A Fresh Look at Cross-Dressing in Deuteronomy

A few years ago I was speaking with a colleague in ministry about how the church responds to trans people. I tried to suggest that, strictly speaking, as a question of chapter-and-verse citation, the Bible does not say anything about the morality of gender transitioning, and, therefore, it is probably best for the church not to frame it as a moral issue.

My friend cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” he said. “You don’t think the Bible addresses this?” And then he cited Deuteronomy 22:5—“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”—and he rested his case.

At the time, I hadn’t spent a great deal of time digging into Deuteronomy 22:5, so I didn’t argue the point. I was pretty sure, however, that a single verse in Torah hardly made an airtight argument. I felt this especially because Christians believe as a foundation of their faith that the Lord Jesus has fulfilled all of Torah in his death and resurrection, and the single command to love our neighbours faithfully in Jesus Christ fulfills the entirety of Torah (Galatians 5:14).

A while later, though, I had occasion to look more closely at the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 22:5, and I noticed something I had never considered before.

You see: the most common word for “clothing” in the Hebrew Bible is beged. It comes from the Hebrew root word bâgad, “to cover,” and occurs 217 times in the Hebrew Bible. Other common words for clothing include lebûsh (32 occurrences), malbûsh (8 occurrences), śimlâh (29 occurrences) and mekasseh (4 occurrences).

In contrast to this, the word “kelı̂y” (319 occurrences) is a somewhat flexible word, which generally means something like “equipment” or “furnishings.” It can refer to a vessel or sack that contains something, to jewelry, to a tool or weapon, to gear that someone might wear for a specific purpose, or to a soldier’s armour. The meaning of kelı̂y is very much dependent on the context in which it is being used.

The most common word for “a man,” in Hebrew is the noun 'ı̂ysh. It occurs 2163 times and means “a man” in the most general sense. The second most common word for “a man,” is the word 'âdâm, with 541 occurrences. This is the word that the name “Adam” comes from and can mean a “man” specifically, or a human being more generally (regardless of gender, as in “God created 'man' in his image”). The Hebrew word for “male,” with special reference to the sexed-body, is zâkâr (with 82 occurrences).

In contrast to these various terms for a “man,” the word geber literally means something like “valiant man,” or, more loosely, a “warrior.” It occurs 65 times in the Hebrew Bible.

With that rough and ready Hebrew glossary in mind, let me return to Deuteronomy 22:5, and its prohibition, seemingly, against men and women wearing each other’s clothing. Because the word it uses for “man” is not 'ı̂ysh, or 'âdâm, or zâkâr. And neither is the word for the man’s clothing beged, lebûsh, or śimlâh. The word the NIV translates as “man” is geber, “a mighty man,” and the word the NIV translates as “clothing” is kelı̂y, “gear/equipment.” Admittedly, the word geber can be used in the Hebrew Bible to describe a man generally, in a way similar to how the word 'ı̂ysh is used, but in this context, paired with the word kelı̂y like this, it seems obvious to me that simple, generic “cross dressing” is not what the verse has in mind.

Literally, we might render it like this: “There shall not be ‘the gear’ of a ‘valiant man’ upon a woman, and a ‘valiant man’ shall not put on the mantle (simlat) of a woman.”

A rough and ready gloss of the verse might run like this: “A woman shall not put on the equipment of a warrior, and a warrior shall not put on a woman’s dress.”

It would take more unpacking than I have space for in a simple blog post like this to determine how accurate this gloss is to the original intent. It’s notable to me, however, that the prohibition against a woman “wearing a warrior’s arms” appears in Chapter 22, shortly after a lengthy list of laws pertaining to how the Israelites are to wage war (or not to wage war, as the case may be) with the nations they will encounter in the Promised Land. Verses 21:10-14, for instance, give careful guidelines for how the Israelites are to treat a woman taken captive in war.

With this context in mind, I can’t help but wonder if Deuteronomy 22:5 actually has nothing to do with the act of cross-dressing, but instead is prohibiting the people of Israel from using their women as soldiers in battle, or allowing their male soldiers to shirk their “manly” duty to fight on behalf of their people (both of which, in an Ancient Near Eastern context, would be an affront to the nation's honor (see, for instance, Judges 4:9)).

Even if these arguments aren’t conclusive, they strongly suggest that we cannot read Deuteronomy 22:5 as some sort of a definitive word on the modern day phenomenon of gender dysphoria, or use it as a some kind of directive on how we ought to respond to trans people. If we do, we'll be doing a kind of violence to the text (to say nothing of what it does to trans people themselves), wrenching the verse from its context and making it say something it’s not meaning to say.

A Fresh Look at the Prophet Daniel

Last week I shared some thoughts about an often-overlooked detail in the story of the Road to Emmaus, and the possibility that, counter to generations of tradition, the two disciples that Jesus encountered that day might not both have been male, that they might have been a married couple. That post received an unexpected level of engagement at my church, so much so that I thought I’d share another “overlooked detail” that I came across in my daily Bible reading, that maybe sheds some interesting light on an familiar story.

The story in question involves the prophet Daniel, one of the best loved prophets in the Old Testament. Many of us have probably heard the stories of Daniel interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, or reading the writing on the wall, or braving the lion’s den, but the other day I was reading Daniel Chapter 1 and I saw something I never noticed before.

