Leaky Jesus
Reflections on the Lectionary for the Fifth Sunday of Pride Month
All month long we have been following the lectionary readings with an eye toward queer theory, which is a sprawling academic world devoted to thinking about gender and sexuality, but also thinking about the norms and patterns of thinking that structure our world. Sometimes a queer reading of scripture can be pretty straightforward (no pun intended), as it was last week in the story of David and Jonathan. (This week’s lectionary also contains material about David and Jonathan, from 2 Samuel 1, where David says that Jonathan was “greatly beloved…to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women”). Both the passage from 1 Samuel last week and the one from 2 Samuel this week are pretty simple cases of seeing the biblical text for what it is, and identifying queer characters in it. But here at the end of June (and the end of Pride Month), I want to turn toward a slightly more complex application of queer reading, one mixed with other kinds of interpretation, to give us a new take on a familiar story.
Mark 5:21-43 has parallel passages in Matthew and Luke, and arguably a less-parallel-but-still-comparable passage in John 11 (the story of the raising of Lazarus). In the version found in Mark, Jesus has returned across the Sea of Galilee to the western shore, where he is surrounded by a crowd. Two things happen in that crowd: first, he is approached by a man named Jairus, who is a synagogue leader who wants Jesus to heal his sick daughter, and second, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years approaches him from behind and touches his cloak. (In both Matthew and Luke, the woman touches the fringes of his clothes, a reference to a Jewish prayer garment and the tzitzit, or fringes, that hung from it). The two stories are nested, and they are clearly meant to be interpreted together. The story of the woman with the flow of blood interrupts the story of Jairus’ daughter, and the story of Jairus’ daughter bookends the story of the woman with the flow of blood. Furthermore, the girl is twelve years old (see Mark 5:42) and the woman has been bleeding for twelve years (Mark 5:25). This might be a broader reference to Israel and its restoration, since the number twelve is very important in Israelite thought. But it also links these two figures together—the girl and the woman—and synchronizes their lives in a certain kind of way. Both are called “daughter” in the passage.
My favorite reading of this passage (specifically the portion dealing with the woman with the hemorrhage, 5:25-34), is an article by Candida Moss, titled The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25-34. (Moss has a brand new book out, and it’s great, and you should read it). This article is about fifteen years old now, which is long in the tooth for an academic article, but I still find it to be cutting-edge and provocative. Moss uses disability theory, mostly, with a side of gender analysis. She’s not using queer theory outright, but I’ve taught this article alongside queer interpretations, because I think it’s very amenable. Moss’s basic thesis is that this story features not one but two “porous” or leaky bodies: the woman’s body and Jesus’s body. Using research on medical understandings from the first century (Galen and those kinds of folks), Moss demonstrates convincingly that Jesus is depicted in this story as “weak, sickly, feminine, and porous,” and that the woman and Jesus are described in parallel ways: “both are porous and leak uncontrollably.” The woman leaks blood, and Jesus leaks power, and neither can adequately control the integrity of their bodies. Moss points out that for ancient readers, Jesus’ leakiness in this story would have coded him as feminine, somewhat passive, and a little bit helpless.
As I said, this is a reading rooted in disability theory and gender criticism, but it’s also very amenable to a reading alongside and with queer theory. The permeability of the body was a major concern in the ancient world, and many scholars see the body’s porousness as a way to think about both sexuality and social status. (Not all scholars think this way of understanding ancient status and sexuality is accurate, and some have argued against it). The thinking goes that in antiquity, bodily integrity was a way of showing off your power. At the bottom of the scale were enslaved people, who could rarely or never control the ways their bodies were penetrated—either sexually or with violence (beatings, torture, execution, etc.). At the top of the scale were men with a lot of status who were not vulnerable to those things, even from other men or from the state. In the middle, the thinking goes, you could sort people’s status by the ways they could penetrate others or be penetrated themselves. As you can see, this had implications for what we would call class and gender, as well as what we would call sexuality. Women were considered further down the scale than men, because they were (typically, normatively) penetrated by men. (It might not be an accident that a lot of Rome’s self-image was represented by the Vestal Virgins, a group of un-penetrable priestesses). Lower-economic-class people were more vulnerable to violence and exploitation than higher-economic-class people, and therefore had a lower social status. Men who were penetrated by other men were thought to be degrading themselves by opening their bodies to violation. The whole of society seems to have operated on what some scholars have called a “penetrative grid” that indexed each person’s place within a spectrum of power, expressed as bodily integrity. (Again, there are some powerful scholarly voices who think that this whole thing is overblown, and that penetration didn’t always or even ever work this way).
