Jesus Christ, Jesus Christa: Freeing salvation from gender

[The Great Open Dance]

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christa: Freeing salvation from gender

No concept of Christ can cage the person of Jesus.

Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, sculpted Christa “to portray the suffering of women.” Christa was a statue of Christ crucified, but as a woman, femininity hanging naked on the cross.

Christa’s initial revelation, in 1984 at St. John the Divine in New York City, produced a theological storm. Those offended insisted that Jesus was a man and should stay a man and that involving Christ in gender play harmed the faith. Episcopalian Bishop Walter Dennis accused the cathedral dean, the Very Rev. James Park Morton, of “desecrating our symbols” and insisted that the display was “theologically and historically indefensible.” Apparently, we are saved not just by the Messiah, but by a male Messiah specifically. Hence, to toy with the masculinity of Christ was to toy with salvation, a dangerous and unnecessary game.

But other followers of Jesus found the statue stimulating, even liberating. Did Jesus have to be a man? Or could a woman have gotten the job done? Or a nonbinary person? For some, Jesus’s male gender was necessary for salvation. For others, it was an accidental quality of the Christ, assigned at random. Or maybe it was a concession God made to our sexism; the Christ could have been a woman, but we just wouldn’t have listened to a woman back then. Would we listen to a woman now?

Certainly, the debates revealed much about the debaters. Some seemed to worship maleness as much as Christ, some saw themselves in the beaten woman, some seemed hungry for a female savior, and some wondered if nonbinary persons would ever be seen, if a still-binary Christa was causing this much of an uproar. Everyone saw Christa as unsettling. Either she was blasphemous, unsettling the ordained order; or she was empowering, unsettling an oppressive patriarchy. The difference lay in whether the viewer sought to be unsettled or not, whether they wanted to preserve the inherited or create the new.

“Who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus (Matt 16:15). Over two millennia, his followers have given many different answers to this question. The church has called councils to dispute Jesus’s identity, issued statements of faith providing definitive answers, and enforced those answers in sometimes brutal fashion. Yet Jesus always outwits our definition of him, like a trickster slipping his chains.

Although at times the Christian tradition has interpreted Jesus as a wrathful judge or tribal warlord, Jesus himself interprets his message as good news for all (Mark 13:10), rebuking his disciples: “You do not know what spirit you are of, for I have not come to destroy people’s lives but to save them” (Luke 9:56). According to Jesus, his appearance is an opportunity for divine joy to enter human hearts, that we might have abundant life (John 10:10; 15:11). For this reason, when he approaches the disciples Jesus assures them, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid” (Matthew 14:27 NRSV).

Accepting the appearance of Jesus as good news for all, in this chapter we will provide a life-giving interpretation of Jesus that accords with his own.

Jesus is the earthly expression of the heavenly Christ.

We have argued previously that creation is continuously sustained by the Trinity, three persons united through love into one God. Those three persons prefer cooperation to mere operation, so they divide their responsibilities between them, assigning priority even as they share responsibility. Of the three, one Sustains, one Participates, and one Celebrates. Jesus is the Participant, the one charged with coming to us concretely, in our time and our space. Hence, Jesus is the Christ.

To argue that Jesus expresses a divine person coheres with our Trinitarian position, which honors both relationality and particularity, both interpersonal love and the concrete world within which it acts. Jesus is a particular expression of a particular person of the Trinity, designated to relate directly to humankind. As such, he is Emmanuel, “God with us,” both fully human and fully divine.

This sentiment appears in the earliest biblical writings. Paul argues for the preexistence of Jesus as the Christ and the participation of Christ in creation:

Christ is the image of the unseen God and the firstborn of all creation, for in Christ were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, sovereignties, powers—all things were created through Christ and for Christ. Before anything was created, Christ existed, and all things hold together in Christ. (Colossians 1:15–17)

In Paul’s understanding, Jesus of Nazareth is the Cosmic Christ, present at creation, grounding creation in communion, and then expressing that communion within creation. The cosmos itself groans for consummation, as do we (Romans 8:22–23), and Jesus is the image of this fulfillment. He is not just a wise teacher or inspired prophet; he is the human manifestation of Abba’s purpose for the universe.

Jesus’s resonance with the cosmos is so profound that, when the authorities insist his disciples quiet down, Jesus replies, “I tell you, if they were to keep silent, the very stones would cry out!” (Luke 19:40). Stones can sing because the appearance of Christ in the cosmos “christifies” all reality, revealing the interior illumination with which it has always been charged. As participants in the Christ event, we are now invited to see God shining through this diaphanous universe, to see the divine beauty within everything and everyone. (Adapted from The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology by Jon Paul Sydnor, pages 120-122)

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For further reading, please see:

Frank, Priscilla. “30 Years Later, a Sculpture of Jesus as a Nude Woman Finally Gets Its Due.” Huffington Post, Oct. 6, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christa-edwina-sandys-art

Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. London: Convergent, 2019.

Vasko, Elisabeth. “Redeeming Beauty? Christa and the Displacement of Women’s Bodies in Theological Aesthetic Discourses.” Feminist Theology 21 (2013) 195–208. DOI: 10.1177/0966735012464151.