Can Matthew 19:12 be interpreted to support transexuality?
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| The baptism of the eunuch by Rembrandt, 1626, depicting Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
They have the gift of being able (by the Lord) not only to subordinate their sexual desires (strong moral resolve) to the demands of spiritual life, but they also deny themselves matrimony in order to devote themselves entirely to working for the Kingdom of God. This scripture refers only to men, and these men never enter marriage or a civil union and are never transexual in any way.
This must not be pressed too far (as Lisa Salazar has done by suggesting that this group justifies the existence of transsexual people). The Bible warns against those who forbid to marry (1 Timothy 4:3) jesus did not infer that these men were actually women trapped in men's bodies.
ARTICLE BELOW
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As a transsexual woman, I had always struggled with Jesus’ comments recorded in chapter 19 of the Gospel of Matthew before my transition four years ago. In this Passage, Matthew tells us of an exchange Jesus had with the teachers of the law regarding marriage and divorce. Jesus then continues this discussion with His disciples who were perplexed by his answer to the Pharisees, in which he quoted the passage from the Old Testament. He had said: “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
The disciples wondered if it might not be better for people not to marry than to risk committing adultery if and when they divorce.
Jesus then says this: “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
Now, tell me that the last comment makes any sense to you if the discussion is about divorce and marriage. For years I used the first part of this passage, with its reference to the Old Testament, to beat myself up. I would often castigate myself with this rationale: “It says we are either male of female, there is no other option, why do you allow yourself to go there in your thinking? Get it out of your mind, you are male! You have fathered three children, what more proof do you need?”
About six years ago I began to gradually see something in Jesus’ statement I had never seen before. First, Jesus re-stated that God created us male and female, but He concedes that it doesn’t always work out that way. “Some are eunuchs because they are born that way.”
In this one statement Jesus tells us that it isn’t all black and white. There are individuals who are neither male nor female, they are eunuchs, or inter-sexed, somewhere in between. We are, therefore, not to view gender and sex strictly as one or the other, but as a continuum with many aberrations and manifestations. Doing so only causes some to be marginalized ostracized, hated, and even persecuted.
Doctors and the parents of an intersex child have a difficult time deciding how to best raise that child. They will often make a decision one way or another, to raise a girl or a boy. The deciding factor might simply be a cultural preference or what the parents feel they want in terms of gender. Unfortunately, studies show that in fifty percent of the cases, as that child gets older and becomes more sexually self aware, the sex chosen for the child is at odds with the child’s gender identity. If this is the case for a person born with “ambiguous” genitalia, that their gender identity is not directly related to their biological sexual characteristics, then who has the right to draw any lines of delineation as to which gender and sex pairings are correct?
This thought or understanding didn’t come to me all at once; it was as if the scales fell off my eyes gradually, until I finally saw that what Jesus was saying to his disciples was applicable to me. What also struck me was what Jesus didn’t say; the implications are huge. First, he didn’t condemn the eunuch, whether he/she was born that way, or was made that way, or chose to become one. He also did not place any conditions on them with respect to the subjects at hand, marriage and divorce. He also did not list which parings of unions would be acceptable for gender variant persons. Should eunuchs only be paired with other eunuchs? The point Jesus was making was that gender and sex are not binary in nature and therefore needed to be seen in a broader way than simply and only male or female.
Additionally, Jesus’ comment that not everyone can accept this is significant as well. The statement is similar to when in other places he said, “let him who has ear to hear, hear,” or, “eyes to see, see.” It is a teaching device and it is not meant as a declaration of exclusivity for only a few. Rather, it is a challenge to the listeners to wrap their brain around this because he wanted them to get it! Jesus wanted to raise their awareness by challenging their small thinking. He wanted to change their paradigm on sexuality.
Finally, this served to temper my expectation that I would enjoy universal acceptance because not everyone would choose to view things from this much more inclusive perspective.
This was a pivotal point in my life because it was then that I was finally able to reconcile faith with what the doctors had told me. It was important to me that if I acted on what had been prescribed for me, that I would not have to trample my faith. And it was equally important to me that if I was going to hold on to my faith, that I would not have to park my brain on the shelf. It was only when I saw that God was not going to judge me for the choices I needed to make and that my faith and what I was were not at odds, that I felt I had permission to proceed.
I must admit, however, that there was a touch of doubt that lingered in my mind. Was I fooling myself and only seeing this issue from a selfish point of view? Any doubt I may have had evaporated when I realized there was corroborating evidence in the Bible that the disciples had understood what Jesus had talked to them with respect to sexuality. The evidence is in St. Luke’s account in the Book of Acts about Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch? Luke tells it like this: (The fact that Luke was a physician adds a certain poignancy to his account. A topic fro another day.)
