Was Jesus of Nazareth queer? Elton John says, goodbye yellow brick road; hello, gay Jesus. Our friend and peer Ashley Harnass is giddy about it:
I have always loved Elton John for his shoes (they recently inspired a purple platform heel purchase). But now I love him for his theology too. He just told the world Jesus was a “super-intelligent gay man.”
Of course, everyone is freaking out about it. The Catholic League is appalled that he called Jesus a “sexual deviant,” (their words, not Elton’s!). And the Christian gays of England are all in a twit too. It’s a bit cheeky, I suppose, to call Jesus a fellow gay.
But as a queer seminarian stateside, I love that Elton John just put a big high-heeled footprint on Christianity. He claimed it as his own, as we all have the right to do.
After all, people have been indigenizing Jesus in their own cultures and communities for as long as Jesus has been around. It’s just that when those who are claiming Jesus in their image are in charge, we don’t call it indigenizing. We call it normal, the status quo. And thus, for example, we get a mainstream image of a Jesus who was white (even though the guy was from the Middle East).
As Gary Comstock in Gay Theology Without Apology wrote 1993, “The history of Christianity has shown that Jesus is up for grabs; and whoever is most powerful determines the prevailing image of Jesus.”
What Elton John did will not change the prevailing image of Jesus, either. But that’s not the point. What he did was add his voice to the cacophony of voices throughout history — from the first millennium through the Civil Rights era — that have claimed Jesus in their image and in doing so, named their own life experience as sacred. Perhaps Elton would fit best with the theologians of the 1960s and 1970s who named a Jesus who was Black, a Jesus who was a feminist, a Jesus who was… gay. They took him as their own.
If Jesus just happened to be a feminist queer, I’d be cool with that. But a generation beyond identity politics, for me the point is not that Jesus was actually any of these identities (besides, they are anachronistic when applied to biblical times). The point is that we too – ALL of us – have a right to make a claim on the sacred, to call our experience of the world holy, to define our own vision of our religion and live it fully.
Thank you, Elton, for reminding us.
Check out Ashley Harness’s blog at Velvet Park.
