Transgendering God

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

19 December 2021

 

Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci, 1499-1510

 
John 1.1-18

 
Have you heard of the ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ critique of contemporary worship songs?
            It suggests that you take a song or hymn,
                        and try substituting the name ‘Jesus’
                        with the name of your significant other;
            and that if the song still makes sense,
                        it’s probably not such a great worship song.
 
It’s easy to do, and you can certainly have some fun with it;
            a bit like when I was a teenager
            and discovered the first-line index at the back of the hymn book.
 
It turns out that if you only read the first line,
            some favourite hymns or songs
            sound a lot more lewd than the author ever intended.
 
I mention this not to be disrespectful to contemporary worship,
            there are some fantastic modern hymns,
            and I think we should learn more of them at Bloomsbury.
 
But I mention it because it raises for us the question of God’s gender;
            and particularly the gender of God, as God is made known in Jesus.
 
And the thing is, this matters,
            because for most of its history the church, the body of Christ,
            has been a patriarchal institution.
 
From male-only priesthoods, to the idea that the husband is the head of his wife,
            to the denial of contraception and abortion to women,
            to the contemporary complementarian ideals
                        perpetuated in the ‘biblical womanhood’ movement,
the church has a woeful history of prioritising masculinity,
            and denigrating femininity.
 
And so much of this owes its origin
            to the fact that the baby Jesus was a boy.
 
If Jesus, born in a stable, is God incarnate,
            and if Jesus is a male child,
then, the logic of the millennia has asserted,
            God must also be understood as male.
 
Particularly notable for us today, in terms of patriarchal legacy,
            is the fact that many of the early church fathers
                        based their theology of male-headship
            on the language of the word-made-flesh that we find in our reading
                        from the prologue to John’s gospel.
 
Here I’m afraid I need to introduce you to a word from Ancient Greek;
            but that’s OK, because we’re all experts in classical Greek now,
            thanks to the naming convention adopted for the COVID-19 variants of concern.
 
Admittedly, a global pandemic wasn’t how I wanted the world to learn biblical Greek,
            but I’ll take what I can get.
 
Anyway, the word I want us to learn this morning
            is the word ‘logos’.
 
And, perhaps ironically, the meaning of this word, ‘logos’, is in fact ‘word’.
            ‘Logos’ is the ancient Greek term for a word,
                        for a thing uttered in speech or language.
 
And we meet this word, this ‘logos’
            in two key verses from our reading for this morning:
 
In the beginning was the logos,
            and the logos was with God, and the logos was God. (Jn. 1:1)
 
And the logos became flesh and lived among us. (Jn. 1:14)
 
And the thing is, in ancient Greek, ‘logos’ was a masculine word.
            But not in the rather simplistic way in which,
            for example in French, a car is female, but an apple tree is male.
 
Rather, in the ancient Greek world, the task of ‘logos’, of uttering truth,
            was a male domain.
It was the men who spoke, the men who articulated thought,
            while the women merely echoed the ‘logos’ of the men.
 
The philosopher Aristotle,
            who lived some 400 years before the writing of John’s gospel,
had used the term ‘logos’ to describe the rhetorical technique of reasoned discourse,
            the act of constructing a logical argument,
and this was something which he saw as a male task,
            arising from what he believed were inherent masculine characteristics.
 
And building on this, the Stoic philosophers of the ancient Greek world,
            had taught that the speaking of reason and logic, the delivery of ‘logos’,
            was the act of speaking order into a chaotic world.
 
For them the universe only made sense
            because of the reason and logic of the ‘logos’,
which they saw as an almost divine word that brings order,
            spoken into a world of chaos.
 
And these ancient Greek concepts of a male, logical, divine logos,
            dominated the world in which Christianity grew and developed,
and they became fused with the way in which the early church
            sought to understand John’s gospel’s language
                        of a ‘logos made flesh’,
                        of a logos which was in the beginning with God, and which was God.
 
And what happened, perhaps predictably,
            was that God came to be understood as inherently male;
            God was the man who spoke order into chaos, logic into irrationality.
 
And what God spoke was Jesus:
            the baby-boy born in the manger was the word incarnate,
            who became the man who called twelve male disciples.
 
Well, today I want us to begin unpicking this heritage of patriarchy,
            and I want us to start to see that God is not so easily defined as male.
 
Today’s sermon is actually the beginning of a new series on John’s gospel
            which will take us through the story of Jesus’ life through to Easter,
and so it’s important for us to think about this foundational issue of gender,
            because, as we will discover over the next few months,
the story of Jesus in the fourth gospel
            consistently and persistently challenges the gender-based hierarchies
            that dominated the ancient world
and which continue to dominate our world today.
 
It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention
            that gender is less easily defined than you might at first think.
 
Biologically speaking, of course, it’s reasonably straightforward.
            The presence of a Y chromosome will trigger development as a male.
            While its absence will trigger development as a female.
 
However, while biological sex is, with some rare exceptions, easy enough to test for,
            gender is something far more complex.
 
Those who study these things recognise that gender is a construct
            that overlays our underlying biology.
 
