God is a Wedding, Part 2
What’s the point of being male and female?
Bruno Barnhart wrote that “God is a wedding.” My wife Kristen—for whom I am blessed to have just celebrated 17 years of marriage on Sunday—told me she struggled to understand that phrase from last week’s post. I’m sure that’s owing to me needing to explain better, but I also told her I was glad that she was still thinking about that phrase. Even if I explained it better (and I hope to, but I’ll leave that for you to determine, dear reader), it’s still a striking phrase, and part of the point in using it is to get us to keep thinking about these matters.
In all of these reflections on gender and the Gospel of John, I am trying to bring together a handful of authors that are helping me see what John is and might be doing. What I’m posting in this series are more like study notes, rough drafts at most, than any kind of synthetic presentation. So, please forgive the rough edges. I’m following somewhat of an outline in this and two more posts I have planned, which incorporates the posts from the last two weeks. Please remember my first and foundational point: John is doing something with gender, incorporating our human sexuality as male and female into his presentation of the good news of Jesus.
If you take nothing else away from this study but that conviction, I will be quite happy; it is a conviction that will keep you alert for how the Spirit might speak to you of these matters in your own reading of John’s Gospel. You are certainly free to disagree. But I hope you will let this material simmer for a while before either agreeing or disagreeing. I first read the phrase “God is a wedding” over 9 months ago and intentionally delayed wrestling with this material. I’m still going slow and not rushing to any conclusions, so if you feel any pressure, or any discomfort because something sounds dangerous, that is not my intent. Please feel free to stop reading, unsubscribe, open that next email, or if you wish, breathe through it and press on. I hope, of course, that you will keep reading, and let me know in the comments how you are thinking/feeling about this series. Ok, long preface aside, let’s dive in!
1. In God’s original and eschatological design for creation, his presence is mediated and represented on earth as in heaven by one creature in two sexes: male and female, man and woman.
2. As
explains, gender is representative. Or as Timothy Patitsas puts it, “Gender is an icon.”1 That is, gender is symbolic; our nature as male and female points beyond ourselves to something else (hence the subtitle of this post). John’s extensive use of Genesis 1-3 suggests he is developing creational themes in his use of gender. Genesis 2 show us that, with respect to the means and end of God’s purpose to unite heaven and earth, “man represents the means. He is the symbol and representative of the earth under testing and the covenantal head of the families of the earth. The woman represents the goal. She is the symbol and representative of heaven and a people destined for Sabbath glory.” For more on this, see Anna’s post Father Earth and Mother Heaven:
3. The Son of God became flesh, representing both God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and humanity—both male and female—in his male body. Scholars note the significance of John’s choice of sarx in 1:14, “the Word became flesh/sarx.” He could have written that the Word became “man” (anthrōpos, which he uses in 16:21 about “a person born into the world”) or “male” (anēr, which he uses in 1:13 of God’s children who are not “born…of the will of man”). But he did not choose either of those words. I’m going to be quoting Dorothy Lee extensively in this and the next post, and long quotes at that. Here is what Lee says about “flesh”:
“The language of ‘flesh’ is decisive for John, a language that does not accord idolatrous significance to gender difference, even though such differences are part of human finitude. Because the Christ of this Gospel in his divine humanity is the eternal Word of God, preexistent and risen from the dead, his complex identity includes but is not defined or limited by the particularities of his humanity: ‘while Jesus was anatomically male, the representation of the gendering of Jesus is never a straightforward matter. It is capable of numerous configurations’…We are not speaking of the deification of male humanity but, in a more radical inversion, the divine enfleshment of God within the bounds of a human life. Those who attempt to make too much of the maleness of Jesus, whether post-Christian or fundamentalist Christian, accord it a cosmic status that it does not receive at the hands of the fourth evangelist.”2
4. There is a limitation to the incarnate Son’s revelation of the Father if that revelation is restricted to male/masculine symbols, and therefore, John intentionally includes female symbols in his portrayal of Jesus. The primary emphasis is not the differences between the sexes but their sameness as human flesh.
