God is a Wedding, Part 4

The “Blessed Inversion” of Gender in the Cross of Christ

Christ on the Cross (with Mary and John), Germany c. 1500/1525, credit National Gallery of Art; Anastasis (Jesus resurrecting Adam and Eve), c. 14th century, Hagia Sophia, credit hagiasophiaturkey.com.

Please forgive the lack of order in this series, for which today is the sixth and final post on gender in the Gospel of John, even though I’ve titled it part four of “God is a Wedding.” See previous posts: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5.

To hopefully help a bit with that confusion, here are the main points of this series thus far with updated numbering (and probably still confusing because they are unevenly distributed across these posts):

1. John is doing something with gender in his presentation of the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.¹

2. 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.

3. Gender is symbolic and representative, with man as “representative of the earth under testing and the covenantal head of the families of the earth” and woman as “representative of heaven and a people destined for Sabbath glory.”²

4. The Son of God became flesh, representing both God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and humanity—both male and female—in his male body.

5. There is a limitation to the incarnate Son’s revelation of the Trinity if that revelation is restricted to male/masculine symbols, and therefore, John intentionally includes female symbols in his portrayal of Jesus.

6. Jesus comes to earth as human flesh, specifically as male, and we see the typology of male orientation to the earth in the predominantly masculine symbols of Jesus in John 1-12.

7. As with man/Adam, Jesus fulfills the symbolic representation of woman/Eve’s orientation to heaven as seen in the increasing frequency and significance of feminine symbols in John 13-21.

Last week I ended with a hint toward my final (for now) eighth point:

8. John’s Gospel reveals gendered reversals, inversions, transpositions, transfigurations and ultimately weddings that show us how human sexuality points to the ultimate wedding between heaven and earth, God and his people.

It’s time to try and bring all of this material together. I’d love to hear if and how this is making sense to you in the comments.³

In 2007 Timothy Patitsas published an article titled “The Marriage of Priests: Towards an Orthodox Christian Theology of Gender.” He later developed this material in his book The Ethics of Beauty (2019) with a slightly different chapter title: “Only Priests Can Marry: The Reconciliation of Men and Women in Christ.” Patitsas’ proposal about human sexuality is appropriate for this series, for it arose from his study of the Orthodox tradition of Holy Week in which “the king is understood as the Bridegroom of his city, and the entirety of the civil-political order as a kind of wedding liturgy.”⁴ Additionally, he was inspired by the difference between two traditional icons, one which shows Jesus standing between Adam and Eve at the resurrection, and one which shows Jesus on the cross between Mary and John the Beloved Disciple, a scene which only John’s Gospel recounts.

Patitsas writes about visiting a church in Washington, D.C. and noticing “that while Adam is always at Christ’s right hand and Eve at Christ’s left, at the cross and elsewhere this gets reversed. Then, it is the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) at Christ’s right hand, and either St. John the Theologian or St. John the Baptist at his left.”⁵ He then gives a diagram to show this chiastic reversal (note, “Panaghia” is an Orthodox title for Mary):

That the second icon of Jesus with Mary and John comes from John 19:25-27 makes this proposal even more fitting for this series, even if Patitsas is using a very different hermeneutic. His basic idea is that, while men and women have differentiated primary callings according to their unique gender, in Christ they are meant to crucify that primary calling and instead represent the primary calling of the opposite sex. In using this paradigm, I’m not interested in how Patitsas assigns callings / offices to each gender.⁶ Additionally, while Patitsas applies his framework to men and women generally, he often focuses on married couples, which sometimes obscures how his paradigm fits single Christians. With those caveats, the paradigm itself seems to fit what we have observed so far in John, regardless of which office we deem primary for men and women. Here is Patitsas in more detail:

