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| Aww, isn't Jesus so cute! |
A friend of mine posted the editorial cartoon to your left
on Facebook. I guess it’s not enough to
insist that, where my faith and my Church are concerned, I do in fact have a
sense of humor. So let me point out what’s
really funny about the cartoon: the nun is wearing a habit. Definitely not representative of the LCWR.
To be effective at manipulation, you want to keep things
simple. So rather than portray the nun
in an ugly pantsuit (far more common), you dress her in the almost-forgotten
habit, just as you draw Papa Bene as if he were being cast for the next
installment of Grumpy Old Men. Then, to really demonstrate how shallow your
theology is, you draw Christ the Lord as a cute little koala bear of a man with
a smiley face, looking nothing at all like someone who could open up a can of
whip-ass on moneychangers in the Temple (Jn 2:14-16) or condemn Chorazin and Bethsaida
to a fate worse than Tyre and Sidon (Mt 11:21-22).
Of course the cartoon is meant to be ironic, in the sense
that it supposedly demonstrates an incongruity or inconsistency in Catholic
teaching. After all, nowhere in any of
the Gospels does Jesus say anything about homosexuality — good, bad or
indifferent. So isn’t the Catholic
Church concerned with preserving his
teachings over all others?
Just like young boys at a matinee movie showing like to supply
“dialogue” (i.e., wisecracks, burps and other noises) to fill the gaps in the
script, so people like to answer the question, “What Would Jesus Do?”, with all
sorts of self-serving mishegoss. Especially
if the Gospels can’t contradict them with a direct quote. Who cares what Ss. Paul, Peter, John and
those other losers said? Jesus didn’t say it!
Back in September, we talked about the
silence of Jesus and why the argument from silence works in the Church’s
favor. But it would pay us to revisit
the problem.
The argument from silence is a two-edged blade. You could argue that, since you can’t
find a text that proves Jesus taught/the apostles believed x, then they must not have believed it. On the other hand, since you can’t find a text
which proves that Jesus/the apostles denied or contradicted x, they must have believed it.
However, Jesus’ silence concerning long-standing sexual
taboos is very much akin to the silence of the dog in the Sherlockismus. Such a
silence might have meant an implicit tolerance had Jesus lived and taught in
the cosmopolitan, relatively gay-friendly environs of classical Greece, had he
claimed divine Sonship from Zeus (whose young lover Ganymede has given us the
word catamite).
Alas! Jesus lived and taught in the homophobic backwater of
Judea, as the Son of the God who declared to the Israelites, “You shall not lie
with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Lv 18:22). The Jesus who didn’t hesitate to call
religious leaders “you brood of vipers” and “hypocrites” (Mt 23:13-36) — nor to
whip the aforementioned moneychangers out of the Temple — was brave enough to
defy plenty of conventions, such as by dining with tax collectors and
prostitutes (Mt 9:9-13); certainly, had Jesus said or done anything that could
be reasonably understood as gay-positive, the Gospels would not be silent.
But let’s suppose Jesus did
say something supportive of homosexuality, and the apostles/the later Church
cut it out because — no, that’s industrial-strength silliness of the “conspiracy
theorist” variety. It’s ridiculous to
believe that someone would rush past the “Bread of Life” discourse (Jn 6:25-71),
with its implicitly cannibalistic theme, in order to excise a rhetorical
flourish in praise of sodomy. Someone so
gimlet-eyed for social niceties must surely have noticed the indiscretion of
letting Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus sit at Jesus’ feet while he
taught (Lk 10:38-42); how, then, did that crossing of gender boundaries escape
the red pencil when Our Lord’s exposition of queer theory didn’t? To successfully prove that a jewel was stolen
from the safe, you must first establish that the jewel was ever inside the safe.
In fact, to the extent that Jesus does speak of matters of
the bedroom, if he’s at odds at all with the prevailing Jewish sexual morality,
it’s in a stricter direction. What else
can we say of his declaration that “every one who looks at a
woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:28)? How else should we judge his equation of
second marriages after divorce with adultery (Mk 10:11-12; cf. Mt 19:9, Lk
16:18)? Or his insistence that those who
can remain celibate “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” should do so (Mt
19:12)? And after all that, we’re
supposed to believe he said it’s “okay to be gay”?
Jesus did, however, say something worth thinking about in
connection with another sexual sin, namely adultery. When the adulteress’ accusers disbanded and
left, their righteous anger withering from the acid of Jesus’ judgment, he said
to her, “Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again” (Jn 8:2-11). He didn’t hand her over to be killed … but
neither did he endorse her behavior.
The problem has never been that Christians deny salvation to
homosexuals. No, the problem is that
homosexuals deny dysfunctionality to same-sex attraction, just as single people
rationalize cohabitation and married people try to justify infidelity. A full discussion of this denial goes beyond
my present scope; suffice it to say that, so long as so many people insist that
there’s nothing inherently wrong with same-sex attraction, they will continue
to find gay-positive interpretations in the silence of the Gospels.
But the Gospels aren’t really silent. It only seems they are … usually when you have your fingers in your
ears.
