First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh
605 Morewood Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2999
412-621-8008
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605 Morewood Avenue |
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THE HISTORICAL JESUS TALKS ABOUT QUEER PEOPLE By David Herndon
"The life size figure of Jesus Christ protrudes mysteriously from a knotted growth in an old tree in this tiny Roman Catholic Cemetery located in Quincy, Illinois USA (pop. 40,000) which is nestled in West Central Illinois along the Mississippi River. "A cemetery worker first discovered the phenomenon a few years ago. He stood in awe upon making the discovery and kept the secret to himself for several days before sharing it with others. The miraculous image cannot be fully appreciated unless one stands at a certain distance and angle thereby explaining why the figure had not been discovered earlier. "Both the Quincy Herald-Whig newspaper and KHQA television station ran stories on it and provided coverage. When word got out people flocked to the cemetery to see the spectacular site. According to Ruby Cookson, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Cemetery Association nearly 2,000 people were visiting daily and in a very short time, the guest book located next to the tree had acquired over 30,000 signatures, however, many people visiting did not sign. As of July 1998 there were signatures from 48 states including Alaska and Hawaii and 20 foreign countries. "The tree which has acquired the name of "The Jesus Tree" is also known by many in the area as "The Good Shepherd Tree." "A fence was placed around the tree to provide some protection because people were peeling pieces of bark from the tree to take home as souvenirs. There was also concern because the grounds around the tree had been worn bare by the many thousands of visitors who visited each week. "People have hung crosses on the image, others have laid bouquets of flowers at the foot, and some have gone so far as to leave stuffed animals and photos of loved ones. "The first time I visited the site . . . I immediately saw what everyone had been talking about. Here was a life size figure of Jesus embedded within a huge knot in an old tree. One can quickly see the image of Jesus cradling what appears to be a lamb. The head of the lamb is visible directly above the folded arms of Jesus. Jesus is attired in a long robe and has a staff beside Him, which seems to be leaning on the right side of the tree. It was very obvious to me that the tree has been untouched as far as anyone trying to alter its make up in order for it to appear the way it does. "Has it evolved through natural means or perhaps through some divine intervention? Feelings are varied but most walk away with a lingering thought in their minds and that is the figure of Jesus does seem to be outlined in the bark and protruding from the knot of the tree." The article included this comment from one person: "The figure of Christ looks exactly as the Bible pictures Him." Well, just how does the Bible picture Jesus? After all, the original text of the Bible had no pictures, only words. I have a picture of Jesus. But my picture, my image, is not part of a tree, nor is it a picture presented by conservative or fundamentalist or evangelical Christians, nor is it a picture presented in the historic creeds of Christianity, nor is it a picture that appeared to Constantine, nor is it a picture that rests upon the miracle stories of the New Testament. The image that I would like to present this morning is one that comes from a group of contemporary scholars known as the Jesus Seminar, who have painstakingly worked their way through all the Biblical scholarship of the last two hundred years to determine as best they can what Jesus really said and what he really did. This image also comes from Thomas Jefferson, who took his copy of the New Testament and used scissors to cut away those parts of the text that lowered the character of Jesus or demanded belief of the unbelievable. This image also comes from William Ellery Channing and other Unitarians of the nineteenth century who admired Jesus not for his divine power but rather for his moral excellence, and sought him as a teacher rather than as a savior. This image also comes from Francis David, the religious advisor to the Unitarian king of a Hungarian-speaking region in present-day Romania called Transylvania, where the people in the villages and towns have claimed a Unitarian religious identity for nearly four hundred and fifty years. This image also comes from the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus, who in the sixteenth century understood Jesus not as a divine figure, but simply as a human being, and who led a religious community in Rakow, Poland, deeply dedicated to following the teachings of Jesus. This image also comes from the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, who denied the doctrine of the Trinity and was cruelly burned at the stake by John Calvin in Geneva. This image also comes from the fourth-century priest Arius, who refused to accept Jesus as equal to God. Finally, this image also comes from the New Testament, where it is still possible to discern a picture of Jesus the teacher and healer and prophet, even though this original picture has been unfortunately obscured by layers of superstition and magic, exclusive theology, and promises of unearthly salvation. I draw inspiration and guidance and hope from this image of Jesus. You might say that I have an emotional connection with this image of Jesus. You might even say that I have a personal relationship with this image of Jesus, a personal relationship that includes conversation from time to time. Why, just two or three weeks ago I was conversing with this image of Jesus in my office. We were talking about contemporary culture, as we usually do. It turns out that Jesus keeps up pretty well with current events. In this conversation, we talked about gay people. As one whose ministry was characterized by reaching out to many people who were marginalized or dismissed by his culture, he was unhappy about the status of gay people in our culture. I said that I appreciated his concern, especially since homosexuality as a distinct sexual orientation has a relatively recent history and would not have been known in his time. I said that my own vague understanding is that in classical antiquity, for example, the ancient Greeks