In verse 1:3, we are told that Daniel was brought to Babylon from Jerusalem during the exile, and that upon arriving in the palace he was placed in the custody of Ashpenaz, the chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s court officials. That is how the NIV renders the verse, anyways. The NASB reads the same, though it includes a footnote clarifying that the word could be translated as the “chief of the king’s eunuchs.” This is, incidentally, how the old King James version translates it.

Was Ashpenaz actually the chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace eunuchs? If so, what would that have meant for Daniel, to have been placed in Ashpenaz’s custody?

The word in question is sârı̂ys, a Hebrew word that comes from a root word that literally means “to castrate.” It’s the word used in Esther 2:14 to describe Shaashgaz, for example, who was the eunuch in charge of the King’s harem, and certainly in the context of that story—which shares many similarities with Daniel, by the way—in that story it is highly probable that Shaashgaz, as the keeper of the king’s harem, was a eunuch in the literal sense of the word.

The word sârı̂ys can also simply mean an “official” or “officer of the court,” however, with no implications as to the person’s reproductive status. In the story of Joseph and Potiphar, for example, we’re told that Potiphar was a sârı̂ys of Pharaoh, and later we discover that he is married, and may even have had a daughter (Gen 41:45). In that story, it’s not likely that Potiphar was a eunuch in the technical sense, which is why most English translations call him an “official” in Pharoah’s court.

In some cases, as in the story of Esther above, the context itself can help us decide how the word is being used. We know, for example, that in 2 Kings 20:18, when the Jewish King Hezekiah sins by showing off his wealth and military might to the envoys from Babylon, the prophet Isaiah warns him that, as a result, his children will be taken away and made to be sârı̂yim in the palace of the Babylonian king. Given the severity of this threat, the context suggests that Babylon will “make eunuchs” of Hezekiah’s sons in the literal sense, not simply make them into court officials. It is possible that this was a common practice—or at least, not uncommon—for Babylon to castrate its prisoners of war before making them servants of the court.

So what about Daniel? Does the term sârı̂ys in this story mean more than just “an official?” Was Daniel literally “made into a eunuch” when he came to serve under Ashpenaz, the head of the king's eunuchs?

Admittedly, the final answer is inconclusive (hence the NASB’s footnote leaving both possibilities), but my hunch, for what it’s worth, is that he was.

I say this partly because of the similarities between the story of Daniel and the story of Esther, another Jewish captive who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Persian court (though admittedly Esther’s sexual violence was of a different nature). I also say it because of the way 2 Kings 20:18 seems to foreshadow Daniel’s situation so directly.

It would be easy to make a much bigger deal out this detail than the context warrants; Daniel being “made a eunuch” does not make his situation the same as people who identify as what now adays we might call a “sexual minority.” At least, not exactly the same. If Daniel was a eunuch, it was not sex-change surgery he received. He was violently mutilated by an oppressive empire. It would be anachronistic, I think, to over-lay his story onto the experience of people today who identify as trans, or experience gender dysphoria.

At the same time, it would be easy to make too small a deal out of this detail, too; and that, I think, is the greater danger. In Deuteronomy 23:1, we’re told quite explicitly that no one who has been castrated is to be permitted in the assembly of God’s people. It’s not clear what should be done with them, but it’s clear they are to be “excluded from the assembly.” And yet, if my reading of Daniel’s story is accurate, then in Daniel we have at least one instance of someone who falls under the Deuteronomy 23 prohibition, but instead of being excluded he is, rather, used powerfully by God.

There’s a line in Daniel 10:11 that I’ve always found to be very poignant. Daniel has received a horrific vision of the future and is in deep distress. He’s been praying and mourning for three days straight, when a divine visitor finally comes to comfort him with the interpretation of what he’s seen. Before this theophanic messenger does that, however, he starts by saying: “You, Daniel, are ‘highly esteemed.’”

That’s how the NIV renders it, at least, but I don’t think it’s strong enough. In Hebrew the word is châmad, a word that literally means “desirable,” or “precious.” It’s the word used to describe precious jewels in 2 Chronicles 20:25, precious gold in Ezra 8:27. In Psalm 19:9-10 it’s the word used to describe “the judgements of the Lord”—they are more desirable (châmad) than precious gold.

The use of this word to describe Daniel in 10:11 would hit you in the gut with its beauty, if, in Daniel 1:3, it really was the case that he had been castrated when he was brought into the service of King Nebuchadnezzar. Because if he was, then according to the Law of Moses, his status as someone whose body lacked “full sexual congruity with his gender,” so to speak, would mean that he should have been excluded from the community, cut off from life with God (no pun intended).

And yet, Daniel discovers just exactly the opposite: his divine messenger assures him that he is deeply loved—desirable even, and precious—regardless any sexual violence he may have experienced at the hands of the oppressor, and whether or not his body was “sexually whole” (for lack of a better way of saying it). Those things would not determine his worth in God’s eyes, or, more importantly, his desirability as a servant of the Lord.

Neither do they determine our worth in God’s eyes, if we are in circumstances similar to Daniel’s: if we have experienced sexual violence, perhaps, that has left a permanent scar on us, if our bodies do not align wholly with our sense of who we are, if there is something about our bodies that feels to us “un-whole,” and we think, as a result, there’s no place for us in community. If I’m on to anything in my reading of Daniel’s story, none of those things make us any less precious to God, or God less able to use us powerfully for his purposes.

