Understanding the Gendered Jesus - Part 2; Graham Ward's Christ and Culture

Previously in this series;

Preface to Theology and Gendered Ministry

Framing Gender Differences

Understanding the Gendered Jesus - Part 1; Graham Ward's Cities of God

Having outlined the theological significance of Jesus’ body Ward, in his chapter “Divinity and Sexual Difference,” looks more specifically at the implications of his theological context of gender differences. Ward guides his discussion with the work of Luce Irigaray whose primary focus in the relationship between religion and gender is the existence of difference, space and desire. To maintain that Christ was humanly only as a man among other men forecloses difference, space and desire (which requires two) and demands that women must identify with the masculine gender for salvation. Difference must be maintained in gender because “sexual difference seems to me to assure the limits of being human which allows space for the divine.”[1] If Christ is the body of salvation then Jesus must somehow be more than just masculine. Some have argued that Irigaray’s position returns to a biological essentialism of heterosexual difference. Ward rejects this saying that her framing of sexual difference between the role of the phallus and two lips of the vagina is symbolic noting that they “do not necessarily map into bodies possessing male and female genitalia.”[2] Irigaray then looks to the body of Christ with the knowledge that it may contain more maleness. She finds that “there appears, in the form of a wound (his side), the place that, in women, is naturally open.”[3] It is within Christ himself that sexual difference may be maintained in particular contexts. And why is sexual difference important? In the Bible it is in the space of separation, difference and desire that creation and redemption occurs. “Desire is both the creator and the creation of space. Only where there is space, where there is distance, where there is difference, can there be love that desires, that draws, that seeks participation. . . . In the beginning God created by a process of separation.”[4]

This drawing into intimate relationship and the act of creation is not dissolution of the self. The space must be maintained and not foreclosed as the logic of patriarchy had it. In this space “we” emerge knowing more fully both “you” and “I.” There are two important post-resurrection stories that illustrate this. In John’s Gospel Mary encounters Jesus, but does not recognize him. Ward frames the encounter as heterosexual and one of desire. As Jesus calls her name she is drawn into desire and recognizes the partner in the space (Rabboni!). The recognition of this space prompts an immediate response and she draws into an intimate embrace with Jesus. Jesus tells her not to cling to him, the space must not be foreclosed, because he must return to God for this space to be inscribed in their faith. The other encounter is Thomas and Jesus. Thomas is the opposite of Mary. He is distant, isolating himself from the possibility of intimate space. Jesus must come to him and say reach out your hand and put it into my side. Place your hand in the place, that, in women, is naturally open. Here in this space there is also revelatory recognition, My Lord and my God! Here we have a ‘homosexual’ encounter in which the space of sexual difference is still able to be created. In both these examples sexual difference is created, regardless of biology. Wards states that “there is no theology of sexual difference, then, only the production of sexual difference in a theological relation. The encounter with Christ installs both the difference and its erotic form, its sexuate nature.”[5]

All relationships then produce sexual difference and carry an erotic nature (economy of desire). Theologically then we must think carefully through what it means to relate in Christ. “A body is, if you like, always in transit, always exceeding its significance or transgressing the limits of what appears. . . . The body exists fluidly in a number of operations between reception and response, between degrees of desire / repulsion, recognition / misrecognition, and passivity / activity.”[6] The body cannot be confined and reduced, it is in this continual negotiation that creation, love and salvation occurs. Gender is an expression of difference acting out within our various relationships in the body of Christ.

Ward offers a substantially different framework for understanding gender. Most scientific (and theological) approaches to the study of gender attempt to ultimately foreclose categories; to confine, dissect and analyze. This leaves individuals and groups working with prescriptive categories that do not apply to everyone and are often unjust in their relationship to other social groups. Ward does not discard biology as the body remains the primary site of meaning. It is, however, in the ongoing reality of relationships, of space, that allows people’s experience to be fully gendered, fully human.

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[1] Christ and Culture, 139.

[2] Ibid., 139-40.

[3] Ibid., 140.

[4] Ibid., 145.

[5] Ibid., 154.

[6] Ibid., 157.