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”
Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.
"How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
The eunuch was reading this passage of Scripture:
"He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”
The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why shouldn’t I be baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.
This passage is not only interesting from the point of view that the Book of Isaiah foretells what has just occurred in Jerusalem and to Jesus, and how a devout Jew comes to accept Philip’s explanation of the events and is baptized. There are so many lessons that we can unpack from this story. For example, the Ethiopian eunuch’s devotion to Judaism had compelled him to make the long, treacherous and dangerous journey to Jerusalem from Ethiopia to celebrate the Jewish feast of the Passover. He did this even though as a eunuch he was unable to enter the Temple grounds to fully participate in the feast, since, as was the custom at the time, eunuchs were considered ceremoniously unclean. He, therefore, could only stand on the sidelines and watch; he was an excluded person through no fault of his own.
I appreciate that you may not hold the same beliefs as I do about Jesus and I am not sharing all of this with you to convince you one way or another. I simply want you to understand that it was important for me to work these things out in my mind. As I said earlier, I needed to reconcile what I was inside with my faith. The narrow focus and very simplistic views I had held is what made it so difficult for me to accept what I was—that was the tension and the battleground and nothing made sense.
As a believer and follower of Jesus, what touches me about this story is that this is one of the first acts by one of the apostles, and more significantly, it is the act of including sexually and anatomically “other” persons. Additionally, for this to be one of the first “church” events is evidence that things were going to be different from the very start. It declared that none would be excluded for being “different.” That Philip did not hesitate to reach out and affirm this sexually other person as a believer, is an equally monumental lesson. I suspect that Philip must have been just as surprised as the eunuch by this amazing encounter.
When the eunuch asked Philip if he shouldn’t be baptized, he wasn’t saying, “hey, I want to start out right by following the new rules.” Instead, the question was packed with so much more importance. It was as if he was saying, “Though I have been a devout Jew all my life and have done everything that is expected and demanded of me, even to come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, I have not been a full participant. As an other-sex person, I have had to stand on the sidelines. Will this also be the case now, or can I be a full participant as an equal?”
I am more and more fascinated that Luke, a physician, is the one who wrote about Philip's encounter with this sexually other person. Could it be that in his years of practice, he had faced the difficult task of helping parents make sense of a child born with ambiguous genitalia? Where there cultural, religious and social complexities that he understood with a more enlightened frame of reference? Who knows, but something to think about.
Then there is the issue of how it was that this person's 'abnormal' sexuality was know in the first place. We don't know how Luke found that out. We can surmise that Philip must have shared this incredible event with others, including Luke. So then, we need to ask, how did Philip find out that this person was a eunuch? It is not as if this person went around with a sign across his forehead that said 'eunuch.' How then did this somewhat, if not very private detail become known? Could it be that this person's dress was more 'flamboyant' or feminine than what would have been expected for a man to be wearing? Or perhaps, as is often the case with individuals whose bodies are deprived of the male sex hormone tend to have smaller frames and have a more feminine, androgynous or ambiguous physical appearance, lacking facial hair, for example.
A more realistic explanation has to do with the question this person asked after Philip helped him understand the passage in Isaiah he was struggling with and became a believer in Jesus. He wanted to know if there was anything preventing him from being baptized. It is not out of the realm of possibility that the eunuch, who happened to be the Treasurer for the Queen of Ethiopia and a devout Jew and had travelled all the way from his country to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover, would say something like, "I am a devout Jew, yet because I am a eunuch, I have been considered ceremonially unclean and have not been able to participate fully in my religion and have been relegated to the side lines all my life. Will it be the same with the church? Will I be marginalized, or will I be treated as an equal?" Philip did not hesitate to baptize him. PLUS - the fact that the Holy Spirit made sure that the 'eunuch' detail even became part of the story is a huge deal, especially if this event took place during the formative first days and weeks of the church. It is a message of inclusion, where sexuality and gender identity have no bearing.
To me, as I discussed earlier, this harkens back to Jesus' bizarre interjection of eunuchs into the discussion about marriage and divorce. I believe more than ever that the lesson Jesus was teaching His disciples had everything to do with how God desires that when we enter into a loving and intimate relationship/union, that it is to be valued and not dispensed with frivolously and casually for selfish reasons. Then he introduces the eunuch in to the discussion. Interesting... because it had nothing to do with the first part of the discussion, when he quotes from the O.T. about "for that reason God created them male and female."
As I've pointed out, what is interesting here is what Jesus doesn't say and that is as important as to what he does say about eunuchs. First, he does not say anything that would disqualify a eunuch from entering into a union with another person. But wait, what gender should that other person be? It obviously did not matter to Jesus, Otherwise he would have said something about it.