A Fresh Look at the Road to Emmaus

In Luke 24:13-32, we’re told about a mysterious encounter two disciples had with the risen Jesus, in the afternoon on the day of his resurrection. It’s sometimes called “The Emmaus Road Encounter,” because these two disciples encounter him while they’re on their way to Emmaus, a small village about seven miles outside of Jerusalem. At first they don’t know it’s him, and the text strongly implies that somehow or other they are being supernaturally prevented from recognizing him. They start sharing with him the bewildering story they'd heard that morning, about an empty tomb and a risen Lord, and he explains to them how it had all been predicted in the Old Testament Scriptures. When they finally reach their destination, and he joins them for dinner, we’re told that they suddenly recognize him “in the breaking of the bread.” The instant it dawns on them who they’ve been talking to, however, he vanishes, leaving them with racing thoughts and burning hearts.

It’s a great story, one of the most famous post-resurrection encounters in the New Testament. One Easter I was researching it for a sermon, however, when, like the disciples recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread, I came across some details that helped me recognize someone in the story I'd never seen before.

 

You see: every illustration of the road to Emmaus I’ve ever seen has always been roughly the same. Two men are seen, walking along an idyllic country road, with a mysterious stranger (usually in white) walking between them. I’ve sprinkled a few samples throughout this post to help you imagine it.

The details may vary somewhat from picture to picture, but, in addition to the presence of the mysterious stranger, there’s one detail they all share in common. The two disciples are always both depicted as being male. I’ve never seen a painting of the Emmaus Road Encounter that bucks this trend: a mysterious Jesus walking along the road with two men.

Now, this post is primarily an exegetical reflection, not an advocacy piece, but let me humbly point out that there is nothing in the text that would require both disciples to be male, and there are, actually, strong exegetical reasons to suspect that one of the two was, in fact, female.

Certainly, one of them is quite clearly male. We’re told he’s named Cleopas, and he seems to be doing most of the talking. The other disciple remains unnamed throughout the encounter, and, though he or she may have spoken at some point, the narrative uses a plural verb, “they said,” to describe it; that is to say, it only describes the second disciple speaking with Cleopas together, so we don't have any specific personal pronouns we can use to determine his or her gender. 

All we know that he or she was traveling with someone named Cleopas, and they apparently lived together; at least, they’re staying at the same house when they arrive at Emmaus.

This details stands out pretty markedly when you go looking elsewhere in the New Testament for evidence of who this Cleopas might have been, and who might have been living with him in Emmaus.

In John 19:25, we’re told that when Jesus was crucified, a woman named Mary, was standing at his cross, along with Jesus’s mother, Jesus’s aunt, and Mary Magdalene. This fourth woman, we’re told, was “Mary the wife of Clopas.”

Could that Mary, the wife of a man named Clopas, be the same disciple in Luke 24:13, walking along the road with a man named Cleopas? 

Before you answer, I should point out that: (a) both names are a variation on the Greek name Cleopater; (b) some ancient manuscripts spell the name in John 19:25 as Cleophas; and (c) at least some Christian traditions hold that they are the same person.

Of course, if the Cleopas that Jesus met on the road to Emmaus really was the same Clopas mentioned in John 19:25, whose wife was standing at the cross when the Lord died, then it doesn’t take much to connect the dots. It’s very likely, and certainly not impossible, that the second disciple on the road to Emmaus was a woman, Clopas’s wife, herself a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.

Even if these exegetical arguments don’t satisfy, it does raise some crucial questions: why do we always assume that the unnamed disciple in the story was male, when there’s nothing in the text itself to justify that assumption?

And what does it say about us and our biases when reading Scripture, our tendency to project onto the text what we assume is there, instead of opening ourselves to see what’s really there?

And what else might we be missing in our reading of the Scripture—who else might we be excluding from the story—because our cultural biases, our complacency with tradition, and/or our spiritual prejudices have blinded us to their presence?

The Thursday Review: David and Little John and the Language of Love

First posted October 11, 2012

A while ago a friend sent me a link to this article at Touchstone Magazine about the language of love and the death of male friendship in our culture.  I find some of the rhetoric a bit unpalatable, especially towards the end, but the overall thrust of his argument scored a touche for me:  our radically sexualized culture has undermined healthy, authentic, and necessary expressions of affection between men, and this has distorted the male experience of friendship.

You can give it a read if you like.  For my part, it reminded me of the final chapter of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood.  If you've never read it, the aged Robin Hood falls ill and visits his cousin, the Prioress of Kirklees, to undergo a blood letting.  Fearing the king's reprisal for having helped an outlaw, she opens an artery deep in Robin Hood's arm, and locks him in an upper room to bleed to death.  When Robin realizes death is upon him, he sounds his bugle horn to summon Little John.  The scene is moving as Little John bursts into the room and, seeing the pallor of death in Robin's face, cradles him tenderly in his arms as he slips away. 

You can give that a read, too, if you like (click here).  I remember weeping real tears over this scene as a boy-- it was the first book I'd ever cried over-- and re-reading it and re-reading it and crying every time.  There was just something so moving in Little John's artless expression of love for his friend on his deathbed.  I didn't know the words pathos or catharsis then, but I'd use them now.

But the point of the Touchstone article, and I think it's a valid one, is that expressions of love like this are old, natural and (above all) platonic; and one of the unfortunate consequences of the modern sexual revolution is that we are losing (or have lost) the non-sexual categories we once had for experiencing and describing them.  If he lived in our world, where love is assumed to include a sexual dimension unless the term is otherwise clarified, Little John would be hard pressed to cradle his dying friend in his loving arms, without raising some questioning eyebrows (or knowing smiles) about his sexual identity.  And a ten-year-old boy would likewise be hard-pressed to shed real tears over the scene.

