As if she were a man

Life is strange. By ‘life’ I don’t mean the everyday round of work school eat sleep tv doomscroll or whatever you do to keep existential panic at bay. Nor do I  mean the total of experiences you will have in your three score years and ten. They are no doubt strange, for some of us we’d need the whole entry in the thesaurus to describe our years: odd, curious, peculiar, funny, bizarre, weird, uncanny, queer. The life I mean is ‘as seen on TV’: Life on Earth nature documentary life. It’s all fine and dandy and cosy to cocoa down with David Attenborough and marvel at the beautiful plumage and great endurance of migrating flocks, and yes he did a series on parenthood, but by and large the centenarian national treasure has, unlike the teeming broiling multitude, avoided a lot of detail about the necessary prelude to progeny.  There’s a whole world out there that even the Attenboroughs dare not go, but I do. Slightly. 

All, naturally, keeping with a venerable Church tradition. For example, The Letter of Barnabas— a second century Christian writing that almost made it into the Bible— makes some pretty unusual claims about animal reproduction. It’s certainly inventive about hare and weasel conception. Weird reading for morning prayer perhaps, but you don’t have to go far in nature to find some species, somewhere, reproducing in precisely the way Aristotle (which is where the ideas come from) thought weasels did. Somewhere in nature, some species is, well, up to something really bizarre. Right now. Quite possibly under your pew.

There are species where individuals change sex depending on what’s going on in the neighbourhood. There are whole species that are one sex- female, nature’s not stupid- and all births are virgin births. There are many species where each individual is both male and female. Lots of them in your garden. There are species with three genders. Our closest cousins, Chimpanzees are quite conservative in their relationships, if by conservative you mean those US Televangelists who regularly crop up in the weekly crime reports. Our other closest cousins- the bonobos, well. And don’t even think about hyenas. Or bed bugs. Nature is nothing, if not inventive.

You might want to question why I’m bringing this up, on a Sunday, in church, with delicate minds present, and my answer is… Genesis, Chapter 1. 

In the beginning… God created the heavens and the earth…and every living creature that moves, of every kind…and saw that it was good. 

If the six-day bit doesn’t quite convince, nevertheless the implications are clear: God made it, it’s good and if you want to see God’s intentions look at nature; any creature in its natural state is doing just what God wanted it to do. There are some unfortunates sides to this thinking of course, like anything that kills other creatures and eats them or organisms you can’t even see that will happily kill and eat you. And if the book of nature is the First Bible, the biggest problem is, as usual, human beings.

Because, we don’t know what humans in their natural state behave like, we just don’t; all we have is fossils and archaeology, which might occasionally tell you what anatomy our ancestors had, but not what they did with it. The closest we get to homo sapiens au naturelle is some of the preindustrial or uncontacted tribes that dot some parts of the world- the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, Canvey Island etc. There’s no way of knowing if what they are like now is what they were like 10,000 years ago, but they are no doubt closer to the original than we are. And, what do you know? Any way you can imagine to order the sexes, is there; men in charge, women in charge, multiple wives, multiple husbands, nuclear families, extended families, children raised by the parents, children raised by the village. Monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, promiscuity but almost never celibacy; old love, new love, every one a true love,  love for sale, free love, you name it somewhere one of our relatives has been doing it.

If that’s human nature, then let’s be blunt here, it’s about as far away as you can get from what most of understand as the correct godly  way to run the show. If we agree with it or not or live it or not we agree that the religious view is something along the lines of one man and one woman for life with the man going out to kill mammoths and the woman does the laundry; man in charge, woman obedient to man. God made humans male and female and gave them different roles, the men delving, the women spinning. This is not a view taken from observing humanity in its natural state, unless you’ve just looked at humans in the west in the last 500 years, those who’d let you look anyway. It’s not a view taken from the book of nature, but rather from the Book of Books, or more to the point, a selection of verses from the Bible, some from here, some from there. All glued together with a heavy gloop of cultural norms, because every time we open a Bible and read it and try to construct an argument from it we invite our assumptions, biases and cultural norms to join in the, erm,  party. For all the variety of humanity (as above), in all times and all places sex and gender are fundamental to the way humans organise societies and culture and our relations with each other; and the way we think about ourselves, and that’s just not something we can leave in a bag by the door when we’re looking to unfold the scriptures.

More Genesis:

God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

In the incarnation God inhabits the human world, a world where sex and gender are fundamental to the way we organise societies and culture and our relations with each other. And so Jesus, fully God and fully man, was anatomically male and presented as male in the particular time and place he came. God chose to inhabit this particular time and place and culture. Do we take this to mean then, when God incarnate conformed to cultural norms,  that God approves?

Let’s just skip back to Genesis:

God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them

Christians have never been able to completely agree on what being made in the image of God means; it may mean many things, not least one of which is our ability to create our own worlds: society, culture, the way we run the human world. Which might be the way God wants it to be. And it might not.

That sometimes it might not, we can see from today’s gospel reading, Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. So many of Jesus transgressions of gender norms go unremarked in the Bible— the abundance of women among his disciples, women not just following, but doing, moving and shaking; the witness of women to the resurrection,  sisters running early churches. Usually glossed over or ignored because there’s something else going on, something the gospel writer thought was more important. There is lots going on in this tale to distract. But John doesn’t ignore the woman: the disciples make it abundantly clear that Jesus is riding a cart and horse over cultural gender expectations. 

’They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman’

It doesn’t seem much to us- a man talking with a woman- but it was to the disciples: they wouldn’t have been astonished at what Jesus was doing had it not been both unexpected and off limits. But there he was anyway, talking with a woman. And— it gets worse— not just any woman, but one who was shunned by her own village— she was at the well on her own after all— an outcast  because of her string of ‘husbands’. And here is Jesus chatting with her as if she were… a man.

To return to the question I asked earlier. When God chose to take on the trappings of a particular time and place and culture, do we take this to mean then, that he approves? I don’t think we can. Jesus wasn’t gender blind: he would have been wholly aware of cultural norms and expectations. But those are things of man, not of God. ‘In Christ there is no male or female.’ The immortal soul has no gender.

Jesus changes the world from the inside out rather than the top down; he doesn’t thunder from the mountain top but teaches by coming alongside. In a world where gender norms are the norm then he will conform to expectations, while in the very act of changing them. 

God gave humanity free will. Which means that sometimes we might not do what he wanted us to do. Sometimes we’ll do what we want to do, which pretty much always ends in tears. But we were given free will. So God doesn’t impose; God asks, persuades; as Jesus, as a human, by example. Jesus doesn’t thunder from the mountain top but teaches by coming alongside.

There is remarkably little instruction with relation to gender behaviour and roles in the Scriptures. What there is is far from consistent: it always comes from the human culture in which it was written: it changes over time and context and never more so than when Jesus is involved. Gender and sex roles, norms, expectations, differences, are important to us. I’m really not sure they matter to God.

Jesus was a man, because he was born into a particular time, place and culture, a particular world. His conformity with the expectations of that world was not approval.  He set about changing that world. Every aspect of it. Forever.