Christ is Never Naked

I’ll  offer a prediction. The upcoming split in the UMC over same-sex marriage and ordination will be the first of many to follow. 

What has drawn and held the UMC together for the last 150 years hasn’t been doctrinal unity, but the mutual advantages of growing social power for Christian witness. Now UM social influence is waning to the point that groups within the UMC see internal cohesion and external alliances as more advantageous than the current UM unity; unity that has little to commend itself to either the most ideologically committed or the most individually powerful. 

For the WCA and related United Methodists an alignment with conservative Christians in a broader evangelical coalition gives far more direct access to political and social influence than continued association with a socially liberal and politically impotent UMC. And a close alliance with African United Methodists insures the appearance of vitality and relevance on a global scale. 

Meanwhile progressive United Methodists, having chaffed under the restrictions of a Social Principles creed dominated by conservative values, will find alliances with other progressive Christian denominations  and political groups a far more effective path into exercising the kind of social and political power they long to have.

And in the rest of the world? Unity is already hard to maintain, and its main advantage has been a link to the resource-rich American church. When that church divides, and its resources divide and diminish with it, expect United Methodists globally to divide along their own particular fault lines. It is too much to expect that only US United Methodists have disagreements over Biblical authority, sexuality, and gender roles.

And the root of these coming divisions will be a fundamental misunderstanding of human diversity and the roots of heterogeneity of doctrine and practice. 

When Christ was born we are told that his mother wrapped him in swaddling clothes. When he died he was disrobed but not naked, for even on the cross the culture of Roman occupied Judea couldn’t abide such a thing. Even in the grave, much as in the cradle, he is clothed. And what do we see in the empty tomb? The clothes. The Christ never appears to us unclothed.

This places Jesus in the world God created for Adam and Eve and their descendants, a world in which the naked man was unimaginable. Noah’s nakedness was an unbearable scandal, and even Paul in imagining death and its aftermath does not want to ever be make, but to be over-clothed in Christ. 

When Noah emerges from the Ark he plants a vineyard, the surest sign that he isn’t just clothed, but is clothed in culture (albeit one that carries with it the danger of nakedness - subject of at least one country-western song.) And when Paul longs to be over-clothed he speaks of tents or tabernacles; perhaps the products of his profession but more likely to that ancient product of Israelite culture created simultaneously with its covenant with God. The covenant is never seen naked, is it? (Indiana Jones got that right.)

Even the sex of Christ, which would seem to be a universal biological fact, comes to us only in the form of sexuality and gender. We don’t see Jesus’ genitalia, only his gendered interactions with other men and women in a 1st century Jewish context. Indeed, biological sex is left behind in the Garden with God’s clothing of Adam and Eve, a quintessential creation of culture, and mere biological sex is evermore hidden by the cultural clothing of gender and sexuality.  God made us male and female. Culture made us men and women, husbands and wives. 

It is worth looking closely at Genesis 2:21 to 2:24. First a description of the event of Eve’s creation, then Adam’s personal appropriation of the event, then an interpretation into Jewish culture. 

Doctrines, witness, and worship are simply the necessary clothing of a God Incarnate whom we can look at in no other way. They are the dressing by which Christian communities in various times and places have made Jesus present-able to themselves and others. Otherwise, as Peter, John, and James experienced, there is only blinding light and the command to listen to a voice once again clothed and comprehensible in a familiar human language. 

Belief and practice are inevitably bound to the languages (and hence cultures) through which they are articulate. They never give us access to the naked Christ because he is decently, and for our own protection, hidden from sight. All we can ever see is Christ clothed in culture. And not surprisingly he is thus seen in a variety of different kinds of clothing. 

Some believe the diversity of belief and practice, the diversity of cultural clothings of the Christ, is a result of sin, or at the least our human finitude. This is wrong. In the narrative of scripture cultural diversity isn’t created by sin. Sin, in the run-up to Babel, is manifest in the human drive to avoid diversity, to live as a culturally homogenous people in a walled city. The diversity of languages and thus cultures that God inaugurates is the cure to sin. Cultural diversity is the root expression of God’s righteous demand that humans be obedient to the Divine will that we be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. 

When we understand this we can see that our efforts at doctrinal purity and unity of witness and worship are the repetition of the sin of Babel by the community of believers. They are an effort to build a walled city in which we’ll be united and never scattered. And so it is hardly surprising that God is scattering us, and will continue to scatter us among the nations until we exhaust our sinful desire for uniformity and purity and turn from Babel toward Zion. 

The only unity we can ever enjoy is spiritual, masked by flesh and robed in culture. And only scattered through the assembly of the nations in all their diversity can we hope to see the glory of the Lord. 

And when if we recognize each other it won’t be by our clothes, but by the fruit of love.