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Understanding the Gendered Jesus - Part 1; Graham Ward's Cities of God

The theological paradigm of gender that I am adopting is taken directly from the work of Graham Ward in his books Cities of God and Christ and Culture.[1] Ward’s chapter “The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ” in Cities of God outlines his particular understanding of the gendered Jesus. In this chapter Ward finds in the Gospels the instability of Jesus’ gender. From birth Jesus appears to issue from promise and not from copulation. Jesus comes from virgin flesh and the line of Joseph. In medical terms the male Jesus who is circumcised (we assume his biology is confirmed here) issues from the XX chromosomal femaleness of his mother. Through his life the body of Jesus exhibits unusual expressions. “This man can walk on water. This man can sweat blood. This man can bring life. This man can multiply material so that five thousand are fed from a few loaves and fish. This man can heal by touch; and not just heal but create – wine from water, the eyes of the man born blind, the ear of the Temple guard.”[2] The body of Jesus and the material in contact with him are destabilized and often undergoes transfigurations. “I am the way, the truth, the life, the Temple, the bread, the light, the vine, and the gate.”[3] Christ is gendered but not bound by a gender. In his body Jesus transcends gender taking bread, breaking it and saying this is my body. Ward also points to Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain saying that the ‘body’ of God’s glory was shown through Christ’s body. At the eucharist Christ breaks his body so that a new social embodiment might be revealed. “Bodies are not only transfigurable, they are transposable. In being transposable, while always being singularities and specificities, the body of Christ can cross boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, socio-economic boundaries for example. Christ’s body as bread is no longer Jesus as simply and biologically male.”[4]
At the crucifixion Jesus’ body is objectified, degendered, displaced as it is acted upon as meat and not human. But that is only in relation to the structural powers of law. Theologically the body is still displaced, distanced, but it is also gendered in the feminine as mother. The pierced side of Jesus issues blood and water birthing the church. In the eucharistic body we are joined through taking in Christ. In the crucified body we are dispelled from the side of Christ. Ward draws great significance for us as we are caught up in these movements. Ward is worth commenting in full here,

It is not simply that the physical body of Jesus is displaced in the Christian story, our bodies too participate in that displacement in and through the crucifixion. At the eucharist we receive and are acted upon; now having been brought into relation and facing the acknowledgement of the breaking of that relation readers recognize displacement of the body as part of Christian living. Our bodies too, sexually specific, will perform in ways which transgress the gendered boundaries of established codes. In the Christian tradition which follows, men will become mothers . . . women will become virile.[5]

At the resurrection Christ’s body is raised corporeal but exhibits itself as even more unstable then in his prior life. He is now able to disappear, hide his identity and walk through walls. This increased instability reinforces to us that Christ’s identity and perhaps the identity of bodies in general cannot be finally determined, they keep their mystery and are able to offer revelation from that place.[6] Ward writes that,

The appearance / disappearance structure of Christ’s resurrected body serves to emphasize the mediation of that body – its inability to be fully present, to be an object to be grasped, catalogued, atomized, comprehended. The appearance / disappearance serves as a focus for what has been evident throughout – the body as a mystery, as a materiality which can never fully reveal, must always conceal, something of the profundity of its existence.[7]

With the ascension Jesus’ body receives its final displacement. Ward is quick to point out though “that displacement is not the erasure but the expansion of the body.”[8] In many ways it is Paul who is our interpreter of the ascended body of Christ when he writes in Colossians that the Church is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. “The final displacement of the gendered body of Jesus Christ, always aporetic and transgressing boundaries, is the multigendered body of the Church.”[9] As the crucifixion is turned onto its head as an event of birthing so to the ascending of Christ, Christ ‘leaving,’ is a creating of space for the divine-human relationship which Ward states clearing as re-establishing,

a new anthropology, a new way of being human as being en Christo as the church. . . . The body of Jesus Christ, the body of God, is permeable, transcorporeal, transpositional. Within it all other bodies are situated and given their significance. We are all permeable, transcorporeal, transpositional. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ.’ . . . The body of Christ is a multigendered body.[10]

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[1] Graham Ward, Cities of God (New York: Routledge, 2000); Christ and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

[2] Cities of God, 100.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 103.

[5] Ibid., 106.

[6] Ibid., 109.

[7] Ibid., 111.

[8] Ibid., 112.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 113.

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