and unutterably Other.

Perhaps the discipline of never gendering God would help you to find other metaphors for God: Rock, Spirit, Breath, Word, Wisdom, Flame. Perhaps you could look at that list of sexless concepts and forget that anyone, anywhere, has envisioned Wisdom as feminine or Fire as masculine.

Perhaps you know a God through meditation Who is so transcendent and other that you could not imagine gendering God anymore than you could imagine holding God's hand or kissing God or running to embrace God early in the morning in a quiet garden.

What if you never used gendered pronouns for God? What if you never used gendered metaphors for God? If God were Parent, Child, Sibling, Spouse, Monarch instead of Mother, Son, Sister, Bridegroom, Queen?

There are non-gender-specific, personal metaphors for God that are a lot more evocative than "sibling," of course -- Lover, Shepherd, Potter, Prophet.

What if you never gendered God? Perhaps your language for God would be rich and evocative, creative and nuanced, every word carefully chosen, first because of the newness of the discipline, then because of the joy of finding new ways to tell old truth. Perhaps you would become more aware of gender as a construct, of the unconscious ways we use gendered language all the time. Learning to use inclusive language is an exercise, a discipline, that renders visible the invisible and omnipresent structure of gender in our culture.

++

Noli me tangere. John 20:17, Vulgate.

This tiny scrap of scripture has been central to my spiritual and academic life (which are, by their nature, one) since I was a senior in college and writing a thesis (if the kind of theology I do -- speculative, constructive, inventive, creative, poetic, imaginative and only discursive when it can't be helped -- can rightly be anything so formal as a 'thesis') about the romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary called Magdalene.

++

So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours sound the strangling of their fear and bullying round him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him. For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a compulsion. And already he had been compelled even into death. The nausea of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with repulsion, dreading its mean contacts. - The Man Who Died, D.H. Lawrence

Jesus asked, "Who touched me?" When all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you." But Jesus said, "Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me." - Luke 8:45-46, NRSV.

It got stuck in my heart my first semester at seminary and it won't unstick... when Jesus Sang the Stone Butch Blues:

She does not touch, learns not to touch, discovers to her horror the draining of touch, the power of touch, the healing and the scarring that is skin touching skin, daubed spittle and fingertips, aching with sensation, nerve endings and desire...

++

People have very kindly not asked me why I've suddenly become so freakish around my pronoun usage, why I sing or say "Child" and "She" or "Ze" when everyone else is saying "Son" and "He." And yet I have an instinctive defensiveness around this topic, a fictional interlocutor against whom I defend myself admirably, as if theology were a contest and not a conversation, as if I could tell you what your relationship with God looks like. That, as they say, is between you and your God.

++

I have worshiped mostly in contexts where the First and Third Persons of the Trinity are referred to with gender-neutral language most of the time, to the point where hearing "God -- He" is not just a little jarring to me.

Jesus, of course, was male.

Of course.

++

There are three ways that we understand the Body of Christ. One is female, one is male, and one is genderless.

The bread we share at the communion table is for us the Body of Christ. This bread is tangible, physical, palpable; we can feel and taste and smell it, and to us it is the very Body of Christ. It is a capital-S Sacrament of God's presence in the world. It is the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.

The Church is the Body of Christ. She is Christ's hands and feet and voice and heart in the world. Paul explains to the Corinthians in eloquent detail how the Church -- She, we -- is Christ's Body (1 Corinthians 12:12-31).

Jesus' body was the Body of Christ. Jesus' body was male, and Jesus was resurrected: actually, physically, tangibly, literally. Jesus died, and lives again. Christ is Risen. Magdalene encountered the living Christ in the garden on Easter morning. He is risen indeed.

++

He says, "Noli me tangere."

The risen Christ is not quite the Jesus who died.

++

"Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." Matthew 25:40, NRSV.

The Second Person of the Trinity -- Son, Christ, Word, Wisdom -- is that Person Who becomes incarnate. The Incarnation was Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, God's Beloved, God's Chosen, the Word made flesh.

And Jesus was, presumably, male-bodied. Was identified as male by Jesus' contemporaries. Identified Christself, without question, as male.

So.

What?

In 1981, Rosemary Radford Reuther asked, "Can a male savior save women?" and those of us who ask it with her have been told (I assume it's not just me) that Jesus' maleness is not important, no more than Jesus' thirtyness or able-bodiedness or Semiticness or 1st-century-CEness. What is important is that Jesus was particular, scandalously particular, that God chose ONE BODY, just like each of us has one body, that Christ's humanity was, just like our humanity, particular and contingent.