In case it seems like I'm just blowing smoke here, let me let me point the discussion in a direction where I think there's more at stake than just a good cry over a childhood classic.  In 2 Samuel 1:26, David is mourning the death of his friend Jonathan, and he says "Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women." 

Some interpreters read this line as evidence that the friendship it so poignantly describes was sexual in nature, and that there were homoerotic undertones in Jonathan's covenant with David back in 1 Samuel 20.

Admittedly, this passage raises far more issues than we have space to wrestle with here, but let me at least suggest this: we may lose more than just some old-fashioned sexual mores, if a  biblical man can't tell another man he loves him without brigning his sexual identity into question.  A biblical imagination when it comes to the language of love--and with it the potential for men to express affection and closeness in ways that are affirming of gender and distinctly nonsexual--may actually be on the line here, if David and Jonathan's embrace must be sexual, simply because it was an embrace.

The Girl Queen, the Captive Conqueror: A devotional commentary on Esther (2:11-20)

When I read about all the "beauty treatments" the candidates for Queen Vashti's replacement were subjected to--a six month oil of myrrh treatment followed by a six month perfume and cosmetics treatment--I can't help but think about the way our own culture objectifies and consumes human beings (and in particular, women) like that. Subjecting a helpless girl to a year-long beautification ordeal on the off chance that she might please the tastes of a decadent (seemingly insatiable) Emperor, who is himself the embodiment of a decadent (seemingly insatiable) culture, doesn't seem that different from our own culture's obsession with female beauty and body-image. Think of the "use" of the female body in advertising media; think of the multi-billion-dollar-a-year cosmetics industry (or the thinness industry, or the plastic surgery industry); think of Hollywood's sexist cult of celebrity; think of the increasing pornographication of our culture and the implicit (often explicit) misogyny it expresses. The author of Esther, of course, didn't have any of these things in mind when he or she wrote this story down, but at the very least, not much has changed.

This is why verse 2:15 was particularly haunting for me. When it's Esther's turn to "go in" to King Ahesuerus, she "asked for nothing, except what Hegai the king's eunuch suggested." The idea here is that each contestant in this insidious "contest" was allowed to bring anything she wanted into the King's chamber with her, to increase her chances of gratifying his desire (v.13). And Esther chose to go in "unarmed" (so to speak, more or less). I've mentioned before how the Book of Esther quite clearly has the story of King Saul and King David playing in the background, so when I read that, my mind went immediately to the story of David and Goliath. When David is about to square off against Goliath, he tries on Saul's armour, then specifically chooses to go into battle with nothing other than his sling. He goes up against Goliath, that is, "unarmed" (so to speak, more or less).

Maybe, I'm reading too much into this, but Esther seems to be doing the same thing here, as David did when he faced Goliath. If it's true, it would mean that, for the author of Esther (and for God), King Ahasuerus’ “beauty contest" is as pernicious an evil as Goliath was, back in the day; and that ultimately, God intends to overthrow this evil as unexpectedly and as decisively as he did Goliath.

You can make up your own mind on that one, but for me, it speaks a prophetic word against all the “Ahasuerean” tendencies of our own culture to objectify and dehumanize and consume human beings (and again, women in particular; see above). It sort of hits you like a sling-stone to the forehead: when the powerful objectify the vulnerable, God in his Messiah stands on the side of the objectified, and decisively against the objectifiers.

Miriam Triumphant, a song

Another song from my latest album, "Accidentals."  A song I wrote almost a decade ago about women in ministry and leadership in the life of the church.  I wanted to save it for the International Women's Day, but that's not till March, and I want to celebrate today.  I am grateful to God for the many godly women, past and present, that he has given his church as examples of what it means to be a courageous, Spirit-fulled, fully devoted follower of Jesus.





You are, you are Miriam Triumphant,
Dancing before the congregation
Leading God’s people in a song of victory
The horse and rider fell into the sea

You are, you are Deborah the valiant
Calling God’s people to the battle
Leading his captains in a march of victory
Judging from your sea beneath the tree

Let the daughters of our Father shout Hallelujah!
Let the children of our God say amen
Let the handmaids of the master usher in his kingdom
Let His spirit on our sons and daughters
Pour out in abundance
Let His vision fill the eyes of our women and our men
Let the children of our God say amen

You are, you are Mary in the morning
Seeking the tomb with your spices
Finding him shining in the light of victory
Proclaiming the news for all to see

You are, you are Phoebe the servant
Working with the gospel of salvation
A sister, commended with the light of victory
Sent by God to set the captives

Let the daughters of our Father shout Hallelujah!
Let the children of our God say amen
Let the handmaids of the master usher in his kingdom
Let His spirit on our sons and daughters
Pour out in abundance
Let His vision fill the eyes of our women and our men

Let the children of our God say amen

The Meaning of Marriage Part I: Shalom, Alone-ness and the Image of God

It's always struck me that Genesis 2:18 is the first time in the Bible when God says that something "isn't good." The verse stands out all the more starkly because throughout Chapter 1, God kept saying things  were  good-- the sea and dry land (1:10), the sun, moon and stars (1:18), the sea creatures and birds (1:21), and the beasts of the field (1:25). But here, for the first time, something's explicitly and specifically not good.