Additionally, we know that biologically speaking, there is a range of possible 'anomalies' so, for example, one could be more male than female, or more female than male, or right in the middle with a 50/50 split. Again, Jesus didn't draw any lines of distinction and he placed no conditions on what would then constitute an acceptable union. And finally, He did not condemn the eunuchs, nor did he say they would go to hell. Now, if Jesus' lesson had to do with the inherent beauty and value of two people making a life-long commitment to each other and he did not get bogged down with the person's sexuality, then why do we?
Posted By: Lisa Salazar | June 11, 2012 12:45 PM
The disciples wondered if it might not be better for people not to marry than to risk committing adultery if and when they divorce.
Jesus then says this: “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
Now, tell me that the last comment makes any sense to you if the discussion is about divorce and marriage. For years I used the first part of this passage, with its reference to the Old Testament, to beat myself up. I would often castigate myself with this rationale: “It says we are either male of female, there is no other option, why do you allow yourself to go there in your thinking? Get it out of your mind, you are male! You have fathered three children, what more proof do you need?”
About six years ago I began to gradually see something in Jesus’ statement I had never seen before. First, Jesus re-stated that God created us male and female, but He concedes that it doesn’t always work out that way. “Some are eunuchs because they are born that way.”
In this one statement Jesus tells us that it isn’t all black and white. There are individuals who are neither male nor female, they are eunuchs, or inter-sexed, somewhere in between. We are, therefore, not to view gender and sex strictly as one or the other, but as a continuum with many aberrations and manifestations. Doing so only causes some to be marginalized ostracized, hated, and even persecuted.
Doctors and the parents of an intersex child have a difficult time deciding how to best raise that child. They will often make a decision one way or another, to raise a girl or a boy. The deciding factor might simply be a cultural preference or what the parents feel they want in terms of gender. Unfortunately, studies show that in fifty percent of the cases, as that child gets older and becomes more sexually self aware, the sex chosen for the child is at odds with the child’s gender identity. If this is the case for a person born with “ambiguous” genitalia, that their gender identity is not directly related to their biological sexual characteristics, then who has the right to draw any lines of delineation as to which gender and sex pairings are correct?
This thought or understanding didn’t come to me all at once; it was as if the scales fell off my eyes gradually, until I finally saw that what Jesus was saying to his disciples was applicable to me. What also struck me was what Jesus didn’t say; the implications are huge. First, he didn’t condemn the eunuch, whether he/she was born that way, or was made that way, or chose to become one. He also did not place any conditions on them with respect to the subjects at hand, marriage and divorce. He also did not list which parings of unions would be acceptable for gender variant persons. Should eunuchs only be paired with other eunuchs? The point Jesus was making was that gender and sex are not binary in nature and therefore needed to be seen in a broader way than simply and only male or female.
Additionally, Jesus’ comment that not everyone can accept this is significant as well. The statement is similar to when in other places he said, “let him who has ear to hear, hear,” or, “eyes to see, see.” It is a teaching device and it is not meant as a declaration of exclusivity for only a few. Rather, it is a challenge to the listeners to wrap their brain around this because he wanted them to get it! Jesus wanted to raise their awareness by challenging their small thinking. He wanted to change their paradigm on sexuality.
Finally, this served to temper my expectation that I would enjoy universal acceptance because not everyone would choose to view things from this much more inclusive perspective.
This was a pivotal point in my life because it was then that I was finally able to reconcile faith with what the doctors had told me. It was important to me that if I acted on what had been prescribed for me, that I would not have to trample my faith. And it was equally important to me that if I was going to hold on to my faith, that I would not have to park my brain on the shelf. It was only when I saw that God was not going to judge me for the choices I needed to make and that my faith and what I was were not at odds, that I felt I had permission to proceed.
I must admit, however, that there was a touch of doubt that lingered in my mind. Was I fooling myself and only seeing this issue from a selfish point of view? Any doubt I may have had evaporated when I realized there was corroborating evidence in the Bible that the disciples had understood what Jesus had talked to them with respect to sexuality. The evidence is in St. Luke’s account in the Book of Acts about Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch? Luke tells it like this: (The fact that Luke was a physician adds a certain poignancy to his account. A topic fro another day.)
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”
Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.
"How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
The eunuch was reading this passage of Scripture:
"He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”
The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why shouldn’t I be baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.
This passage is not only interesting from the point of view that the Book of Isaiah foretells what has just occurred in Jerusalem and to Jesus, and how a devout Jew comes to accept Philip’s explanation of the events and is baptized. There are so many lessons that we can unpack from this story. For example, the Ethiopian eunuch’s devotion to Judaism had compelled him to make the long, treacherous and dangerous journey to Jerusalem from Ethiopia to celebrate the Jewish feast of the Passover. He did this even though as a eunuch he was unable to enter the Temple grounds to fully participate in the feast, since, as was the custom at the time, eunuchs were considered ceremoniously unclean. He, therefore, could only stand on the sidelines and watch; he was an excluded person through no fault of his own.