In 2006, I wrote:

If Jesus was human -- and he was, fully human, subject to human temptations, emotions, and desires -- then his human particularity becomes overwhelmingly scandalous for me. If Jesus was the perfect embodiment of God's intention for humanity, if Jesus' relationship with God was one of total trust, complete obedience, and mutual confidence, then the particularities of this one human person become problematic. This one human, Jewish, aged thirty, poor, so tall, and, most troubling for me, celibate (probably) and male (definitely) knew God as no one else has. I feel in my discomfort my own gender essentialism; Douglas John Hall notes that imaging Jesus as a young white male excludes "the weak and handicapped, the old and feeble, the members of nonwhite races, and women" (490) and in a footnote describes a study of Christ images in the visual arts -- Christs of all colors, but all of them men. I find myself saying, "But of course, Jesus was male;" gender is essential for me in a way that race is not, for obvious reasons. As a white woman, I can ignore race, pretend colorblindness, but I am always aware of gender, and as a queer white woman, I am always aware of sexuality.

When James Cone says that Jesus is Black in every way that matters, that the essential point of Jesus' humanity was his identification with the oppressed, not his skin color (which of course was not "white" according to our categories), he is perhaps making a true statement about the Black experience and what it means; to say that Jesus is female, I feel, is qualitatively different and a more difficult intellectual move. The tradition informs us that the importance of Jesus' particularity is not his particular aspects -- age, sex, race, religion, sexuality or lack thereof -- but his full participation in an essential aspect of humanity. To be human is to be a particular human; no one is "human in general." Jesus cannot be identical to me, his attributes identical to mine, any more than I could be identical with my father, my sister, [or others with whom I share deep intimacy].

[...]

For black liberation theology, as for all liberation theologies, Christ identifies entirely with the oppressed and downtrodden of any society. In this connection, as a white person of privilege, I cannot begin to speak, but only listen and accept the real, physical liberation that Christ offers to the world's poorest and that is so desperately needed.

At the same time, with the imagined feminist theologian in Migliore's dialogue (pp 298-299 especially), I must supplement the discussion of economic injustice with acknowledgement and discussion of, to claim Migliore's word, "linguistic" oppression, but, moreover, the hegemonic thought patterns that color our ways of thinking God, Christ, redemption, resurrection, and the whole panoply of related concepts. At one and the same moment I accept with almost mantric faith that Jesus Christ died for me, that I am a sinner and that I am redeemed, that even at my most despairing moments I am the beloved child of a God who loves me enough to suffer with me and die for me, working a redemption that I cannot hope to understand, that the drama of Christ's passion is the story of God's love enfleshed in a human body. I believe, incredulous, confused, that Christ is Lord and savior. I believe in a gendered Jesus who was fully human and who loved God with all his heart, and a Christ beyond gender and history who loves the created world, humanity, and me enough to die for us, and I believe at the same time that there is no distinction or difference between them, so much so that I find any discussion of two natures disingenuous and confusing [...]

[Cited: Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context; Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology; James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation]

++

Why do you use gender-neutral or female pronouns for Jesus? no one has asked me.

The smorgasbord of quotations and ideas above provides context, I hope, for two answers.

1. "Inclusive language" for God frequently results in God-talk that is entirely neuter except for the male pronouns that are, unquestioningly, used for Jesus and by extension Christ*. The result is that all the pronouns used for the Godhead are male.

*I'm not entirely comfortable with using "Christ" as shorthand for "the Second Person of the Trinity," but the usage is ubiquitous and, I think, understandable to my readership. "Jesus" is "the historical Jesus," a human person who embodied Godhood; "Christ" is "the Christ of Faith," coeternal with the Creator and the Spirit, God from God, Light from Light, of one being with the Creator, the Word and Wisdom of God. The relationship between "Jesus" and "Christ" you can fill on for yourself until such time as I write a book or seven, and until then I won't ask too hard why "Anointed One" became God's middle Name.

2. Jesus' maleness has made me uncomfortable for a long time. It makes me uncomfortable because I find deep resonance in the metaphor of the Church, and the soul, as the Bride of Christ, and I am a lesbian. It makes me uncomfortable because, despite all the women who surround Jesus in the gospels, the women who provide Jesus with money and ointment and service and tears and who are the first apostles, we are still left with the image of many men and women serving one man. It makes me uncomfortable because when we speak of God without pronouns and without gender, Jesus' gender shows up more starkly still and feels indisputable, ironclad, of course.

++

But it doesn't have to be.

This is the conclusion of another paper I wrote in Fall of 2006, modified slightly:

Every writer realizes that, in recounting or writing or inventing Jesus’ words, she or he or ze changes those words and their meaning, discovers or invents or both a new Christ, responds to "Who do you say that I am?" with an answer that will never perfectly reflect the Jesus of history, who cannot be known to us, but is recounted only in stories already embroidered. We may choose, with the questers for the historical Jesus, to carefully pick out stitches in an attempt to discover the texture of the original cloth. Or, with the authors we have studied this term, we might take up our needles, choose our own threads, add our own images to those we have received, sometimes overlapping those images, sometimes discarding them, sometimes simply changing the color. We cannot know who Jesus was, but only who Jesus is, for us, today.