And what a thing it is: the 'adam is alone! God forms a human creature, places him in the garden on the mission of imaging God to the world, and in 2:18 we find out that the male 'adam all on his own is not good, not complete, not able to accomplish God's purposes for him.

 A couple of incidentals are worth mentioning here:

1) This explains why the story has God making the female 'adam out of the male 'adam's rib. It's not to suggest that the woman is in any sense inferior or subsequent to the man. It's so we could see the helpless (and according to 2:18 he is, quite literally, help-less) male all alone, and recognize with God how not-good that state of affairs is.

2) We have to read this in light of Gen 1:27, where it says that God made the 'adam in his own image, male and female, he created them. On his own the male 'adam can't image God; it takes male and female together to do that. Rather than being archaically patriarchal, this text actually underscores the man and woman's interdependence in radical ways.  (Which is what Paul seems to be saying in 1 Corinthians 11:11-12.  “Woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman”.)

These two thoughts lead us into the main thrust of this passage.  The solution to this "not-good" situation is for God to give the male a helping hand; and what a helping hand he has in mind!   The Hebrew phrase in 2:18 is etzer chenaged, and a lot of theological ink had been spilled on this one over the years. Literally it means something like "a help that is compatible/fitting/completing and/or equal to him." Often scholars point out that etzer (help) is the word the Bible uses when it wants to talk about how God is Israel's "help." In other words, the woman is not the man's "help" the way Robin is a "helper" to Batman; more in the way a search and rescue team is a "help" to the lost and stranded hiker.

This text speaks past marriage, actually, to the many godly ways in which men and women prove that they are, in fact, “help-less” without each other (though in a patriarchal context like the one into which God first spoke Genesis, underlining this for the male, in particular, was especially important).  But it also speaks, of course, to marriage in particular.  The story ends, after all, with the man leaving his natural ties to his mother and father, and cleaving instead to his wife.  In this we see the ultimate proof that the flip-side of Genesis 2:18 is equally true, it is good for the man to be not alone.

The meaning of marriage that this passage points us to is profoundly counter cultural.  We tend to think of marriage as an arrangement that serves, primarily, the felt-needs and personal interests of the married couple—fulfilment, satisfaction, sexual expression.  If we’re thinking very broadly, we may widen this to include the well-being of their children, but culturally, it usually stops there.  Without getting too political, let me suggest that our modern flexibility when it comes to marriage is evidence of this.

But biblically—at least the way I’m reading Genesis 1-2 here—the way marriage serves individuals is a secondary benefit to the real meaning of marriage.  As a divine institution, marriage serves the Creator’s shalom-oriented purposes for the Creation, by reminding the whole human community of the profound, necessary, mysterious and inescapable interdependence of the sexes—that men and women are indeed helpless without each other.  This serves the Creation, in particular, because according to Genesis 1:26 humans rightly “Imaging God” is necessary for the Creation to thrive and flourish the way God intends it to, and according to Genesis 1:27, man or woman alone cannot Image God.  We can only do this together.

David and Little John and the Language of Love

A while ago a friend sent me a link to this article at Touchstone Magazine about the language of love and the death of male friendship in our culture.  I find some of the rhetoric a bit unpalatable, especially towards the end, but the overall thrust of his argument scored a touche for me:  our radically sexualized culture has undermined healthy, authentic, and necessary expressions of affection between men, and this has distorted the male experience of friendship.

You can give it a read if you like.  For my part, it reminded me of the final chapter of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood.  If you've never read it, the aged Robin Hood falls ill and visits his cousin, the Prioress of Kirklees, to undergo a blood letting.  Fearing the king's reprisal for having helped an outlaw, she opens an artery deep in Robin Hood's arm, and locks him in an upper room to bleed to death.  When Robin realizes death is upon him, he sounds his bugle horn to summon Little John.  The scene is moving as Little John bursts into the room and, seeing the pallor of death in Robin's face, cradles him tenderly in his arms as he slips away. 

You can give that a read, too, if you like (click here).  I remember weeping real tears over this scene as a boy-- it was the first book I'd ever cried over-- and re-reading it and re-reading it and crying every time.  There was just something so moving in Little John's artless expression of love for his friend on his deathbed.  I didn't know the words pathos or catharsis then, but I'd use them now.

But the point of the Touchstone article, and I think it's a valid one, is that expressions of love like this are old, natural and (above all) platonic; and one of the unfortunate consequences of the modern sexual revolution is that we are losing (or have lost) the non-sexual categories we once had for experiencing and describing them.  If he lived in our world, where love is assumed to include a sexual dimension unless the term is otherwise clarified, Little John would be hard pressed to cradle his dying friend in his loving arms, without raising some questioning eyebrows (or knowing smiles) about his sexual identity.  And a ten-year-old boy would likewise be hard-pressed to shed real tears over the scene.

In case it seems like I'm just blowing smoke here, let me let me point the discussion in a direction where I think there's more at stake than just a good cry over a childhood classic.  In 2 Samuel 1:26, David is mourning the death of his friend Jonathan, and he says "Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women." 

Some interpreters read this line as evidence that the friendship it so poignantly describes was sexual in nature, and that there were homoerotic undertones in Jonathan's covenant with David back in 1 Samuel 20.

