“You can hug me,” reads a sign on a weeping willow in the park. Not far away, a different sign sternly advises bodily distance. Still. When we had hoped to be emerging from this plague of untouchability. The noli me tangere of COVID19 was for a while giving way to joyous hugs of reconnection.
Might we yet hope that a lasting appreciation of the sense of touch--so backburnered for so long now to the 2D surfaces of the visual--will offer itself as part of the pandemic’s legacy? A hope against the hope for “back to normal”? A hope against the disembodied optimism that has abstracted us from the very body of the Earth? Against the systems that keep us out of touch with the vulnerable bodies human and otherwise that make up our world? Against that normalcy, might we get and stay in touch with the boundless incarnations, the enfleshed multi-dimensions of our inescapable planetary ecology?
I hope against hope so. Then the pandemic echo of John 20.17 and its prohibition would fade. In the meantime a few of us are haunted by the scene. It raises questions that may not disappear with the virus. Why does the incarnate one of John’s Gospel--the gospel of the incarnation after all!-- suddenly go untouchable? And only with Maria the Magdalene? And in the first manifestation of his resurrected bodily self?
In the informal forcefield of textual effects, the scene operates very much like it does in most of the history of its representation. In endless paintings and routine citations, the Incarnate Word sounds at this moment--this peak moment of the recognition of Jesus’ bodily resurrection--forbidding. In the history of its reception, it carries a strong whiff of the classic misogynist rejection of feminine fleshliness. It implies that Maria (to stay with the Greek version of the name) is inappropriately sensuous, and he, always celibate, but now in his supernaturally altered state, cuts her off at the pass. No hugs allowed. It comes redolent with the history of misreading Maria M. as an ex-sex worker or adulteress. It comes suffused with the dualistic disembodiment of the Western White Man Christianity, for which woman was already associated with darkness and dirt. Don’t touch me--your impurity pollutes, distracts, degrades. It spreads. You contaminate. Like a virus.
That degradation of the second sex long precedes and exceeds biblical versions of gender and sexuality. And it largely though never totally managed to cancel the Gospel’s more gender-egalitarian gestures. But the sexist reading of the passage can summon fellow Gospel support, with Luke attributing to Maria M “seven demons”--who get successfully exorcised [Luke 8:2]. According to the extracanonical Pistis Sophia, Mary as--at least to Jesus--an indispensable and apparently communicative member of the band--she was subject to Peter’s resentful rage: “My Lord, we will not endure this woman, for she taketh the opportunity from us and hath let none of us speak, but she discourseth many times.”[1] If the gnostic Pistis Sophia thus casts her as an overly verbal, pushy woman, impeding the true disciples’ conversation time with their Lord, another ancient Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, has Peter demand that Jesus expel her from the community--on the basis of straight male supremacism: “Simon Peter said to them, Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.”[2] Fortunately Jesus refuses Peter’s demand (although the terms by which he counters Peter’s logic seem for strategic reasons to share the same premise--but that is another story.)
Yet even within the canonical Johannine context, a sexist reading of “don’t touch me” can summon internal support. For why in the very same chapter does Jesus return, only one week later, for the express purpose of letting doubting Thomas touch him? Why then the “noli me tangere” to his female friend? The touch of a disbelieving guy is invited, hers is prohibited. What credible reading might cut against the apparent traces of ancient misogyny?
I would first return to the original Greek in John 20.17 of the phrase in question: me mou haptou. While the Latin translation, tangere, signals an act of touch, the Greek haptou carries a different connotation--that of the ongoing action of ‘holding’. Indeed the New Revised Standard Version offers: “Do not hold on to me…” This translation carries then a quite different register of meaning--it is not that touch is being prohibited. The text after all does not say she tries to embrace him, it just narrates the stunned moment of recognition of who this “gardener” really is: “Rabbouni! (which means Teacher.)” Accordingly we should read her response somewhat differently: of course she will want to hold on to him, to keep him now with her, with all of them, as though he had come back to stay. But to hold on would be to prevent the necessary work of grief at this life that was so horrifically lost. Whatever new form of connection becomes impossibly possible, it will not be the same as their time together in day to day community. Whoever he is now or will be, the Nazarene teacher, the beloved friend, did die, is gone, is dead.
Without I hope discoursing (too) many times, I am tempted to wonder if this need to let go goes both ways. I can’t help remembering that I was as a teenager first opened to religion at all by the gift of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and so by the practice of “letting go.”[3] Not of leaving the body or the world, but of learning not to cling to any of it. And it was not long thereafter that in an Intro to the Old Testament course that has everything to do with this undergrad later becoming a theologian, Professor Paul Hanson chose to share with us a recording from the then superpopular musical Jesus Christ Superstar: it was Mary Magdalene singing "I don’t know how to love him." Naturally letting go of him--especially upon his im/possible return--would be unbearably difficult. This ‘don’t hold onto me’ has little to do with the sense of touch.
