by Penelope Doe, University of Exeter, who has just completed a PhD thesis on Church reports on sexuality and the ‘Queer Art of Failure’
There was a lot of manufactured outrage recently, both in the mainstream press and on social media, about a visiting preacher at Trinity College Cambridge – Dr Joshua Heath – claiming that Jesus was trans, and the Dean then defending the sermon. Spoiler: neither said that Jesus was trans. What really happened, for those who have managed to avoid the brouhaha, is that Dr Heath’s sermon used mediaeval and Renaissance art depicting Christ’s side wound to suggest that His body is simultaneously masculine and feminine, since the wound can be figured as a vaginal tunnel through which the Church (the Body of Christ) is birthed.
This imagery may be shocking, but it is hardly innovative. The trope of Christ’s wound as both vagina and lactating breast, in theology and art, goes back to the Middle Ages. If you google ’Jesus’s vagina’, you will see some exemplary images, although, as several women were keen to point out after this latest uproar, what is being depicted is a vulva rather than a vagina!
One thing that struck me about this latest ‘the Church of England is heretical’ scandal is not the unfamiliarity of the media (and of some Christian commentators) with fairly arcane mediaeval art and mysticism, but the horror being expressed that Christ’s body might be trans or non-binary by being neither male nor female, masculine nor feminine. There was a similar backlash when, in a sermon delivered ten years ago, Paul Oestreicher suggested that Jesus might have been gay. Worshippers and secularists alike are habitually repulsed by an unmanned Jesus. For me, all this suggests that the Church – and cultural Christianity – has capitulated not only to white Jesus, but to cis heteronormative Jesus, a straight male saviour rather than a human one, and that in turn raises the question of whether heterosexual and cisgender identities have themselves become idols.
Why is the concept of a trans or a gay Jesus so offensive to contemporary sensibilities, ostensibly seared by secularism and post modernity? I think there are quite a few answers to this question. One is that Christians have apparently lost the playful and imaginative approach to scripture and tradition that was evident in the early Church and in the Middle Ages. Post-Reformation tradition seems, generally, to be a much sterner and more humourless affair. Another is that, even for secularists and cultural Christians (perhaps especially for these), a transgressive Jesus who disrupts cherished, if unacknowledged, norms is too disturbing a figure. For some theologians and historians, however, gay/bi/trans Jesus is incongruous not because this troubles the mores of contemporary discourse but because it imposes current cultural identities on a first-century Palestinian who was born and died in the Greco-Roman empire. Furthermore, as the theologian Linn Marie Tonstad has argued, this insistence that Jesus must have a sexual and gender identity actually ‘unqueers’ our understanding of Jesus, if the incarnation requires Him to be depicted with ‘healthy’ sexual impulses.
One way of rescuing the trans/gressive Jesus from the coils of modern identity politics is by adopting a lens which either He or the writer of Matthew’s gospel chose, that of the eunuch: in Matthew 19:12,
For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.
In Putting Jesus in His Place, Halvor Moxnes argues that both the Church Fathers and modern commentators have ignored or suppressed the implication that ‘eunuch’ was an insult thrown at Jesus that he himself then appropriated to describe his and his followers’ ‘place’, much as LGBTIQ+ people today have adopted the term queer, formerly used as a slur. In reality, those who were made eunuchs were disadvantaged socially, although many held prominent and confidential positions as servants, as we see in the Ethiopian eunuch who is a court official in Acts 8:27. Occupying both male and female space in the household, eunuchs were the objects of both trust and suspicion. They were useful in that they could not establish their own households, so that they were dependent on their masters; some eunuchs were valued as sexual partners. Reading the eunuch as a figure of chastity and continence is another misstep the Church has made in making Jesus’ words in Matthew 19 into an appeal to an ascetic Christian ideal. While eunuchs were not able to procreate, some were capable of and celebrated for their sexual prowess.
Moxnes argues that this virile understanding of continence erases that ‘queer space’ that Jesus claims from those who were criticising him for abandoning conventional male space and thereby embracing ambiguity. Why were they ‘eunuchs’? Because, although male, they were no longer ‘men’, since to be a man was a status of honour, a status which could be achieved but which could also be lost. Rather than being seen as a positive ideal – the virile contest for celibacy – Moxnes sees Jesus as identifying with the slander and putting himself and his followers alongside other marginalised and ambiguous groups who are included in the Kingdom, such as tax collectors and prostitutes. He writes:
Eunuchs were men who were permanently out of place, in a liminal position where there was no possibility of integration into the order of masculinity … I suggest that the modern term that can best provide a lens for viewing the material and a category of interpretation is that of ‘queer’. This is in contrast to suggestions that Jesus could be understood by means of categories like feminine or gay. These would be categories that once more attempted to view Jesus in terms of a fixed identity, as feminine in contrast to masculine, or gay in contrast to heterosexual. ‘Queer’, on the other hand, does not indicate another category. Rather, it signals a protest against fixed categories. As a protest or opposition to fixed categories of identity, it points out that all categories are historically and socially constructed, and that human experiences are forced into these categories.
If all identities are historically and socially constructed, as Moxnes claims, then the traditions which the Church (and the secular media) lay claim to are more unstable than is generally admitted. Few ecclesial traditions are unambiguously 2000 years old, and the figure of a transgressive and liminal saviour is deeply rooted in scripture and theology. But these are traditions which the Church seems to have neglected, so that a trans Jesus is now perceived as improperly, rather than properly, shocking. If the Church of England is to have a grown-up conversation about gender and sexuality – a conversation which the Living in Love and Faith resources promised – it seems to me that we need to some smash some modernist cis heteronormative idols, recover some neglected traditions, and lose our squeamishness about sexually transgressive and genderqueer theologies.