I appreciate that you may not hold the same beliefs as I do about Jesus and I am not sharing all of this with you to convince you one way or another. I simply want you to understand that it was important for me to work these things out in my mind. As I said earlier, I needed to reconcile what I was inside with my faith. The narrow focus and very simplistic views I had held is what made it so difficult for me to accept what I was—that was the tension and the battleground and nothing made sense.
As a believer and follower of Jesus, what touches me about this story is that this is one of the first acts by one of the apostles, and more significantly, it is the act of including sexually and anatomically “other” persons. Additionally, for this to be one of the first “church” events is evidence that things were going to be different from the very start. It declared that none would be excluded for being “different.” That Philip did not hesitate to reach out and affirm this sexually other person as a believer, is an equally monumental lesson. I suspect that Philip must have been just as surprised as the eunuch by this amazing encounter.
When the eunuch asked Philip if he shouldn’t be baptized, he wasn’t saying, “hey, I want to start out right by following the new rules.” Instead, the question was packed with so much more importance. It was as if he was saying, “Though I have been a devout Jew all my life and have done everything that is expected and demanded of me, even to come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, I have not been a full participant. As an other-sex person, I have had to stand on the sidelines. Will this also be the case now, or can I be a full participant as an equal?”
I am more and more fascinated that Luke, a physician, is the one who wrote about Philip's encounter with this sexually other person. Could it be that in his years of practice, he had faced the difficult task of helping parents make sense of a child born with ambiguous genitalia? Where there cultural, religious and social complexities that he understood with a more enlightened frame of reference? Who knows, but something to think about.
Then there is the issue of how it was that this person's 'abnormal' sexuality was know in the first place. We don't know how Luke found that out. We can surmise that Philip must have shared this incredible event with others, including Luke. So then, we need to ask, how did Philip find out that this person was a eunuch? It is not as if this person went around with a sign across his forehead that said 'eunuch.' How then did this somewhat, if not very private detail become known? Could it be that this person's dress was more 'flamboyant' or feminine than what would have been expected for a man to be wearing? Or perhaps, as is often the case with individuals whose bodies are deprived of the male sex hormone tend to have smaller frames and have a more feminine, androgynous or ambiguous physical appearance, lacking facial hair, for example.
A more realistic explanation has to do with the question this person asked after Philip helped him understand the passage in Isaiah he was struggling with and became a believer in Jesus. He wanted to know if there was anything preventing him from being baptized. It is not out of the realm of possibility that the eunuch, who happened to be the Treasurer for the Queen of Ethiopia and a devout Jew and had travelled all the way from his country to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover, would say something like, "I am a devout Jew, yet because I am a eunuch, I have been considered ceremonially unclean and have not been able to participate fully in my religion and have been relegated to the side lines all my life. Will it be the same with the church? Will I be marginalized, or will I be treated as an equal?" Philip did not hesitate to baptize him. PLUS - the fact that the Holy Spirit made sure that the 'eunuch' detail even became part of the story is a huge deal, especially if this event took place during the formative first days and weeks of the church. It is a message of inclusion, where sexuality and gender identity have no bearing.
To me, as I discussed earlier, this harkens back to Jesus' bizarre interjection of eunuchs into the discussion about marriage and divorce. I believe more than ever that the lesson Jesus was teaching His disciples had everything to do with how God desires that when we enter into a loving and intimate relationship/union, that it is to be valued and not dispensed with frivolously and casually for selfish reasons. Then he introduces the eunuch in to the discussion. Interesting... because it had nothing to do with the first part of the discussion, when he quotes from the O.T. about "for that reason God created them male and female."
As I've pointed out, what is interesting here is what Jesus doesn't say and that is as important as to what he does say about eunuchs. First, he does not say anything that would disqualify a eunuch from entering into a union with another person. But wait, what gender should that other person be? It obviously did not matter to Jesus, Otherwise he would have said something about it.
Additionally, we know that biologically speaking, there is a range of possible 'anomalies' so, for example, one could be more male than female, or more female than male, or right in the middle with a 50/50 split. Again, Jesus didn't draw any lines of distinction and he placed no conditions on what would then constitute an acceptable union. And finally, He did not condemn the eunuchs, nor did he say they would go to hell. Now, if Jesus' lesson had to do with the inherent beauty and value of two people making a life-long commitment to each other and he did not get bogged down with the person's sexuality, then why do we?
Posted By: Lisa Salazar | June 11, 2012 12:45 PM
