(12 minute read)
Forewarning: later in this post I am going to be talking about the literal physical Jesus and the implications of that in terms of sexuality, humanity, God and gender.
Objectionable in part …
What’s going on today isn’t all that new. It’s just taking place on a more compressed time schedule with technological advancements complicating achieving a better societal balance. People are questioning what used to be fundamentally accepted by large sectors of religious people.
I’m old enough to remember the days when the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures would rate films on their morality. A LOT of popular movies didn’t make the cut. The struggle to figure out how to rate and control media content isn’t all that different today than what the movie industry went through[1] starting with the Hay’s Production Code.[2] It was believed that films were contributing to the declining moral values of America. This was in the 1930s! Declining moral values included homosexuality, interracial relationships, kissing, getting people worked up, know what I mean, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, say no more, and other heinous activities.
What is new generationally is that the Christian faith is in decline in this country. What started as a blip is now a trend; a trend that is accelerating. People are leaving in droves. We’re talking millions. Churches are closing by the thousands. Pastors are quitting. It isn’t because the Christian faith is under attack. It isn’t, unless you count Christian fratricide. There are myriad reasons for people leaving. Politics. Injured by the church. Gender issues. Doctrine. Policies. It isn’t confined to individuals but entire families and communities.
Couple all the above with the faith simply having too many unresolvable conflicts in the bible pertaining to divorce, abortion, marriage, gender, prophets, books suitable for reading, video games and what movies are okay to watch. Too many square pegs and only round holes available. The bible has too many contradictory and objectionable parts for too many people.
Faith leaders are telling people what God supposedly wants. Really? Does God really care about what movies we watch? Because people en masse decided that they really didn’t care about what church leaders had to say about what movies they wanted to see. The same thing happened with regard to divorce. Too many divorced people were rejected by the faith in a country where half of marriages fail. Women refused to stay in abusive relationships because the church said they should. People started using birth control regardless of their faith’s position on the matter. Now people of the faith are dividing yet again over gender identity in addition to abortion. Ultimately people are simply no longer buying what’s being sold.
They just stop believing.
Houston, we have some problems.
Xmas time is kind of a big deal for the Christian faith. I really enjoy this time of the year. Yes, I am of the Christian faith for at least a little while longer anyway. We celebrate the “virgin” birth of our savior. That’s a hard sell. I want to say right here that Joseph was a standup guy and had to really love Mary.
Obviously, we have some problems.
Mary didn’t have a choice. God told her that she was going to have their baby. (I’ll explain their later.) She wasn’t asked if she wanted to carry Jesus. “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.” She went along with it. Protest wasn’t really an option for her or Joseph. We don’t know the technical aspects of how Mary was impregnated since God is spiritual but from the moment of conception Jesus got his start in the physical world to become a full-fledged physical being.
Luke 1:26-38
New International Version
The Birth of Jesus Foretold
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called[a] the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
Is God who men said God is?
The bible, in addition to being a celebration of death of large and small scale, is a book about the politics of the time as well as Jesus. The bible is about men being in charge. The interpretations of ancient languages were done at the behest of men in charge. So, confirmation bias once again raises its head. Men in charge. They already had the answers. They just filled in the questions with the appropriate story lines that satisfied their positions. Men were in charge of explaining the bible for centuries without question except amongst themselves. Men ended up in charge of households to be obeyed without question. What a surprise!
The bible is mansplained.
There’s another story in the bible. It’s hidden in plain sight as it were. It has to do with the physical Jesus. God incarnate. It’s in plain sight in the manger and with Mary. Her story has been under reported. It’s the story of Jesus in the real world that is just beyond the written bible.
The poem, “Sometimes I Wonder,” was written by Kaitlen Shetler. She addresses some of what I’m going to be talking about with a powerful poem. You can access the poem here. It’s worth the click.
There is one aspect regarding Mary that I believe is important to keep in mind.
Mary was 14.[3]
Early wokeness
It seems to me that there are a lot of aspects of Jesus/God/Holy Spirit/the physical man that we should have been talking about. The prudery of men has kept the lid on the very human aspects of Jesus. Jesus was crucified naked and probably hung upside down yet portrayed in paintings as being fully clothed to hide his, what masculinity/gender and present a more aesthetic relatable view.
Jesus was born a male. Yet bible scholars in general believe that the Christian spiritual God does not have gender. (Understandably, there are those that will disagree just as there are those that will disagree that God is of no particular race.) Jesus is more often portrayed as being white rather than a brown skinned swarthy Jesus. Supreme being white Jesus is just a tad too white supremacy for me.