“The vision I saw was basically this: men and women alike are called to the same three offices; that of priest (to offer sacrifice), that of king (to lead and to fight), and that of prophet (to bring forth a word of insight). What differs between the genders is that the primary calling among these three offices for women is the prophetic office, while for men, it is the kingly office. What unites men and women, though, is that they are called to fulfill their primary offices in a priestly way — that is, in a self-sacrificial way. They are charged to inscribe the cross of Christ within their primary gender offices, within their respective gender callings. Their first task is not, in a sense, to fulfill their gender calling, but — a challenging paradox — to “crucify” that particular calling. When they do so, three things happen. First, their primary office (prophecy for women, kingship for men) seems to be all but wiped out as they become chiefly priests; in other words, their gender office dies, is humiliated, as it is offered sacrificially to God and to each other. Second, their gender office is re-born in a transfigured and much higher form. But the third point is the biggest surprise…The real way that Christian gender is inverted from the world’s is that in Christ each gender not only dies and is reborn, but in being reborn comes to a dynamic rest as the truest symbol not of its own life but of its partner's role and life [ie, of the opposite gender, regardless of marital status]. Men come to symbolize best the feminine prophetic office, while women come to symbolize best the masculine kingly office. Thus both men and women experience all three offices, but according to a Pattern or a Way that is unique to each. This is how the genders are deeply reconciled in Orthodox life, in a loving act of mutual indwelling and self-offering.⁷

The basic foundation of this paradigm is chiasm, where one reality is reversed with another, but without mere swapping places (leaving either unchanged) and without complete replacement (where one simply becomes the other). Chiasms “reconcile opposites while keeping distinctives intact.”⁸ Drawing on Athanasius’ famous statement, Patitsas writes that “[C]hiasm is the very essence of sacramental life, of all Christian life, of the gospel itself: God became man so that man might become God.”⁹

This is a profound idea. Similar to the pervasive presence of signs—vestigia, not images—of the Trinity in creation, I believe that, on account of the incarnation and the cross, God inscribed chiasm into the very structure of reality (something I wrote about in A Theology of the Brain). Maximos the Confessor described this reality as a

“‘blessed inversion’ [kalén antistrophén] whereby the incarnation of the Logos becomes all that human beings are without losing his divine distinction in essence just as human beings receive all that God is without losing their human distinction of essence. The paradox is that this inversion can take place without mixing or blending in the Neoplatonic sense.”¹⁰

This use of Chalcedonian christology, which “resists those who imagine a mixture or confusion of the two natures of Christ,” provides a helpful protection against blurring the distinction between man and woman. At the same time, maintaining the distinction can go to the extreme of dichotomizing the profound unity that exists between man and woman. Echoing Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:8-12, Hans Urs von Balthasar put it this way:

“If Eve was taken out of Adam, then Adam had Eve within him without knowing it. Of course, God created her and breathed his breath into her; but God took the material for her out of Adam’s living flesh infused with the Spirit. There was something feminine in him which he recognizes when God brings him the woman. It is the feminine element that fashions creatures before the face of the Creator. And the Creator gives the man the power to be creative in this creaturely womb. But the woman is taken from the man; the substance from which she is made is masculine. She knows the man from the beginning. She is, together with him, feminine in relation to God, but she also has the actively responding power with him. She is able to give him the fully formed child that the seed can only indicate. Though his ‘help-mate’ she does all the work, which he only, as it were, proposes and stimulates.”¹¹

This movement, representing the archetypal unfolding and enfolding within the Godhead, is echoed in Christ’s typological relationship with the church and within our male and female genders. Adrienne von Speyr described man and woman as a “mirrored image”, both with respect to each other, and also mirroring the Trinity in “full inversion and mutuality, coming together and then separating again.”¹² I’m particularly interested with the idea of “inversion,” for that aligns with Patitsas’ chiastic paradigm. Schumacher explains this theology of Speyr and Balthasar in terms strikingly similar to Patitsas:

“To be sure, there is a definite association in Adrienne’s theology—as in Balthasar’s—of the contemplative [ie heavenly] and the feminine, the active [ie earthly] and the masculine, but this association is transferred from one sex to the other at precisely the moment in which the communion of persons is effectively realized. It is as if an exchange is affected in their communion, with the woman sharing her femininity with the man in the form of her contemplation and the man sharing his masculinity with the woman in the form of his activity.”¹³

