Jesus is queer.
I don’t mean queer as in Jesus had a same-sex lover; I mean queer as in not fitting the paradigm that broader society has considered “normal” (whatever normal is). While most folks would use that statement primarily to describe his ministry, we can also apply the description to his own sexuality, gender expression, and other ways he existed in the world. For example, most popular theories claim that Jesus never had a romantic partner, viewing his lack of sexual engagement as part of his work as a holy man. But what if Jesus wasn’t celibate? What if Jesus was asexual and aromantic, having no desire for sexual intercourse or romantic connection? Many folks can’t imagine living without the desire for sex or romantic connection, but there’s a whole population of people who are asexual and/or aromantic. Their experience in the world could teach us a lot about this part of Jesus’s life—if we’re willing to listen.
It’s widely agreed that Jesus was 100 percent man and 100 percent God, but what observations do we notice about his expression of masculinity? As far as we can tell, Jesus wasn’t an incredibly muscular man. There are no comments on his physical strength (until we get to him carrying his cross, but he doesn’t even carry it himself in one of the Gospels). He uses his words instead of his fists to get his point across. He focuses more on healing than violence. He doesn’t lose his temper, only saving his harshest rebukes for those who use their authority to harm less-privileged folks. He’s gentle, a nurturer. He even relegates himself to doing the work of servants and women as part of his ministry. By today’s Western European standards, Jesus was not “a man’s man” by any stretch of the imagination. That reality may confuse folks, but there are groups of effeminate men, women, and nonbinary people who live out this kind of soft masculinity every day. Their experience in the world could teach us a lot about this part of Jesus’s life—if we’re willing to listen.
When we let the same people tell the same stories about Jesus in the exact same way, we all miss out on a fuller, more inspiring picture of who Jesus was and is. We also miss out on the new things Jesus has to teach us today.
[Throughout this book] I invite you to view Jesus as queer. We will revisit familiar parts of Jesus’s story as well as less-familiar parts and view them through a queer lens. To help you along, I will pull in the lived experiences of queer people from all walks of life to highlight how their experiences mirror Jesus’s in many ways, and I will explain what these things reveal to us about Jesus and our own faith journeys. For some parts of this endeavor, I’ll be able to share my own experiences as a queer person of faith; for others, I’ll rely on the works of other queer people of faith.
The goal isn’t for queer readings of Jesus’s life to be accepted by mainline Christianity as a metaphor for how to see Christ. Rather, the goal is for all versions of Christianity to remember that Jesus is already queer and that his queerness has much to teach us about how to be better people of faith. Because we resonate with his queerness, LGBTQ+ folks are simply better equipped to recognize those truths and share them with the world.
We like to talk about the body of Christ as metaphorically as we can: we are all part of Christ’s body, therefore Christ is diverse and so on. Those teachings are important and should continue to be taught. However, we can’t teach about the metaphorical body of Christ at the expense of Christ’s physical body. Christ lived. Christ breathed. Christ was—and is—queer. If we ignore the physicality of Christ’s existence, we assume that it isn’t important. When we make that assumption, we give ourselves permission to shame our own physical bodies. We have to embrace the physical nature of Christ’s queer body in order to better embrace his call to love both God and our neighbors as we love ourselves.
It’s like my experience of watching Matilda; because I have lived some of Matilda’s life, it was easier for me to explain the significance of those parts of the movie to my friends. When we recognize ourselves in the story, it’s easier not only to understand the story but also to share the story with others. And Jesus’s story is the greatest story of all. Why shouldn’t we find other ways to equip ourselves to share it?
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A bivocational pastor, writer and spiritual director based in Williamsburg, Virginia, she currently works as a Spiritual Director at Reclamation Theology. Cawthon-Freels is the author of Reclamation: A Queer Pastor’s Guide to Finding Spiritual Growth in the Passages Used to Harm Us (Nurturing Faith Books), and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.