“In the opening chapters of Genesis, male and female equally share the image in creation and are equally responsible for its disfigurement. Only the advent of the Logos, who first formed it, can remake that image: “male and female” as at the beginning…Only flesh restores flesh…Only God’s humanity heals humanity. In that vision, all manifold human divisions are healed.”3
It is worth quoting Lee further, as she articulates this significance of sarx more clearly than any I have found so far:
“‘When it stands by itself, sarx is not just another way of saying ‘man’’ [quoting Schnackenburg]. The Johannine language is inclusive of female and male, transposing itself beyond the limits of Jesus’ own historical maleness. In crossing the abyss between heaven and earth [which, remember, is wedding language], “above” and “below,” the flesh of Jesus, enlivened with divine glory, crosses also the rift between human beings, including that between men and women…[W]omen as well as men are able to perceive themselves and their own embodied experience within the iconic portrayal of the divine flesh in the Johannine Jesus. The transposition of flesh thus opens the gospel to those [ie women] outside the narrow bounds of identification with the male, historical Jesus.”4
How can Jesus cross the rift between men and women? Hans Urs von Balthasar said that “the archetype of both sexes” is found in the Son.5 This is another way of saying, or at least supporting, my belief that male and female are wed in John’s presentation of Jesus. But that has still largely been abstract, as I felt the need to take time for foundation building before getting more concrete. I ended the last post with this expectation: “If ‘God is a wedding’ (Bruno Barnhart), and if Jesus is “the one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side [who] has revealed him” (John 1:18), then we would expect to see masculine and feminine somehow wed in Jesus’ revelation of God.” The next post will address that question by focusing on John’s use of feminine images to describe Jesus. This is the more challenging material, and it’s looking to be a longer article. For now, here’s a brief look at Jesus’ representation of men.
5. Jesus comes to earth as human flesh, specifically as male. Following Anna Anderson’s typology of man’s orientation to the earth, it stands out that all of the miraculous signs of Jesus are earthly:
1. He turns water into wine at Cana (2:1-11).
2. He heals a man’s son who was about to die from a fever (4:46-54).
3. He heals a paralytic at the pool of Bethesda (5:1-15).
4. He multiplies loaves of bread for a huge crowd (6:1-15)
5. He walks upon the Sea of Galilee/Tiberias (6:16-21)
6. He uses spit and dirt to restore sight to a blind man in Jerusalem (ch. 9; significantly, this healing is likely an allusion to Genesis 2:7 when God formed Adam from the dust of the ground)
7. He raises Lazarus from the dead at Bethany (ch. 11)
Not only do all of these miracles focus on the stuff of earth—human flesh, sickness, water, bread, dirt, saliva—additionally, all of the individuals healed are male. That might be straining the typology, but it is at least suggestive and worth noting. The main point, I believe, is that we can see Jesus’ fulfillment of Adam’s task to rule the earth and work towards heavenly rest. However, if we take the masculine/feminine polarity too far, it is all to easy to believe that Jesus only represents Adam, or that only men can truly identify with Jesus. As a helpful corrective, we must take note of Jesus’ similarity to Eve/woman. Stay tuned for that study next time.
Quote from Dorothy Lee
Noting that the Gospel of John doesn’t use the language of “image,” Dorothy Lee writes that the women in the Fourth Gospel
“share, with men, the status of being ‘children of God,’ a concept closely tied with that of the image…[I]n this Gospel, believing men and women in their narrative portrayal share and reflect the divine image restored in the incarnate Christ. Their [women’s] role, like that of men, is symbolic of that communion of persons which stems from the being of God…Women belong within the iconographic structures of this Gospel: here, if nowhere else, their place at the core of faith is assured.”6
Question
Once again, what do you think of all this? What additional questions does this raise for you? Concerns? Criticisms?
Timothy Patitsas, Ethics of Beauty, 333.
Dorothy Lee, Flesh and Glory, 59-60.
Lee, Flesh and Glory, 60.
Lee, Flesh and Glory, 64-65.
Michele Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology: Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas (The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 283.
Lee, Flesh and Glory, 24-25.