Schumacher goes on to describe how all of this movement transpires “by way of the key notion of surrender.”¹⁴ Can you hear the resonance with Patitsas’ grounding of the gender chiasm in the priestly office?¹⁵ He put it this way in his 2007 article:

“[T]he genders attain inner as well as mutual integration. This takes place at the foot of the Cross, at the hierogamy [“holy marriage”] of heaven and earth within Christ [hopefully this sounds familiar by now!]. The woman stands now in the place of Guardian Adam, the man in the place of Prophet Eve, and Christ is all in all, the priest uniting both modalities within himself.”¹⁶

This chiastic reversal, or “blessed inversion,” is precisely what I think is happening in John’s gendered presentation of Jesus and his disciples.  Here are some of the reversals that we have seen in the Fourth Gospel:

• As explored last week, Jesus moves from a predominantly masculine mode (ch. 1-12 oriented toward the earth) to a predominantly feminine mode (ch. 13-21 oriented toward heaven); or perhaps, as Jesus is the Son (13:31; 17:1; 19:7) who births the church (19:34), we could make a case for a move in ch. 13-21 to both masculine and feminine symbolism. Beginning with Jesus’ imitation of Mary of Bethany’s feminine symbolic act which prefigured his sacrificial death, Jesus by speech and action up to and on the cross increasingly takes on the maternal, life-giving and nurturing role of Eve, Mother Zion.

• Women take on the traditionally masculine vocation of prophetic proclamation: the Samaritan woman witnesses to her village (4:1-42); Martha gives the most exalted confession of Jesus as Messiah, otherwise attributed to Peter in the synoptics (John 11:27; cf Matthew 16:16); Mary Magdalene proclaimes the risen Jesus as the first to witness him alive from the grave, a privilege also attributed to Peter elsewhere in the NT (John 20:17-18; cf Luke 24:34; 1 Corinthians 15:5).

• The Samaritan woman participates in the reversal of the adamic punishment of Genesis 3:17-19. Jesus’ words in John 4:35-36 apply, in context, specifically to the Samaritan woman and to Jesus. Both, as man and as woman, are doing the laboring/harvesting, sowing/reaping, gathering/eating the fruit which is life eternal. The Samaritan woman is Eve, the woman returning to the heavenly Bridegroom, and Adam-like farmer/gardener returning to the earth.¹⁷

• Another reversal in the story of the Samaritan woman is noted by Caryn Reeder. As is well-known, John 4 uses a Hebrew type-scene where a man in search of a bride meets a woman at a well and discerns her suitability for marriage by asking her for a drink of water. However, Reeder observes that “this story began with a marriage plot, but the woman’s questions [in vv. 10-15] disrupted the expected conclusion. Now, Jesus has upended the marriage plot entirely by offering the woman water—and she accepts! The bridegroom has become the bride.”¹⁸ Rather than the man (groom) receiving water from the woman (bride), the woman receives water from the man.

• In Jesus’ absence, the mother of Jesus takes on the typico-symbolic representation of Mother Zion, the church, caring for, nurturing and protecting the children of God.

• The beloved disciple, one of few purely positive male portrayals of Johannine faith, is the sole man standing by the cross with four women (in the synpotics, only women were present at the cross; Matt 27:55; Mark 15:40; Luke 23:49). As an ideal male follower, resting in the bosom of Jesus (13:23), the beloved disciple only says two words in the entire gospel: “kyrios estin,” “It is the Lord” (21:7). There is a real sense in which the beloved disciple is presented with (stereo)typical feminine characteristics.

• In contrast to the largely silent beloved disciple, the Samaritan woman says more than Peter in John’s Gospel. Talkative, foot-in-the-mouth Peter, who in the synoptics is always speaking when he should probably be silent, is given a more minor speaking role in John. The Samaritan woman gets 161 words in just one narrative, and Peter only 116 words in four narratives (ch. 6, 13, 18, 21), compared to Peter’s representative speaking in Matthew with 149 words across seven different narratives (ch. 14-19; ch. 26).