At a simple level, for example, there is no biological reason
            why men should wear trousers and women should wear skirts.
In fact in some cultures, men wear skirts too,
            and similarly these days in our culture,
            there is nothing unusual in women wearing trousers.
 
However, if I had come into this pulpit wearing a dress,
            you might wonder what I was saying about my understanding of my gender;
unless, of course, that dress was clerical dress,
            in which case you might wonder why I’d suddenly gone all Anglican on you.
 
You see, even at the level of what we wear, gender is fluid, non-defined,
            and you can write this across other areas of our being,
            from speech patterns, to movement, to occupation.
 
And whilst some of us find that our biological sex
            and our gender identity feel in harmony,
others find that their gender identity is more diverse, more fluid,
            less binary than ‘male’ or ‘female’.
 
And so we have a glorious set of words that have emerged,
            to describe people’s understanding and experience of who they are.
 
I’m not going to try and define these for us today,
            because I want us to get back to John’s gospel;
but as we do so I’d like us to hold in our minds,
            the fact that the concepts of male and female
            are not always experienced in the same way by different people,
and that any overarching framework
            that seeks to define what it is to be male, or female,
is likely to be experienced as oppressive
            by those who don’t fit that definition.
 
So, back to ‘logos’, this ancient Greek term for masculine rationality,
            which came to define the Christian understanding
                        of a male God, a male priesthood,
            and a patriarchal authority structure for both society and the home.
 
And here we need to depart from the world of Greek thought,
            and remember that although the fourth gospel was written in Greek,
it was written by someone who was Jewish,
            and that its thought world owes at least as much to the Hebrew Bible,
            as it does to Aristotle and the Stoics.
 
The clue is there in the opening words of the gospel,
            which echo the opening words of the book of Genesis.
 
‘In the beginning God created…’
            becomes ‘In the beginning was the logos….’
 
The author of John’s gospel is wanting his readers to make a connection
            between the story of God speaking creation into being,
                        separating light from darkness and declaring it good,
            and the story he is about to tell of the word-made-flesh
                        that is the light shining in the darkness of the world.
 
But of course, the creation story from Genesis
            isn’t just about the mechanics of creating the cosmos,
it’s also a story about the creation of humans:
 
So God created humankind in his image,
            in the image of God he created them;
            male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27)
When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God.
Male and female he created them, and he blessed them
            and named them "Humankind" when they were created. (Gen. 5:1-2)
 
And here we need to notice something significant about gender, and it’s this:
            there is diversity of gender within God,
            and this is reflected in the diversity of gender amongst humans.
 
Genesis does not describe an unambiguously male God,
            and neither does John’s gospel offer an unambiguously male logos.
 
Whilst ‘logos’ may be a male term within the classical Greek tradition,
            John’s gospel clearly has in mind another tradition from the Hebrew Bible,
            known as the ‘wisdom tradition’.
 
Other Jewish writers from the same period made the same move,
            with the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria
            using the Greek words ‘logos’ and ‘sophia’
                        (the Greek word for ‘Wisdom’) interchangeably.
 
In places such as Proverbs (1-9) and the Apocryphal book of Sirach (24)
            we meet this character called ‘wisdom’, always personified as a woman;
and she is presented as the agent of God’s communication, of God’s speech.
 
In the Hebrew Bible, when God speaks salvation, hope, and judgment to humanity,
            God does so through the female form of wisdom.
 
But even more than this, wisdom is also presented
            as the agent of God’s creation (Prov. 8.22-23):
she, that is ‘wisdom’ was in the beginning with God,
            and she participated with God in the creation of the world.
 
Wisdom is a decisively female image for God,
            and of God’s spoken word taking human form,
and so when John’s gospel speaks of God’s word made flesh,
            this female image of wisdom is part of that incarnation.
 
If God creates humans male and female after God’s own image,
            then God’s word takes human form as both male and female too.
 
And whilst the human being of Jesus may be biologically male,
            in Jesus are embodied the full diversity of gender,
            which is reflective of the full glory of God’s diversity.
 
And we will see this time and again
            as we work through the fourth gospel over coming months,
            with Jesus consistently subverting gender norms and expectations.
 
As Elizabeth Johnson puts it: ‘
            ”The gender particularity of Jesus
                        does not reveal that God must be imaged exclusively as male.
            In Jesus Christ we encounter the mystery of God who is neither male nor female,
                        but who as source of both and Creator in the divine image
                        can in turn be imaged as either” (Johnson 1985: 280).[1]
 
In fact, the very language of God as creator,
            is itself a reflection God’s own gender diversity.
 
The fact that the Hebrew Bible assigns to the female character ‘wisdom’
            the creative roles of builder, architect, and director,
                        (perhaps more typically masculine roles),
            along with the unambiguously female act of creating flesh from flesh;
means that these female images for God
            have to sit alongside any image of God as male,
to remind us that God is not just the Father of all things,
            but the eternal Mother of us all as well.
 
And it’s this idea of God as mother that I want us to sit with for a moment now,
            as we explore another aspect of the prologue to John’s gospel.
 
