Access to Bodies

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 21st

The lectionary can be a strange conversation that throws a bunch of different voices into the same room, whether they know each other or want to be together, or not. Sometimes they’re interested in talking about the same things, and sometimes they’re not. The lectionary puts passages together that never knew about each other or never intended to speak to each other, and it asks them to have a conversation. The result can be magical or chaotic, informative or disappointing, depending on who’s in the room and how much the readings want to speak amongst themselves. Sometimes the common themes among a set of readings can emerge differently in different times and places, depending on what conversations are happening in the world around them.

The lectionary readings for August 21st are this kind of grouping. Jeremiah never knew about (second) Isaiah, because Jeremiah was written nearly a century earlier. Neither expected to be having a conversation with Hebrews or Luke, because those books are centuries newer. Perhaps the authors of Hebrews or Luke knew something about Isaiah or Jeremiah, but it’s hard to know for certain whether they did, or what the nature of that knowledge might have been. And none of them, Psalmists included, knew anything about us—the people who would be assembling and reading these texts together in a wholly different world, almost two thousand years later. The lectionary is an artificial conversation, a strange focus group, that plucks voices out of the past and asks them to talk to each other and to us.

Jeremiah in particular might be surprised to know what conversations he’s a part of in the year 2022. A couple dozen centuries after he lived and died, Jeremiah 1:5 has become a key verse and rallying cry for the pro-life, anti-abortion movement. If God knew Jeremiah pre-birth, and consecrated Jeremiah for sacred work while he was still in the womb, the thinking goes, then God must recognize the full personhood of all fetuses, and if God recognizes the full personhood of all fetuses, then so should civil law. This verse has adorned countless signs and t-shirts at protests over the years, and it stands as one of the key passages cited by Christians who oppose abortion—never mind that Jewish traditions interpret this and other passages quite differently, and produce a very different ethics of reproductive choice. In the context of the book of Jeremiah, this verse and passage serve to set up the divine sanction of Jeremiah’s words, but these days it has been pulled into a conversation about abortion and meant to say something Jeremiah probably never meant to say.

What happens when Jeremiah gets into a conversation with Luke? They are not talking to each other purposefully, but here there are in the lectionary together, Jeremiah 1:4-10 right beside Luke 13:10-17. Both are talking about bodies; Jeremiah is talking about God’s access to and consecration of Jeremiah in the womb, and Luke is talking about Satan’s access to and control of a woman’s body. In that story in Luke, Jesus lays his hands on this woman without her or anyone else asking him to do so; he seems to have access to her body too, just like Satan does. And then the Psalms join the conversation; in Psalm 71:6, God “took me from my mother’s womb,” implying that God has access both to the Psalmist’s body and to the body of the Psalmist’s mother. Even in the Hebrews passage, animals can be stoned to death for standing in the wrong spot, and Moses trembles with fear. In this week’s lectionary, bodies are vulnerable.

Suddenly, this collection of texts has taken on a sinister view of divine relationships to human bodies. Although each of the texts individually seems to be trying to convey something redemptive and life-giving, together they are having a conversation about how easy it is for divine and semi-divine figures to touch and manipulate and even kill human bodies. It gets creepy fast. The Luke passage starts to read like Jesus and Satan struggling for control of the body of a woman who has no say in her own fate. Her bodily autonomy is a football that two others are scrambling to fall on. Psalm 71 takes on an ominous tone; what does it mean that “it was you who took me from my mother’s womb?” Even the much-cited Jeremiah 1:5, which is usually cited to argue for the sanctity of young bodies, begins to feel like a parable about divine surveillance and control. Who knows and consecrates a fetus? Moses’ fear in Hebrews seems entirely warranted.

All of this is amplified in times and places, like the United States in 2022, where and when bodily autonomy is already contested and restricted. The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the precedent in Roe v. Wade that was upheld for nearly 50 years, and turned reproductive freedom into a question to be legislated on a state level. Reproductive choice is newly front-of-mind for millions of people who had lived most or all of their lives assuming the protections of Roe v. Wade. Anyone preaching the Jeremiah text, and possibly the Psalm 71 and Luke texts, should be thinking about how those texts will land with people in a post-Roe world. No matter what the preacher’s stance on the matter, and no matter whether the preacher can hear echoes of bodily control in these texts, chances are good that someone in the congregation will hear it.

Someone might object: God consecrates Jeremiah for good, and Jesus intends healing for the woman in Luke, and the Psalmist clearly values and praises God for God’s actions. Jeremiah, Luke, and Psalm 71 all display gratitude for the ways the divine has accessed human bodies, and they don’t find anything creepy about it all. And that is true! On their own, these passages each tell a story of a human being who is singled out for divine care and attention, and who experience God’s touch as a positive force in their lives.

But together, these passages might create a feeling of unease. In a world where large governmental, religious, and corporate forces are already vying for control of our bodies, where does God stand? Is there a way to imagine God and Jesus, even in conversation with these texts, as divine figures who respect human bodies and who demand respect for them? Against the voices of those who put Jeremiah 1:5 on protest signs and leverage it to legislate reproduction, is there a way to reclaim the blessing the prophet seems to be expressing in that passage?

Those are difficult questions, born out of the dilemma of producing 21st-century ethics out of texts written as long ago as the Iron Age. These passages never intended to talk to each other, and they never anticipated that they would be grouped together in the late summer of 2022, in the wake of an upheaval of a Supreme Court decision. The task for us, as people here and now and in our own circumstances, is to ask what we have to say about the matter. How does knowing what we know from and about our world affect what we think about these texts that were written in a different world? How does our own experience speak into the past, and into the character of a God who many of us claim is a God of all times and places? When we join the conversation, what will we say?