accepted sexual relations between men as something unremarkable, but neither did they have any understanding of a distinct category of people known as homosexuals. One thing I have noticed about Jesus is that he really wants people to understand his message and his ministry. In our conversations he sometimes expresses frustration and even discouragement that his message and his ministry have been so widely misunderstood. "How could so many people use the Christian religion to oppress gay people?" Jesus asked. "Time and time again I demonstrated acceptance and love for all people, even those considered unacceptable and unlovable by my culture. Which part of 'all people' do they not understand?" "I think there are a few Scriptural passages that some folks have interpreted as condemnation of gay people," I said. "Which passages are those?" Jesus asked. "Can you tell me?" "You know," I replied, "in my Unitarian Universalist tradition, we honor the Bible but we do not necessarily regard it as the final authority. There are four canonical sources of religious authority: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. As a liberal religious tradition, we tend to emphasize reason and experience more than Scripture and tradition. In fact, I'm not familiar enough with the Bible to be able to tell you which passages are used to condemn homosexuality." "In other words," Jesus said, "you are abandoning the Scriptures to those who would distort their basic message. How can you expect to oppose those who would deny the basic human rights of gay and lesbian people?" "Well, we do have a big rainbow banner on the side of our church building which proclaims that civil marriage is a civil right," I said, a little defensively. "Yes, but could you hold your own in a debate with one of those conservative or fundamentalist or evangelical queer-haters?" "OK, OK, I get your point." Jesus and I moved on to some other topic. But what he said stuck with me, and I resolved to educate myself. A week later Jesus and I were talking once again, and I told him that I had learned a few things about what the Bible says about homosexuality. I started with this quotation from the historian John Boswell. "In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word 'homosexual' does not occur in the Bible: no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic, contains such a word. In fact none of these languages ever contained a word corresponding to the English 'homosexual,' nor did any languages have such a term before the late nineteenth century. Neither Hebrew or Arabic has such a word today." [1] Because he wants people to understand his message and his ministry, Jesus
is really quite interested in modern Biblical scholarship. He sees it,
correctly I think, as the last best hope to set the record straight. Of
course, in his lifetime Jesus never encountered anything called the Bible.
Yes, the Jewish religious tradition of his day did have many religious
books regarded as authoritative, but they often circulated as individual
texts rather than being collected together. And of course Jesus in his
lifetime never encountered anything called the New Testament. Once he
jokingly quoted Yogi Berra: "I never said most of the things I said."
Jesus was referring to the practice of the Gospel writers to attribute
words to him that are contrary to what he actually had in mind. "Yes," Jesus said. And Jesus went on to tell the story. "Lot had welcomed two strangers into his home. They were angels, although they were disguised. The people of the town came to Lot's home and demanded to know the identity of these two strangers. Sensing that the crowd might want to do harm to these two strangers, Lot offered his two daughters as a substitute, a fine commentary on the status of women in that culture. Eventually God destroyed the city, but allowed Lot and his family to escape." I said that John Boswell has identified four different explanations for the destruction of Sodom: (1) general wickedness; (2) rape of angels by people of Sodom; (3) homosexual intercourse with angels; (4) inhospitable treatment of strangers. I quoted Boswell again: "Since 1955 modern scholarship has increasingly favored interpretation (4), emphasizing that the sexual overtones of the story are minor, if present, and that the original moral input of the story had to do with hospitality." [2] I continued, "The Biblical text tells that the men of Sodom said to Lot, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.' Boswell claims that in this context, 'know' meant knowing their identity, knowing who they were, not knowing them sexually. The word 'know' is used 943 times in the Hebrew Bible, but only ten of those times does it refer to carnal knowledge. And in none of those ten instances does it refer to homosexual relations." I quoted Boswell once more: "Sodom is used as a symbol of evil in dozens of places, but not in a single instance is the sin of the Sodomites specified as homosexuality. Other sins, on the other hand, are explicitly mentioned." [3] "Then why," Jesus demanded, "would anyone believe that the story of Sodom was intended to condemn homosexuality? The story condemns inhospitality to strangers! In one of those passages in the New Testament where I said something I did not say, I allegedly said, according to Matthew, 'And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I say to you it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.' Does it sound as though I was allegedly talking about homosexuality in this reference to Sodom? No! I was allegedly talking about inhospitality to strangers! That's how we understood the story." "Let's go on to the next passage," I said. "There are two troublesome passages in Leviticus, one in Chapter 18 and one in Chapter 20. Leviticus 18:22 says, 'You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.' Leviticus 20:13 says, 'If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.'" I then read from Boswell's book, which is called Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century: "The Hebrew word 'toevah,' here translated 'abomination,' does not usually signify something intrinsically evil, like rape or theft (discussed elsewhere in Leviticus), but something which is ritually unclean for Jews, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during menstruation, both of which are prohibited in these same chapters. It is used throughout the Old Testament to designate those Jewish sins which involve ethnic