Admittedly, this passage raises far more issues than we have space to wrestle with here (Wikipedia summarizes the debate), but let me at least suggest this: we may lose more than just some old-fashioned sexual mores, if a  biblical man can't tell another man he loves him without brigning his sexual identity into question.  A biblical imagination when it comes to the language of love--and with it the potential for men to express affection and closeness in ways that are affirming of gender and distinctly nonsexual--may actually be on the line here, if David and Jonathan's embrace must be sexual, simply because it was an embrace.

Musical Mondays (V)

I heard an old proverb once that says, "Uninitiated boys will burn down the village to feel the heat."  This is a song about what it means to become and to be a Christian man.




Burning Down the Village

Hey Bro I can see you way back there when we were kids
before we knew we’d be men
And though I needed to tell you I needed you
My words escaped me again
like lost dogs or broken castles
Stolen songs I don’t need any more
If I had known that iron was so fragile
I would have told you before:

You’re a king, you’re a lover you’re magic you’re a warrior
The heart can only grow wise when it breaks
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes

And Bro I can see you you’re right there in front of me
While we make up our names
I know I’ll never be the man I want you to see
But I got lost in the game
Like unsung songs or unspoken secrets
Hollow masks I don’t need any more
If I had known that iron was so fragile
I would have told you before

You’re a king, you’re a lover you’re magic you’re a warrior
The heart can only grow wise when it breaks
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes

And son, I can see you way up there ahead of me,
not many years from now
'Cause once you start on the road to the high country
I know you’ll find it somehow
like innocence, you find it by losing it
Prairie skies like distant shores
If I had known that iron was so fragile
I would have told you before

You’re a king, you’re a lover you’re magic you’re a warrior
The heart can only grow wise when it breaks
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes
You’re a priest you’re a poet a prophet and you know it
the cure is throbbing there beneath the ache
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes

Sisters in Christ

I feel like I'm always the last to find out about these things, but today they announced on the radio that it's International Women's Day-- a day set aside to recognize and celebrate "the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future."

Of course, you sometimes hear the claim that the Christian Faith is one of the main reasons we need things like an "International Women's Day" to rectify years of marginalization in the first place; but my experience and general impression is that people who make this claim have actually given Christianity at best a cursive and cliched reading. Not everything the Church has always said and done when it comes to gender equality has always been above reproach, to be sure, but it's not for nothing that the (highly macho) ancient world dismissed early Christianity derisively as a religion of "women and slaves."

Be that as it may, for my part on this International Women's Day and all, I began compiling a list of sisters in Christ through whom God has left a significant Kingdom-mark on the world, women whose contributions theological, pastoral, literary or missiological have spiritually enriched the heavenly coffers of the people of God, so to speak. This list morphed into the short quiz below.

Each of the following quotes are by (or in the case of those marked with an asterisk, about) a well-known woman of the Faith, past or present. How many of these Sisters in Christ can you identify correctly?

Who said (or in the case of 5 and 6, about whom was it said):

1. ...the soul is now wounded with love for its Spouse and strives for more opportunities to be alone and, in conformity with this state, to rid itself of everything that can be an obstacle to this solitude.

2. Oh, what a happy child I am, although I cannot see! I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be!

3. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

4. I am not a man nor a minister, yet as a mother and a mistress I felt I ought to do more than I had yet done. I resolved to begin with my own children; in which I observe the following method: I take such a proportion of time as I can spare every night to discourse with each child apart. On Monday I talk with Molly, on Tuesday with Hetty, Wednesday with Nancy, Thursday with Jacky, Friday with Patty, Saturday with Charles.

5. O how great is the devotion of this woman that she should be counted worthy of the appellation of apostle. *

6. For thy hands, O my God, in the hidden design of thy providence did not desert my soul; and out of the blood of my mother's heart, through the tears that she poured out by day and by night, there was a sacrifice offered to thee for me, and by marvelous ways thou didst deal with me. *

7. A great benefit of Sabbath keeping is that we learn to let God take care of us — not by becoming passive and lazy, but in the freedom of giving up our feeble attempts to be God in our own lives.

8. The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

9. So I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.

10. People say to me. ‘What about the rich?’ They need Jesus too.’ Well, that’s fine if you’re called to them, but we’re called to the poor. The rich can look after themselves.

The G-3 Summit

Terra Incognita went a bit more literal than usual last week in its quest for unknonwn lands, when my father took me and my son on a week-long canoe trip into the back-woods of Algonquin park. We called it, at one point, the G-3 summit (G for "Generations").

Now, tourism Ontario isn't paying me to say this or anything, but for the record let me just put it out there that there's some absolutely amazing country up that way. Once or twice I almost felt guilty camping there, it was so peaceful and lonely and beautiful. I kept expecting someone to come along and say: "Hey, you can't sleep here-- this is a private resort." But no one did; and we enjoyed some really great camping, back-packing, canoeing, swiming, rock-climbing, cliff-jumping, fishing, portaging, and just general bonding.

One of my friends talks about the "3 T's" that sons need from their fathers (touch, talk, and time). There's something to that, I think. At least there was that one night, after too much camp-fire coffee on my part, and too much frog-hunting on his, that neither my son nor I could sleep, so we took our mats and sleeping bags out under the stars and just lay there in the light of the full moon for about three hours, talking about life, and relationships and corny movies until we drifted off. And then there was that day when our camp sites were three portages apart and when we finally got there we still needed firewood, so my Dad and I spent the next couple of hours bucking up an old dead tree he dragged out of the woods until I could barely lift my arms anymore. And I'm left wondering if, instead of the G-3 summit, we might have called it the T-3 summit.