• I haven’t mentioned this one before, as it’s a recent observation from Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger in her article “Transcending Gender Boundaries in John.” Similar to how the beloved disciple is present as a man at a scene where only women are present in the synoptics, Nicodemus as a man performs an action in John that only women perform in the synoptics: anointing the body of Jesus with spices (John 19:39-40; Mark 16:1; Luke 23:55-24:1). Additionally, just as Jesus imitates Mary of Bethany’s feminine action when he washes the disciples’ feet, Nicodemus also imitates the same feminine act. Twice we are told that Mary anointed Jesus’ body with perfume (11:2; 12:3), and Jesus’ interpretation is that “she has kept it for the day of my burial” (John 12:7). Nicodemus, as a man, fulfills Mary’s symbolic, proleptic act when he actually anoints Jesus’ body for burial. While I wouldn’t go as far as Kitzberger does in her article, I think she is onto something with this observation: “By attributing to [Nicodemus] the roles of anointing and of caring and nurturing that were carried out by the (un)named Synoptic women and by the Lukan Mary respectively, Nicodemus is enriched with female character traits.”¹⁹

Inversion of Heaven and Earth?

Our study up to these point leads to an additional question: if John really does follow the OT typology of man/earth and woman/heaven, and if John really is showing how male and female are liberated from the effects of sin in order to live into the “blessed inversion” found in Christ, how do those two fit together? Is the man of the earth to die, in Patitsas’ framework, to his calling to represent earth, and be raised in Christ to represent heaven? Is the woman of heaven to die to her calling to represent heaven, and be raised in Christ to represent earth? And if so, what does that mean and look like? But in asking these questions I feel the limits of our exploration of gender in John. I feel cautious about getting too concrete and specific. As I said a few weeks ago, “John is doing something so much deeper and richer than addressing “roles” of men and women in family, church and culture.” The formative and transformative power of symbols dies when pressed into literal 1:1 meaning which is typical of gender-role theology. So Barnhart exhorts us,

“As we study this biblical theology [of sexuality connecting John and Genesis 1-3] we must keep continually in mind that woman, the feminine, Eve, and man, Adam, are symbolic expressions of realities which lie fully within both woman and man.”²⁰

With Anna Anderson, I find that John provides a profound contribution for seeing that “gender is part of the deeper Protestant conception.”²¹ If this series on gender in the Gospel of John has done nothing more than convince you that John’s presentation of the good news of Jesus speaks profoundly to the imago dei as male and female, I am content. This all still needs to continue marinating and steeping.

Not just because I love academic study; this series is not merely an intellectual exercise. We all know how troubled our present society is by issues of sexuality. Most of my focus relates to marital relationships and responding to abuse that is enabled by impoverished and unbiblical anthropology. There are other related concerns as well that are outside of my professional scope. But Barnhart admonishes us with the broadest and all-encompassing concern of all:

“The gospel’s realization in the world depends upon a transformation of the relationship between man and woman.”²²

I encourage you to continue pondering these things in your heart as we pursue “the eschatological destiny of human sexuality,” that is, “The fullness of humanity [which] is to be realized in the marriage of masculine and feminine, as an epiphany of the eternal marriage of Logos and Sophia, and as an expression of the wedding of the creation with its God.”²³

Quote from A.M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality

“Heaven and earth are linked in a single bond, and the world is a wedding; the angels of God ascend and descend upon the sons [and daughters] of men.”

Question

Ok, we’ve reached the end of this journey for now. It’s been much longer than usual, both in each post and as a series. If you’ve stuck with me along the way, or recently joined in, thank you! In this series I have drawn from a community of various authors in different theological traditions. I greatly value dialogue and welcome you to share your thoughts. What do you think of all this? What additional questions does this raise for you? Concerns? Criticisms? Fears? Hopes? Please let me know!

