It may not make sense to you, that I am not sure I believe in god – the capital G-o-d, but I do very much believe in Jesus. I spend a lot of time, in all seriousness, asking some form of “what would Jesus do?” and I take the answers I get to heart.
Growing up Irish-Catholic, albeit in a strange, lapsed and half-assed way, I was familiar with the idea that women inherently can’t measure up. “If you wanna be like Jesus you gotta pee like Jesus” is the strangely articulate way of summing up why women can be Sisters, but never priests. Why women are incomplete vessels, too weak to embody the Word. Anyone who grows up around nuns and female religious can tell you that there is nothing weak about the work they do. Those women are fearless and tireless. My great-aunt is a nun, a Maryknoll sister, and she has stories about war, famine, crocodiles and the bravery of her Sisters (and only indirectly, herself) in these conditions that would make a combat vet give mad respect. Many of these stories occurred after she reached the usual age of retirement, by the way.
When I was an undergrad in a Jesuit University, a political science professor I clashed with on values and political opinions passed me between classes. He patted me on the shoulder and said, in front of a hallway full of students, that he was on his way to Mass and would “pray for me”. I was startled, but I did manage to shout out to his retreating back “pray for yourself, Jesus holds me in the palm of His hand, and we’re all good.”
In law school at the same Jesuit institution, my Torts professor was rabidly devoted to the Catholic tenets regarding birth control, homosexuality and especially abortion. He struck me as a bit presumptuous, as I heard he’d converted to Catholicism ten years prior, and here he was now, out-Catholic-ing those of us who’d put in our time since childhood. He and I went head to head over the pro-choice law caucus I started and the fact that the LGBT student caucus could not, by school decree, use the words “gay”, “lesbian”, “bisexual” or “transgender” in their name. (The pro-choice law caucus could not use the word “choice”, either.)
You might wonder why a girl like me would set foot in an institution like that, but this is not the Catholicism I grew up rebelling against and admiring simultaneously.
Another prof, a Jesuit – you know, the real deal – described to us the Jesus I know. In a Theology course, of all things. He discussed the Magnificat – the speech that Mary makes to Elizabeth right after the angel Gabriel appears and tells her that she will be conceiving and giving birth to the Son of God. It’s not a speech that a submissive woman would make. It is about how things around this Roman outpost are going to change when her son is born. Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist, so this little conversation takes place between the mothers of two revolutionaries. God is going to do some housekeeping through her Son, she says:
He has showed might in his arm: he has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he has sent empty away.
This last part, the professor/Father said, is extremely important to understand clearly. Jesus did not come to regulate whether one washes one’s hands properly, or whether personal habits are clean or unclean. He did not come to arbitrate the squabbles of priests in the temple over rules and regulations. He came with the express mission of ending the injustice of the rich and powerful over the poor and powerless. In short, this priest said, “Jesus is a communist.” “Note” he said, all twinkly, “that The Blessed Mother did not say ‘and the rich got lots of yummy treats, too’ she said they went hungry.”
God wanted his only begotten to remind his chosen people that while they were quarreling over what constitutes holiness, their race lived and died in slavery all around them.
This part of the message has always resonated with me. And the women of the New Testament have also always resonated in harmony with my little rebel heart. Even as a child, I could see that Mary (and Esther, and the Magdalene, and Elizabeth) were terrifying in their ability to persevere, and do the work of being good.
There is a reason that evangelicals and fundamentalists of all stripes work their asses off to minimize these women and their fierceness. You can’t actually be raised to revere New Testament women and think of women generally as weak, or their role as submission.
But back to me, and Jesus. Like any son raised by a rebel mother, he hung with a bad crowd. When people say “prostitutes, lepers and tax collectors” they are oversimplifying. Jesus championed ‘fallen women’ of all kinds – adulteresses specifically. Remember the stoning story? Though Magdalene was probably not an actual prostitute, she was not behaving like a good little woman, either. And if you read the Gospel of the Magdalene, you will see that she was an apostle in her own right. (That Gospel is not canon, as the geeks say. So you will have to go looking for it.) As for the lepers, Jesus did not see their suffering as warranted by some past sin, unlike everyone else. He saw disease and suffering as separate from sin. He would see AIDS the same way, regardless of what your local hatemonger preaches.
As for tax collectors, believe it or not, they were the most low of company. And the highest proof that Jesus was not about regulating personal morality, he was about compassion. See, a tax collector was not just a person considered odious because they took money and no one digs that. A tax collector was a race traitor – someone who aided the Romans in the genocide of their own people. In Irish terms, The apostle Matthew would be your neighbor who took a salary to remove your crops and livestock at gunpoint from the fields for export to Britain, leaving your family to starve.
Jesus said exactly nothing about homosexuality, and exactly nothing about abortion. Let’s be perfectly clear. And, as a young man living in Roman-occupied territory, these practices would not be unknown to him. Abortifacients were various and commonly used. Common wisdom and practice in the cultures of Jesus’ locality denied the incarnation of a human soul until either birth, or ‘quickening’, the time during pregnancy where the child can be felt to move. This translates roughly to about halfway through a pregnancy to the moments after birth. I learned this from another theology professor at a state University, a devout Jew.
Certainly, I don’t need to point out that homosexual practices were a Roman speciality. Yet Jesus? Totally silent about these two issues while he was walking the earth. And we are currently led to believe that these are the two issues of the day. Of the year. Of the election cycle. Of all freaking time.
Well, my expensive and intensive religious education, and my reading of the New Testament tell me that Jesus didn’t care. It’s really that simple. He did not care who had sex with whom so long as no vows were broken, or whether women used their own means to choose when to have children. If he did, he would have said something. He was vocal that he felt that regulation of personal ‘cleanliness’ and ‘worthiness’ (including a focus on the sexual practices of others) had distracted his people from the real evil – the one he actually names. Money.
Jesus says nothing about gay sex or abortion, or even sex prior to marriage, but he said and did a lot about the problem of greed. He loses his self-control only toward the money-changers in the temple. He urges his followers to give up materialism, he condemns the rich specifically (camels, eyes of needles…) as unlikely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He is dismissive about the paying of taxes (render unto Caesar…) because he wants his followers to place no particular value on money and does not care if Rome continues to profit. From his vantage, it is the rich who will be judged in the end.
But don’t take my word for it, go read it. Take special care with the Sermon On The Mount, where Catholic doctrine tells followers the heart of Christian Law is revealed. What is mentioned there, in what I think of as Jesus’ mission statement?
Love. Humility. Lack of Judgment. Rejection of materialism. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, give your money to people who need it. Stop planning your retirement, just do good and expect good in return. I’m not messing, it’s all there.
What is condemned? Hypocrisy. Showy piety. Wealth. Judgment. Prejudice. Violence. Dishonesty. Xenophobia.
So, I guess what I would like from all the men preaching that my life and beliefs are immoral is for them to keep their eyes on their own paper. Do their own work. Clean their own houses. Stop legislating what can’t be legislated – my own, personal ethics and morals. Which I like to believe, are Jesus-approved.
I check in with the Jesus regularly, if not religiously. I assure you. Me & Jesus, we’re all good.
Not that it’s any of your business.
redzorah 