Anyways, still mulling this all over, I thought I'd post a few pictures from the trip here:

learning how to get back in again

learning how to evacuate a canoe

one of the other loons on the lake
the start of the long walk
fishing

An Hysterical Etymology

"Hysteria" comes only a few entries after "hysterectomy" in my dictionary. No mere linguistic coincidence, this. Both words have the same root: from the Greek, hystera, the womb.

Apparently the word "hysterical" comes from the not-too-old fashioned assumption that the womb was a source of weakness, inconstancy and instability in women. Having a womb, it was supposed, made one naturally prone to hysteria; such irrational outbursts and emotional breakdowns were just the inevitable result of the woman's hystera.

Now I've been present at the birth of all three of my children. And I can say with some conviction that, far from being a source of hysteria, the hystera is a source of mysterious strength and emotional endurance. In those three hospital rooms, I watched a woman centred and strong and determined push life out into this world.

No one was hysterical.

But one of the things we're convinced of here at terra incognita is that words always matter. They reflect our realities, but they also shape them. They show us how we see the world, but they also determine how we see the world. And this small word, this "hysteria"-- this flotsam of an androcentric patriarchy-- is no exception. There really was a time in our not-so-distant past when having a womb was considered a liability. An inferiority, really. Made you crazy, if you must know.

I've been sharing some random thoughts on gender and the Faith these days (here, here and here). My deep hope is that as we come to Jesus again and again asking him these kinds of questions, he will faithfully help us see what it really means to be made male and female in the image of God. He'll help us see what it really means to relate as biblical men and women.

But as he does, he will inevitably ask us to name and confess and repent of the barriers to seeing we've erected in our pride, our traditions, our guilt, our suspicion of the other. The kind of exclusive language game that a word like "hysteria" represents, is, I'm convinced, one of those barriers.

May Jesus give his sibling-disciples the courage to see such language games for what they are. And may he give us the courage to repent of the ways our words have driven us apart as men and women, instead of binding us together as the children of God.

Mary, Martha and the Good Share

Last night before we went to bed, my wife told me about this news article. It describes the recent "family law" that Afghanistan's president has reportedly approved for the Shia minority in his country. Apparently the law will, among other things, make it illegal for Shia women to refuse to have sex with their husbands, have custody of their children, or leave the house without permission. Canadians have expressed astonishment and outrage at the possibility that all our risk and expense and sacrifice in Afghanistan might unwittingly result in this kind of government-sanctioned women's-rights abuse.

Canadians are asking "was this what we were fighting for?"

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon is seeking clarification from Afghan cabinet minsters.

And I'm thinking of Mary and Martha.

Do you have a flannel-graph vision of this story haunting your childhood, too? Jesus visits two sisters. As the practical-minded Martha makes busy in the kitchen, preparing the meal, the spiritually-minded Mary sits at the Lord's feet, hearing his word. Finally fed up with doing the housework alone, Martha asks Jesus to tell Mary to give her a hand. But he gently affirms Mary's choice: she has chosen "that good part which shall not be taken away from her."

If you're like me, you grew up with the impression that the point here was to contrast Martha's hustle and bustle with Mary's serene contemplation. "We need to learn to have a contemplative, Mary-spirit in a bustling, Martha-world."

Not long ago I read an article by N. T. Wright that sheds some pretty piercing light on what the "better share" that Mary chose might really have been. Wright points out that the obvious and scandalous thing here for a first-century reader (and, perhaps, a reader in places like Afghanistan today), is that rather than keeping to the back rooms with the other women, Mary is sitting at the Rabbi's feet in the male part of the house. He suggests that this is the source of Martha's indignation. Mary has cut clean across one of the most basic social conventions. To help you feel the scandal of what Mary has done, Wright asks you to imagine you'd invited him to stay the weekend at your house and, as it got around bedtime, he went and set up a camp-bed in your bedroom. In Mary's culture, there are certain places a woman just did not go. And sitting at the feet of a rabbi--the place where you trained to be a rabbi yourself-- was emphatically one of those places.

Martha isn't just asking for Mary to lend a helping hand. Mary has quite brazenly flouted a socially-coded gender role, by seeking a place as a rabbi-in-training under the Master. Martha is asking Jesus to put Mary back in the place where, as a woman, culture says she "belongs."

She's asking Jesus to ratify her society's gender code. And this is exactly what Jesus will not do: Mary has chosen the "good share" of the work, and it won't be taken from her.

Wow.

In calling Mary's choice "the good share," Jesus has spoken good news for the men and women of Afghanistan. And for the men and women of Canada, too. Because Jesus refuses to rubber-stamp a gender code that functions simply to keep women "in their place." Instead he invites them to find their place, discovering what it really means to be a "biblical" woman, sitting together with biblical men, in training at his gracious feet.

John Milton and the Happier Eve

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of John Milton's birth (December 6, 2008), I had planned reread Paradise Lost. I'm only just getting around to it, but I figure it's been 400 years already, so what's a few extra months?

This is actually my fourth time reading through this masterpiece of English poetry, so I'm surprised I hadn't really noticed it before. Maybe I did, but it never hit me the way it did this time: John Milton holds that Eve must have been happier in paradise than Adam. And why? Because (his Eve argues), she has the far superior Adam to enjoy, while Adam has no comparable "Adam" of his own.