But that aside let’s get back to gender. I’m with the God is gender-neutral crowd. The supreme being as a non-gendered spiritual being makes more sense. Gender-neutral God’s pronouns would be they/them/theirs.[4] So why would God want to discriminate against or hate LGBTQIA people? Why would God want them killed?
This of course brings us back to the human Jesus. The Jesus that lived in the unmentioned Jesus times. The nursing baby Jesus. The toddler Jesus. The pre-teen Jesus. The teenager Jesus. The Jesus that interacted with those around him on a daily basis. There was that stunt that he pulled off when he ran away, probably a preteen, so that he could go hang out with some old guys.[5] That got him in some trouble with Mary and stepdad Joe even though it seems that they had a kid missing for a day or so and didn’t even know about it. It took them a couple of days just to find him. Evidently it was just as easy to lose a kid then as it is now. Shades of …
“Home Alone.”
What is love?
The bible tells us that Jesus was without sin.[6] (Getting through the teen years had to be rough since he was “… fully God and fully man.”) This means that he had no sexual relations with women nor was he tempted by them. Jesus never expressed any sexual interest in women—at least not that we know of from the bible. So, let’s just go with that.
Jesus was asexual.[7] (Although like most people I am assuming that
he had man parts.) Jesus never spoke
against homosexuals. Now I will point
out here that the word homosexual didn’t enter the bible until 1946.[8] Christians, make that some Christians, are quick
to point out that gay sex is prohibited specifically by the bible even without
use of the word homosexual in both the Old and New Testament. My point though goes to Jesus/God by today’s
Republican Fascist standards would be seen as LGBTQIA supportive at the very
least. (In case some of you were
wondering how I would be able to work Republican Fascists into this, now you
know.)
Lock and load.
It’s possible that the Old Testament God was fake news. Jesus the Messiah didn’t come of age and raise up an army to go around and start slaughtering Romans. He didn’t have a sword in one hand and parchment in the other.
From some of my earliest questionings of the bible I wondered at the apparent disconnect between the Old and New Testaments. We go from a merciless God willing to wipe out entire tribes. Every man, woman and child. Pregnant women included. There’s just a lot of slaughter in the Old Testament. Then God does a complete 180-degree switcheroo with Jesus. Now God is all about love, mercy and forgiveness.
What happened? Is God bi-polar and we’re being caught up in another manic episode? Did they go back on their meds. (They. Get it? God’s pronoun.) Or did God have an epiphany and decide that there was a better way for mankind to go?
Isn’t it more likely that before Jesus a bunch of Old Testament guys were just using God as an excuse to keep their base in line? Isn’t it entirely possible that all that carnage in the Old Testament wasn’t, in fact, God’s idea at all, but rather that of leaders fighting each other for the usual political reasons? If the New Testament God is Love, as Jesus tells us, could it be that God always was Love and has been horribly misrepresented?
Jesus delivered his message, and it had nothing to do with abortion and LGBTQ issues. Jesus’s main message (and thereby God’s) was (and is) that we should love God and love people.
Short and sweet.
Excuse me!
Shouldn’t it be plainer what God really meant in the bible? Christian Nationalists will argue that it’s crystal clear. So, biblically it’s okay to kill queers.[9] It’s okay to kill your child for mouthing off.[10] Raise them that way. Let them know that their death is imminent if they back-talk. At least people can rest a little easier knowing it doesn’t make one a bad parent to forget about them for awhile in another city. We spend a lot of time hearing I-know-that-this-is-what-it-says-but-this-is-what-it-really-means, m’ kay. The guys didn’t put together a stand-alone text. It’s an operator’s manual that needs additional manuals and scholars to know the kinda’ true meaning except in the following instances and with the proper historical context.
The bible taken in total needs way too much explaining and excusing of bad behavior. The good parts don’t but also way too much of the time the good parts get short shrift. And while we’re at it, why weren’t there any women disciples? Actually, there were, but sometime post-Jesus, a bunch of men made the women disappear. It was the times that they were living in. Maybe we need to reclaim them. And Mary.
These are different times.
[1] https://www.filmratings.com/Content/Downloads/130208_ratings-timeline.final.pdf
[2] https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/production-code-hays-code
[3] https://christianityfaq.com/how-old-was-mary-when-she-gave-birth-to-jesus/
[4] https://www.healthline.com/health/agender
[5] Luke 2:41-52: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%202:41-52&version=NIV
[6] https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/did-jesus-ever-sin.html
[7] https://www.webmd.com/sex/what-is-asexual
[8] https://petergoeman.com/homosexuality-was-added-to-the-bible-in-1946/
[9] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=leviticus%2020:13&version=NIV