1. I have focused on Christology and anthropology in answering the question of gender in John. It is worth noting in passing an alternative thesis from Colleen Conway: “all five women [mother of Jesus, Samaritan woman, Martha, Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene] are consistently presented positively, in contrast to three of the male characters, Nicodemus, Peter and Pilate. This suggests that, contrary to the predominant interpretation, the purpose of the positive characterization of Johannine women cannot be to present them as equal disciples with men in the Gospel. Regarding these three male characters, the women are clearly superior to the men. That this nevertheless does not represent an anti-male attitude or a gender dualism in the Gospel is shown by the portrayal of the man born blind and to a lesser degree by the beloved disciple. One can only surmise that there is something more than gender involved in the positive characterization of the women in the Gospel…Are the anonymous characters of the man born blind and the beloved disciple intentionally presented as figures without ties to established authority? Is this what they share with the women in the Gospel? . . . [I]s the author of the Gospel worried about authority figures? From a more radical perspective, it may be that the Fourth Evangelist is presenting a challenge to these authority figures through the characterization of men and women in the gospel.” Colleen Conway, Men and Women in the Fourth Gospel: Gender and Johannine Characterization (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), 205.

2. Anna Anderson, Father Earth and Mother Heaven. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology: “If man in the order of creation is chiefly masculine (as the dominator of the world), in the order of grace he is chiefly feminine (as the receptive womb for the marvels of the power of God” (195).

3. And again, please don’t hear what I’m not saying. While I do think John challenges us with the possibility of transfiguration of gender in Christ, so that truly “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), John’s use of Genesis 1-2 creation theology and eschatology maintains God-given boundaries between the sexes. As we will see, our genders are neither porously unbounded (non-binary extreme) nor impermeably bounded (fundamentalist extreme). But as I believe most of my audience, like myself, comes from a predominantly conservative and complementarian background, it’s worth noting that even John Piper can say, “in a community where there is a secure, strong, humble, masculine feel, men are free to be appropriately feminine. And women are free to be appropriately masculine.” I disagree with him in his insisted emphasis on the masculine, but this clarification of his controversial statement—“Christianity has a masculine feel”—is a bit closer to this theology of gender in John. As Patitsas put it, “By embracing ones given gender vocation in a priestly way, a man or woman attains an interior integration of his or her masculine and feminine sides” (“The Marriage of Priests,” 99).

4. Timothy Patitsas, Towards an Orthodox Christian Theology of Gender,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly vol. 51, no. 1 (2007), 71; cf “The King Returns to His City: An Interpretation of the Great Week and Bright Week Cycle of the Orthodox Church” (Ph. D. diss.. The Catholic Universitv of America, 2003), 319-83.

5. Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (Maysville, MO: St. Nicholas Press, 2019), 341.

6. See “The Marriage of Priests,” 100-102, where Patitsas addresses the objection that his connection of the kingly office to men and the prophetic office to women seems arbitrary.

7. Patitsas, Ethics, 299-300.

8. Patitsas, Ethics, 341.

9. Patitsas, Ethics, 301.

10. Daniel Haynes, “Grace and Metaphysics in Maximus Confessor” (PhD diss.. University of Nottingham, March, 2012), 228.

11. Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 312-313.

12. Michele Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology: Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 268.

13. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, 284.

14. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, 302.

15. See also Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, pp. 189-190: “it is through the power of self-giving that a new community of men and women will emerge, in which distinct but dynamic gender identities that are “not without” the other will be fashioned and re-fashioned in peace.” And he writes again, “all of this—the affirmation of the equal dignity of genders, the symmetry in construction of gender identities, and the presence of the other in the self—all of this is kept in motion by self-giving love.”

16. Patitsas, Ethics, 104.

17. There is parallelism in Genesis 3:16 and 19 in a mirrored “return” of the woman and the man. The woman is told that, literally in the Greek Septuagint, “your return will be for your man”; likewise, the man is told, “until you return to the ground.”

18. Caryn A. Reeder, The Samaritan Woman’s Story: Reconsidering John 4 After #ChurchToo (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022), 159.

19. Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger, “Transcending Gender Boundaries in John” in Feminist Companion to John: Volume 1, edited by Amy-Jill Levine (New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 206.

20. Bruno Barnhart, The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center, 237.

21. See Anna’s article “Deeper Protestant Conception of Women Teachers in the Local Church.”

22. Barnhart, The Good Wine, 405.

23. Barnhart, The Good Wine, 407.