Persecution and Change

Reflections on the Lectionary for the First Sunday of Pride Month

Jesus heals the man with the withered hand, by Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, 1684. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

As I announced a couple of weeks ago, for the month of June I am framing my lectionary reflections in terms of queer biblical interpretation—putting together, in essence, a Pride Month series. For a generation now, queer biblical interpretation has been emerging as a method to read biblical texts in new ways. Queer biblical interpretation is about finding queer figures in the text, to be sure: pointing to characters and stories in biblical texts that resonate with the experiences of people in LGBTQia+ communities. But beyond that, queer biblical interpretation has also emerged as a way to interrogate norms, and to notice the ways those normativities are working to govern texts and the characters in them, as well as readers. Often my students latch on to scholarship that describes how “to queer” something, as a verb—not simply recognize queerness (as a noun), but also to actively turn things on their side, examine them from new perspectives, and question and subvert all the norms that invisibly hem us all in. These normativities—which can range from family structures to political orthodoxies to gender expectations to hairstyles to professionalism to religion—turn out to show up everywhere, and they matter a lot in all of our lives, whether we identify as queer or not.

For this first Sunday of June, I want to take a broad view. As a way to start this series, I want to focus not on queer persons as they might show up in the text (though one should always expect to find folks from the full spectrum of human sexuality in any biblical text), but instead I want to focus on queerness as it comes to us through some of the texts in the lectionary this week, and on what happens when we put queer interpretation in conversation with the texts themselves.

The first text I want to look at might seem counterintuitive. If there is a single biblical enemy to queer people, it is probably the apostle Paul. While I (and many others) have argued that Paul’s reputation as a homophobe is not deserved, there is no disputing that on balance Paul’s writings (and those attributed to him) have been used against queer people far more often than they have been read as supportive. While (mistakenly, in my view) it can be easy for some Christians to dismiss passages from Leviticus or to explain away a story like Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s harder to explain away Paul’s words in Romans 1:25-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and 1 Timothy 1:9-10. If you’re looking for explanations of those passages and why they don’t necessarily say what they seem to say, you can click that link above to see what I have to say about it. But today I want to focus on something different, and think about this weeks’ lectionary reading of 2 Corinthians 4:5-12 as an entry point for queer biblical interpretation and a Pride series.

Queer folks are not the first marginalized people to be suspicious of Paul. Jewish people, for example, have mistrusted Paul—with good reason—from the beginning. But today, many Jewish readers see Paul as a fascinating example of second-temple Jewish thought and theology. Likewise, many African-American interpreters have rejected Paul, because of the writings that were attributed to him in Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy, where the pseudonymous author of those works advocated that slaves be obedient to their masters. But alongside that rejection, other African-American interpreters have understood Paul as a fellow-traveler—as someone who endured persecution and violence and still remained faithful. It’s that point that I want to grab onto here, and think about its implications for Pride and for queer biblical interpretation.

The passage from 2 Corinthians that’s in the lectionary this week is actually one of the passages that some African-American interpreters have recognized as evidence that Paul shared some of their experiences of violence and persecution, and I wonder whether the same might be true for some LGBTQia+ Christians. In that passage, Paul and his co-author Timothy talk about their struggles, framing their difficulties in terms of Jesus’ life and death, and their difficult embodiment in terms of Jesus’ wounded body “We are afflicted in every way,” they write, “but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.” Paul and Timothy seem to be referring to the ways they often met resistance and even violence wherever they went. Elsewhere Paul discusses beatings and trials and imprisonments, and in the book of Acts, the author describes many difficult moments in the life of Paul as he is chased from city to city and imprisoned and punished on fabricated and exaggerated charges. In this passage from 2 Corinthians, Paul and Timothy are clear that the difficulties they faced did not discourage them, and the violence they experienced did not separate them either from God or from their calling.

This reminds me of no one as much as it reminds me of queer Christians. As a cisgender straight person, I have had an easy path through the church. No one objects to my presence, and no one questions whether the way my body shows up in church is evidence that I do or do not belong. But the same is not true for many other Christians. I meet people all the time in my classes and when I visit churches who have been chased away, denounced, resisted, undermined, and even physically harmed by churches because of their sexuality and gender. I cannot emphasize enough how common this is—how often the church has done these things to the people who are among the most faithful. When Paul and Timothy write about the ways they have been afflicted and persecuted, but not forsaken, I hear echoes of the experiences of queer Christians who have met intense resistance and even hatred, but who have nevertheless insisted that the church, that Jesus, that God, that faith belong to them too, and that they will not have it taken from them. There is no one as faithful as a Christian who has been told again and again that they don’t belong, but who insists that they will belong, and shows up anyway.