The verse’s hint of brusqueness can be heard of course as a flesh-transcending reprimand of her sensuality. Or quite differently, it can be read as precisely the wisdom she needs at that inconceivably fraught moment between loss and joy. The wisdom to simultaneously love and let go, without dissociation or denial? And might the letting go have been a challenge for him too? Might it be read as an expression of his own affect as well? He also must not be drawn backwards like a ghost into his life before crucifixion. Yet whatever his post-death ontology, would he not still love her--and precisely in her own struggle to love him appropriately? And so he must not let either of them “hold on.” Which might be impossible to distinguish from being held onto.
For if love--agape or eros--contains an irreducible element of reciprocity and so of at least empathic compassion, however asymmetrical, has love vanished from whatever state of metamorphosis or metaphor the story imagined him to manifest? Perhaps it does vanish--for instance, from the Thomist rendition of divinity as Unmoved Mover. Hence some of us have chosen instead the theology of a Most Moved Mover.[4] Interpreted either in his full humanity or full divinity, this resurrected one would be moved by the garden encounter with Maria M, would be in that single moment addressing his movement toward her as well as hers toward him.
Interestingly, the word “resurrection” is not used in John’s narrative of the empty tomb and the subsequent appearances. It uses it of him only once, much earlier, responding to a woman’s expectation of the “last day,” and of a collective resurrection [11.24]. And he uses it once: “I am the resurrection and the life.” [11.25] Already, long before the cross and its aftermath, this “I am.” There is no gap, no contradiction, between flesh and spirit, between his incarnation and his resurrection, between nature and supernature, in that enlivening poetry. This is after all the gospel of the Word become flesh. Not an epistle of spirit vs flesh.[5]
We might then infer, exercising empathy with the writer of this gospel, something like: without a letting go of the flesh that died--there is no resurrection. The life of the risen Christ is indeed the life that was fully incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. But that one’s body did die. It was mortal and vulnerable like all the bodies of the earth. Tragically Christianity has clung ferociously to the resurrected one, not despite Good Friday quite mourning his death, his hideous political execution, but skipping right on to a supernatural solution. So it seems much of our tradition has been reanimating a corpse--holding on rather than letting it go.
The letting go: Mary got it; Christendom may not have. And so it seems that much of the resurrective potential of scripture has been wasted: the potential to instigate collective work for a socially just and ecologically vibrant life together: the basileia, the kingdom which my colleague Ada Maria Isasi Diaz long ago wrote as “kindom,”[6] a realm of our fleshly interdependence, a life imagined long before Jesus by his favorite prophet, Isaiah, as new, radically renewed heaven, earth, Jerusalem… That imaginary got rendered supernatural, rather than being allowed to supercharge all of the natural life of the earth, us included. There could have been--and might yet be?--a far healthier species, a healed planet, a touch of the original garden hinted at by the one who appears first as gardener. Not touch, but being out of touch--intimately and collectively--is the problem. Getting in touch with each other, and on principle with every other, the difficult others different in gender, yes, and in sex, in race, in religion or lack thereof; and at the same time the myriad others animal, vegetable, mineral: that is not the work of a one-off, ontologically exceptional incarnation. Making Jesus the exceptional human finally made him prove the rule--the rule of the old and very versatile basileias of imperial power and greed. Of holding on. And with the accumulation of centuries and power, the holding pattern turns into a Christendom of control and commodification.
And yet movements, often inflected by the prophets and the gospels, for transformative justice, for that renewed Earth of the messy all of us, have not stopped. The movements for women, civil rights, and peace, for environmental and LGBTQ+ justice, more recently BLM--all these carry significant levels of Christian participation. But that prophetic work, Christian or other, rarely unfolds in the name of an exclusively Christian incarnation. It expresses what we might call a planetary intercarnation.[7] And in them all, in their outrage, there is a work of grief for all that has been betrayed and lost. As with Maria M, and the gathering of the bereaved community, the griefwork means we don’t hold on to what is already lost, dead. But we may--we occasionally do--embrace a greater body and practice its enlivening spirit. And hug a weeping willow.
[1]Pistis Sophia: The Gnostic Tradition of Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and His Disciples, trans. G.R. S. Mead (Dover, 2005).
[2]See “The Conflict between Peter and Mary, and other Issues,” http://www.public.asu.edu/~greywolf/religion/ecpaper2.html
[3]Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (Tuttle, 1957).
[4]See Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (Yale, 1948).
[5]See Mayra Rivera, Poetics of Flesh (Duke, 2015).
[6]Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Orbis, 1996).
[7]Catherine Keller, Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (Fordham, 2017).