In her opening speech to Adam, she says (Book IV, 444-447):

We to [God] indeed all praises owe,
And daily thanks, I chiefly, who enjoy
So far the happier lot, enjoying thee
Preeminent by so much odds, while thou [Adam]
Like consort to thyself canst nowhere find.

Unbelievable.

And, really, heart-wrenching.

Because he's done here what the Genesis story refuses to do. Milton's Adam can find no "like consort" for himself, even in Eve, though Genesis insists that the woman is precisely that: the man's "like consort" (which may be as good a translation of the Hebrew for "help meet" as any I've heard). Milton's "superior" Adam is ultimately alone, even in the company of Eve, though Genesis insists that the loneliness of superiority was the not good problem that the male-female relation had solved. Milton was a first rate poet, but, I think, a third rate theologian.

Of course, no one reads Milton anymore, but this idea-- that the primary role of the woman is to compliment the man-- is a tree with deep roots, and it still tempts the church now and then with its bitter fruit. I've talked to men, and women, who still have its juice on their lips.

But besides celebrating Milton's 400th birthday, I've been thinking a lot lately about gender identity and the Bible. Previously I suggested that the first point in any theology of gender must be the divine address and the human response that includes our selves as man or woman. After meeting Milton's lonely, superior Adam and his sad, happier Eve, I want to add a second. Theologically, I think, our gender is also defined by our open embrace of the otherness of corresponding gender.

Unlike Milton's adam then, a biblical man will embrace the otherness of the eve as full "flesh of his flesh," the like consort whose otherness truly solves the problem of his aloneness, without appealing to that otherness as a claim to lonely superiority. And unlike Milton's Eve, a biblical woman will likewise embrace the otherness of the adam, without appealing to that otherness as a claim to blissful inferiority.

Perhaps in such an embrace, men and women will discover the equality, mutuality and interdependence that Christ, the Living Word of God, holds out to his lonely, confused brothers and sisters in the Genesis story.

The Manliest Men of American Letters

I've been doing a lot of thinking these days about gender identity and the Bible. It seems to me that our culture has a pretty confused sense of what it means for men and women to be men and women, and my gut tells me that the Bible speaks to this in some way. At the same time, most of the efforts I've seen to use the Bible to define gender seem pretty content to wrench ideas out of their historical, literary and cultural context, and just use them arbitrarily to prop up unquestioned stereotypes about masculinity and femininity. Like the time I read in a magazine with a special family focus that the man must be the one to provide for his family, because of 1 Tim 5:8. Or the time I read in the literature of an Evangelical denomination that a woman's role is to provide hospitality in the home because of Heb 13:2.

Thinking about this, I got wondering: who would I include on a list of truly manly men? (And then, since the first two that jumped to mind were from American Lit, I decided to narrow the search down to that specific field.) Anyways, I present to you my list of the Top 5 Manly Men from American Literature.

1. Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird)-- for courageous commitment to justice. True courage, says Atticus, is knowing you're licked before you start, but you still start anyway. And, of course, he demonstrates this courage, and genuine manliness along with it, in the Tom Robinson case. I wept when Rev. Sykes wakes Scout so she can stand with all the rest of the gallery as Atticus leaves the courthouse after the guilty verdict.

2. Charles Ingalls (Little House on the Prairie)-- for indefatigable resourcefulness. I didn't discover the Little House series until I was a grown man reading to my children. But I'll tell you-- it seems like there was just nothing this man couldn't do. With his bare hands. No power tools. Even his determination must have had callouses on it.

3. Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)-- for the exuberant embracing of life. I got a battered copy of Leaves of Grass at a used book store in Massachusetts ages ago. Every now and then I sit down and read as much of it as I can handle, and I always go away with my heart beating a little bolder. "To be a sailor of the world, bound for all ports!"-- the heart cry of a genuine man who is intensely, sensually, madly in love with life.
4. Santiago (Old Man and the Sea)-- for self-sacrifice to a higher cause. My spirit kind of skipped a beat at the end when Santiago staggers up the hill with his mast across his shoulders (falling five times) and collapses in his shack after his long, lost struggle against the sea (arms straight out with the palms of his hands up). And of course, he wakes renewed, soon to face the sea again.

5. Slim (Of Mice and Men)-- for strength in serenity. There's still the moral ambiguity of his "sometimes a guy gotta" line after George killed Lennie, but anyone who can be described as having hands like a "dancing shiva" and still have such authority that not even Curly would tangle with him, counts as a man in my books.

Well, there's my list, for what it's worth.

But here's the thing: as a list describing what makes a man uniquely a man, I don't think it's worth all that much. Sure, any man who could live his life with a courageous commitment to justice, indefatigable resourcefulness, exuberant embracing of life, self-sacrifice to a higher cause and strength in serenity would be a man indeed-- but none of these characteristics are essential and exclusive to men (i.e. things that are only true of men, and without which a man would not be a man).

And "exclusive and essential" is the key when we come to the Bible asking it to define gender, too. There are lots of admirable men in there with admirable characters doing admirable things, but few if any of these traits are essential and exclusive to masculinity.

Where does this leave us? I'm not sure, but I think that rather than starting with culture-coded stereotypes, any theology of gender must take as its starting place the human response to the divine address. A biblical man, then, is a man who hears God address him in Christ, affirming him as a man--and who responds as a man-- "here I am." And a biblical woman, then, is a woman who hears God address her in Christ, affirming her as a woman -- and who responds as a woman-- "here I am."