If this is right, though, then having a porous body was a sign of femininity, weakness, and vulnerability. The text of Mark does not specify where the woman’s flow of blood was located, but most interpreters have assumed that it was gynecological in some way. Many have then taken the further step of claiming that such a flow of blood would have made this woman ritually impure under Jewish law, though this is quite a leap from what the text says.
Moss’ point in her article is that given the disease etiology of Jesus’ time and place, Jesus’ inability to control the power flowing from his body is analogous and parallel to the woman’s inability to control the blood flowing from hers. Neither can adequately control the borders of their selves; both bodies leak. Moss goes into a lot of research on ancient medicine, but suffice it to say that the kind of porosity experience by both the woman and Jesus was though, in that time, to be a stereotypically feminine experience. To be manly was to keep one’s body buttoned up and controlled, neither leaking from within or penetrated from outside. But to be womanly was to be porous, leaky, uncontrolled, and vulnerable. The flow of power from Jesus would have been read as a sign that Jesus was more womanly than manly.
If Moss is right (and I think she is), we can add this to a pretty decent list of ways that the gospels portray Jesus as a less-than-ideal man. Given the norms and standards of his day, Jesus is sometimes portrayed as failing to live up to the stereotypes of manhood. People frequently point out that Jesus was unmarried; scholars argue over how non-normative that might have been. And the story of his arrest and crucifixion shows Jesus to be the vulnerable, penetrable kind of person who might be further down the “grid,” more feminine than masculine. (Perhaps this is what Paul meant when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:23 that “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block [literally scandal in Greek] to Jews and foolishness to gentiles”). But beyond these obvious examples, some see the purple robe of Mark 15 as an example of Jesus in drag. Medieval artists have depicted Jesus’ side wound in starkly vaginal terms. I’ve written on this Substack about reading Jesus’ association with Mary and Martha and Lazarus as an example of chosen family (and Jesus’ repeated emphasis on rejecting one’s biological family), and the same could be said for the disciples. The story of Jesus’ relationship with “the beloved disciple” in John is the subject of enduring speculation, and there are many, many other examples. (For a great introduction, check out the Queer Bible Commentary; the first edition can be had cheaper).
What’s at stake in this argument about Jesus as a less-than-ideal man? Perhaps a lot, and perhaps not much. Perhaps not much is at stake, if we are thinking about the actual sexuality and gender expression of the person named Jesus. I think it’s unlikely—probably impossible—that we will ever know for sure how Jesus thought about his own gender and sexuality, and so everything we say is really speculation. And for many people, it won’t matter; Jesus’ value for many people has more to do with his death and resurrection and his teachings, and the intricacies of how his gender is portrayed in light of ancient medical knowledge might not figure very much into things.
But then again, there might be a lot at stake in the way we understand Jesus. Sometimes Jesus is described as having been perfect, sinless, all-knowing, or ideal. Sometimes, he is depicted as hyper-masculine, with big muscles and a tech bro’s smirk, or wielding a whip while angrily driving out money-changers. There’s something powerful, for many people, about understanding Jesus as occupying a more conflicted and middling place in the world. It might be really life-giving to see Jesus as vulnerable, feminine, or less-than-idealized; we might be able to see ourselves in him. There’s something really valuable in a Jesus whose life looks more like ours.
This story of the woman with the flow of blood—and the man with the flow of power—is the story of a Jesus who is vulnerable, permeable, and taken by surprise. It’s a portrait of Jesus in the middle of the crowd, pressed in upon, and not completely able to control what’s happening, even to his own body. He is still very powerful; even just touching his clothes can heal. But this powerful Jesus is still open to the needs of the world and the demands that people put on him. There’s something reassuring about that—the idea that Jesus ever felt that way, and the idea that the people who passed these stories along in word and in writing made sure that Jesus’ vulnerability made it all the way to us today.
I am always exposed to new thoughts and interpretations in your writing. This was very interesting. Thank you!