Here I want us to turn to v.18, which in the NRSV translation we use reads as follows:
 
No one has ever seen God.
            It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart,
            who has made him known.
 
However, and forgive me turning back to the Greek again here,
            I don’t think this is the best translation.
 
Just so you know, I’m going to borrow much of what I want to say about this verse
            from Karoline Lewis’s remarkable commentary on John’s Gospel. [2]
 
The first issue we have here is with the word “son”,
            because the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of John
            do not include the term “son” here.
 
It was added later, most likely by scribes
            on the basis that the Father–Son relationship between Jesus and God
                        is a central theme of the gospel.
 
However, and interestingly for us, that does not seem to have been
            the original focus here in the prologue.
 
Rather, John was showing his readers
            that Jesus reveals God’s nature
            in a new and profoundly different way.
 
At this point in the story, the logos is God, begotten of God,
            but not yet gendered, not yet God’s ‘son’.
 
This is God’s word and wisdom, embodied but ungendered,
            fully human and fully God.
 
And then we come to another translation problem,
            with our pew Bibles telling us that the begotten logos
            is “close to the Father’s heart” (NRSV)
 
But the word ‘heart’ isn’t actually used here,
            the word in Greek is better translated as “bosom.”
 
And I don’t want any sniggering at the back!
 
The King James Version rightly translates this,
            saying that the divine word, the logos,
            is ‘in the bosom of the Father’,
 
The reason later translations change this, opting for the ‘at the Father’s side’
            or ‘close to the heart of the Father’
is because the word ‘bosom’ has become, in many of our minds,
            inextricably linked with the heaving bosoms of period dramas!
 
In other words, it makes us think of a woman’s breasts.
 
However, Margaret Miles, in her study of the breast as a religious symbol in art, [3]
            argues that before the mid- 18^th century
            a primary image for salvation was the infant Jesus
                        nursing at the exposed breast of Mary.
 
The believer, in viewing this picture,
            was invited to imagine being in Jesus’ position
            and, in this way, to experience salvation from of God as nurturer.
 
Margaret Miles goes on to suggest, however,
            that the simultaneous advent of medical anatomy and printed pornography,
meant that depictions of the female body moved
            from being a representation of the source of nourishment of life
            to becoming a detached object of study and desire.
 
From this point on, there was no longer the possibility of visualizing God in this way,
            and viewing the breast as a religious symbol became impossible.
 
As a result, the primary representation of salvation in art
            moved from the nursing baby Jesus, to the crucifixion.
 
Translations of John 1:18 published after this point
            demonstrate this remarkable shift in the perception of the female body.
 
Describing Jesus as nursing at the bosom or breast of God
            suddenly became sexualised or even sordid,
and so Jesus being 'in the bosom' of God,
            became Jesus being 'by the side', or 'close to the heart', of God.
 
However, to abandon this image
            in favour of a more socially acceptable portrayal,
is problematic because the meaning conveyed in this picture,

            of Jesus at the bosom of God,
            is one of extraordinary tenderness.
 
One would be hard-pressed to find a description of relationship
            more intimate than the nursing of a child
and the rest of the Gospel depends on this description
            of Jesus’ relationship with God.
 
Who God is, for the believer as a child of God,
            is their parent, their mother,
            who provides everything necessary for sustenance of life.
 
God is the life-sustainer in the Fourth Gospel,
            and Jesus’ signs and words that will follow
            all bear witness to God as the one who is the source of true life.
 
To be a disciple of Jesus is to become, like him, a child of God,
            as we experience God the nurturing mother,
            as well as God the loving father.
 
Interestingly, the only other time in the Gospel of John
            that the word “bosom” is used is in 13:23, at the last supper.
 
Here we have the disciple whom Jesus loves,
            resting his head against Jesus’ bosom.
 
Those reading the gospel are encouraged to emulate this disciple,
            and to share with him in the intimacy of his relationship with Jesus,
just as Jesus invites us to share in the intimacy of his relationship with God.
 
And through all of this, we encounter these astonishing images
            of both God and Jesus, encompassing the female characteristics
            of nurturer and sustainer.
 
And so we get to the final few words of verse 18,
            where we are told that the only begotten, born of God,
            the one who is sustained by God’s loving nurture,
                        is the one who makes God known.
 
This is the revelation of God,
            and it is a trans-gender revelation.
 
The God of the prologue to John’s gospel is no alpha male,
            and the only begotten of God is no macho man.
 
The logos, the word and wisdom of God,
            spoken into human form and flesh,
reveals to us a God who creates humankind after God’s own image,
            with gender transcending biology at every turn.
 
And so as we come towards Christmas,
            to the point where we encounter God as the dependent child in the manger,
I pray that we can discover that for each of us,
            however we experience ourselves in these complex and wonderful bodies of ours,
            we will know deeply and truly that we have been created in God’s image.
 

---

[1] Quoted in Scott, J. Martin C., Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: John (pp. 38-39).
[2] Lewis, Karoline M., John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries) (pp. 21-24).
[3] A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008]