Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
—Collect for The Holy Name, Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 213
When the eighth day came, it was time to circumcise the child, and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
—Luke 2:21
It is discomfiting to consider the penis of Jesus, and yet today, as the octave of Christmas concludes (and the civil year begins), our gaze is directed precisely there, and for good reason, as it turns out the stakes are fairly high in terms of how far we think the incarnation really goes.
I regularly make this point when explaining the development of Christology to my students. For them, it’s not at all controversial to think of Jesus as a human, while it seems natural that folks would struggle to affirm that he’s also divine. So I have to labor to show not just that the earliest Christological heresies called into question not Christ’s divinity, but his humanity — hence, the strong emphasis on flesh in the Johannine literature. Thus, when we read the Gospel of Luke, I note that the Christ child’s circumcision informs us that when the Word became flesh, that flesh included a penis — otherwise how could the mohel have cut part of it off? The attendant awkwardness helps us to grasp Docetism’s attraction. We don’t really like to think of God assuming genitals, or defecating, or any other such embarrassments that come along with fleshy life.
Along the way, I introduce them to the rather unsettling convention in Renaissance art of depicting Christ’s penis — sometimes even erect — from the naked baby in a “Madonna with Child,” to a crucified or dead adult Christ with … let’s say … evocative placement of clouds or clothing. What I endeavor to explain with this artistic foray is that the Renaissance obsession with Jesus’ genitals is driven not by prurient interest but rather theological insight. A confrontation with the penis of Jesus removes all ambiguity and hedging from our affirmation that the Word became flesh. What he has not assumed, he has not healed, Gregory of Nazianzus reminds us. The artistic vision, then, is one of Christ embracing and healing all dimensions of our humanity, including our sexuality.
Recent resurgences of antisemitism, along with my research into church division, colonialism, racialization, and their bitter fruits, has convinced me that we Christians need to squarely face the supersessionism that has characterized so very much of the Christian imagination, beginning from rather uncomfortably near to our earliest days, so that we may finally and decisively repent and amend our lives. Until this besetting — and I’d very nearly say founding — sin is eradicated, the prospects for Christian fidelity or vitality strike me as rather dim.
And so, of late, I’ve been thinking of the circumcision of Jesus not just as proof of concept that he had a penis, and, so really assumed flesh, but also and especially as marking the assumed flesh as distinctly Jewish. There are all sorts of implications to this recognition that all of humanity is saved by this circumcised, Jewish man, including the ways in which we construct racial and gender differences, but what I wish to highlight here is that the Jewishness of Jesus matters, not just as an accident of history, but perduringly.
On the eighth day of his life, the Son of God and Son of Mary was at once circumcised and given the name that means Savior — Jesus. His saviorhood is intrinsically bound to his Jewishness. It’s not so much that a non-Jewish Christ could not save us. Instead, a non-Jewish Christ is an impossibility, a contradiction in terms, for the Christ, the messiah, can only be understood within the context of God’s relationship with the people God has elected with gifts and callings that are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29). Those of us who are Gentiles are saved insofar as we get to be included in this story, and not at all through a repudiation or surpassing of it.
Here I claim no original insights. Many others have affirmed the Jewishness of the savior, the identification of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as the God of Israel, the spiritually self-destructive character of Christian antisemitism, and so forth. I just think it bears repeating. Those of us Christians who are Gentiles must remember that we are grafted into Israel’s olive tree, contrary to nature (Rom. 11:17-24). Any undercutting of Judaism amounts to an undercutting of our salvation in the Jewish Jesus.
The unlearning of antisemitism and supersessionism and the learning of ways of being Christian that do not partake of this bitter fruit will not be an easy path. But for Christ’s sake we must walk it, as we continue to revel in the joy of the incarnation. As we begin the new year, a time for resolutions, let us be resolved to walk this path, wherever it leads us, because ultimately it leads us to the heart of the God who loves us, calls us, and will never let his people go.
I think this article is unseemly. One can argue pro or con about its theology, but that’s not the problem. 30 years ago, it would never have been published in a mainstream church publication. The visual alone would have offended too many people.
Duly noted, but the image was not deemed to be too offensive to be altar decoration in the 15th century. Thirty years ago is, perhaps, too narrow an appeal to history. The incarnation of God has long-offended people’s sensibilities.
You are not thinking pastorally. Deliberately or intentionally offending the sensibilities of everyday churchgoers is not the way to get through to them.
Your comment seems to presume that the offense you are taking to the image was my intention, which it was not and is not.
[…] This teaching was new and radical but also entirely Jewish. It meant that Gentiles, too, could be saved by Jewish flesh — even if not through the fleshly rite of […]
[…] This teaching was new and radical but also entirely Jewish. This meant that Gentiles could also be saved by Jewish flesh – even if it is not by the carnal rite of […]