contamination or idolatry . . . Leviticus 18 is specifically designed to distinguish the Jews from the pagans among whom they have been living . . . Chapter 20 begins with a prohibition of sexual idolatry almost identical with this, and like 18, its manifest . . . purpose is to elaborate a system of ritual 'cleanliness' whereby the Jews will be distinguished from neighboring peoples. Although both chapters also contain prohibitions (e.g., against incest and adultery) which might seem to stem from moral absolutes, their function in the context of Leviticus 18 and 20 seems to be as symbols of Jewish distinctiveness. . . ." [4] Personally, I was quite fascinated by Boswell's scholarship, and I read aloud a little further: "The distinction between intrinsic wrong and ritual impurity is even more finely drawn by the Greek translation, which distinguishes in 'toevah' itself the separate categories of violations of law or justice and infringements of ritual purity or monotheistic worship. The Levitical proscriptions of homosexual behavior fall into the latter category." [5] "In the Greek, then, the Levitical enactments against homosexual behavior characterize it unequivocally as ceremonially unclean rather than inherently evil." [6] I paused for a moment to let all this sink in. I continued, "That part of Leviticus is all about distinguishing the Jews from others. Here is how Chapter 20 ends: 'I am the Lord your God, who have separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean beast and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not make yourselves abominable by beast or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you shall be mine.' And just to put this into perspective, in Chapter 19 of Leviticus we find these instructions, 'You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. You shall not make any marks or cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead or tattoo any marks upon you.' All these instructions have to do with ritual purity, with distinguishing the Jewish people from other people." "Let's go on to the next passage, in Judges," I said. "This terrible story is almost an exact parallel to the story of Sodom in Genesis. A traveler finds lodging in a city, the local inhabitants gather menacingly, and two young women are offered as a substitute. One of these is the traveler's concubine. The local inhabitants know her sexually, and in the morning she dies. Incredibly, the traveler cuts his dead concubine into twelve pieces and circulates them among the twelve tribes of Israel as a rebuke. Later, in a speech before the assembled tribes, he says: 'I came to Gibeah that belongs to Benjamin, I and my concubine, to spend the night. And the men of Gibeah rose against me, and beset the house round about me by night; they meant to kill me, and they ravished my concubine, and she is dead. And I took my concubine and cut her in pieces, and sent her throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel; for they have committed abomination and wantonness in Israel.' So here we see that the danger the traveler was facing was not homosexual rape but rather murder. Eventually, that city, like Sodom, was destroyed, but not because its inhabitants were gay, but rather because they showed inhospitality to a stranger." Yet another story about the destruction of a city occurs in the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua, the story of the destruction of Jericho. I quoted Boswell once again: "The parallel story in Joshua 6 is eloquent testimony to the paramount importance of hospitality in relation to sexual offences: the city of Jericho, like Sodom, was completely destroyed by the Lord, and the one person spared was a prostitute-though prostitution is prohibited in both Leviticus (19:29) and Deuteronomy (23:17)-because she offered hospitality to the messengers of Joshua." [7] Jesus said, "So now we have finished with the four passages in the Hebrew Bible. Let's move on to those three passages in the New Testament." "Sure," I said. "All three passages appear in letters from St. Paul. The first passage is 1 Corinthians 6:9, where St. Paul lists those who will be excluded from salvation. The second passage is 1 Timothy 1:10, where, once again, St. Paul lists those who will be excluded from salvation. According to some people, two words in these two passages refer to homosexuals. However, John Boswell points out that one of these words simply means "unrestrained" in bodily pleasures, which would apply to gay people no more than it would to anyone else. The other word means "male prostitute." "The best evidence," says John Boswell, "suggests that it did not connote homosexuality to Paul or his contemporaries . . ." [8] "That leaves just one passage," said Jesus. "Right. The passage is Romans 1:26-27. Here it is, with an introduction: 'Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. . . . For this reason God gave them up to unnatural passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own person the due penalty for their error.' John Boswell points out that this passage is really intended to criticize infidelity to God. He writes that 'the persons that Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons. The whole point of Romans 1, in fact, is to stigmatize person who have rejected their calling, gotten off the true path they were once on. It would completely undermine the thrust of the argument if the persons in question were not 'naturally' inclined to the opposite sex in the same way they were 'naturally' inclined to monotheism.' "So now," I said, "we have covered all seven of the Scriptural passages that supposedly forbid homosexuality. In each case, putting the passage in question into context makes a great deal of difference. A Scriptural passage in isolation may seem to forbid homosexuality, but when the context is added, that interpretation is shown to be contrary to what the passage really means." "I think these are important conclusions," said Jesus. "It would certainly be in accord with my message and my ministry to bring these conclusions to a wider audience. In any case, now you have something to say to those who would distort Scripture to justify prejudice, exclusion, and denial of basic human rights to gay and lesbian people." And so my conversation with the historical Jesus was over for the day. I'll keep you posted on future conversations.
© 2005 by David Herndon |
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| Copyright 2005 | ||