Sometimes, even as a straight person, Pride Month feels like a bizarre experience. I walk through Target and see displays of Pride merchandise, I get emails from every corporation announcing their Pride collection, and I remember that until just a few years ago those same companies were firing people because of their sexuality, and the government was barring them from getting married or adopting children. I am old enough to remember casual homophobia on television, institutionalized homophobia in the military, and the abandonment of a generation of gay men to die of AIDS. It’s jarring, walking through Pride displays and remember all of that. There’s no doubt that it’s an occasion for celebration, and there’s no doubt that things have come a long way, but it’s still weird. The modern movement for full rights and inclusion had many beginnings, but we should always remember how many of those beginnings were violent. The Stonewall Riots, for example, were prompted by a crackdown against queer folks that led to violence and arrests. I can imagine someone in 1969, having been beaten and intimidated by police at Stonewall and having seen their friends hauled away, saying the words of Paul and Timothy: “For while we live, we are always being given up to death….” Pride has its origins in encountering persecution and violence and insisting on living anyway—the same kind of defiance and hope that we see in the passage from 2 Corinthians.

If the passage from 2 Corinthians reminds us of the voices of queer folks, then the passage in the lectionary from Mark 2:23-3:6 should remind us of the voice of the church. In that paragraph above, when I mentioned the failures of various institutions like the military and culture, I left the church out. That’s not because the church is blameless; to the contrary. Religion was (and still is) one of the strongest bastions of prejudice and harm against queer people. Many mainstream Protestant churches are only finding their way to acceptance in the last decade or two, and sometimes even that is a grudging acceptance, something more like a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy than an embrace and a celebration. And of course there are still wide swaths of Christianity in which acceptance of LGBTQia+ people is as far away as ever.

We should be careful when making the argument I’m about to make. This section of the Gospel of Mark is one of many passages in the gospels where Jesus argues with other Jewish people, in this case the Pharisees. There is a long Christian tradition of reading passages like this one in anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic ways, casting Pharisees (and Judaism) as the legalistic and rigid and backward enemies, and depicting Jesus as always only liberating or woke. I have written at length, on this Substack and elsewhere, about why those interpretations are misguided and dangerous. So don’t misunderstand me here; this passage is not about Jesus being right and Jews being wrong. Instead, I want us to read this passage as an example of religious debate and conversation bringing change.

We have to start with the observation that everyone in this story is Jewish. Jesus is Jewish, the Pharisees were Jewish, David and Abiathar were Jewish, and the man with the withered hand was Jewish. They are all Jewish people, and they are all having a conversation—a debate—about what it means to be Jewish. In particular, they are debating the meaning of the Jewish law—whether tradition and texts should be interpreted for new circumstances and how the demands of justice can interact with custom and religious law. At issue in this passage is something that was, and is, very central to the practice of Judaism: sabbath observance. The dispute in this passage has to do with the best way to observe the sabbath; all parties agree that keeping the sabbath was a good thing, but they disagreed on how best to do it. Jesus makes both historical arguments and theological arguments, and while we don’t get much of the Pharisees’ point of view, their argument seems to be rooted in a desire to do the right thing according to tradition and scripture. Two thousand years of Christian polemic has obscured something important about this passage: that it shows us what religious conversation and dialogue can do.

When I was a kid, almost none of the major Protestant Mainline religious traditions had an accepting and welcoming stance toward queer people; now, most of them do. Even some more conservative Christian traditions have moved toward acceptance. This has happened because of exactly the kind of exchange preserved in Mark 2 and 3—the making and hearing of arguments, and a concern for what the requirements of justice bring to a new moment. It has happened because of the tenacity of queer Christians, who would not allow themselves to be pushed out, and it has happened because churches have rethought precedent and tradition in light of new information and in light of the witness of faithful queer people. Religion is still a bastion of prejudice and hatred, but passages like this one and the recent history of Christianity has shown us that faithfulness can evolve in new times and places to look different than it did in the past. We can understand new truths and hear new callings, and we do not always have to be bound by the wisdom of the past.

This might be the greatest gift of queer biblical interpretation, as we will see all this month: it disrupts the wisdom of the past, breaking it open so that new and different insights can come forth. Queer biblical interpretation challenges norms and asks new questions; it turns things on their sides. Queer biblical interpretation is a gift to all of us who look for wisdom in ancient things, and seek to do justice in the present. It allows us to find fellow-travelers in our most sacred texts, and it allows us to break free of old certainties and pursue new understanding. We will spend the rest of this month doing just that. But we start from here: an acknowledgement of queer experiences of persecution, a reflection on the ways the church has been on the wrong side of things far more often than it has been on the right side of things, and an awareness that change can happen. From those beginnings, all kinds of new possibilities open into the future.