Women who begat Jesus: Tamar

Women who begat Jesus: Tamar

The genealogy of Jesus, according to the gospel of Matthew, begins: A man was the father of a man, and that man the father of a man, and that man the father of a man and his brothers, and that man the father of a man and a man by Tamar, a woman.

My name is Tamar which means “date palm,” and like the fruit of palm trees, which grow in the desert and serve for weary travelers as landmarks for oases of water and offer them cool shade and protective covering, I am one offshoot of my family tree who serves for travelers on a spiritual journey as a symbol of courage amid desperation and betrayal.

My story is remembered in Genesis 38. I was the wife of Er, the firstborn of Judah, but Er was wicked in the sight of God, and so God put him to death. Then, as was the custom in our time and land, my father-in-law Judah told his next son, Onan, to produce a child by me for his dead brother. But since he knew the child would not be considered his, Onan instead spilled his seed on the ground. What he did was displeasing in the sight of God, and so he was put to death also.

Then my father-in-law Judah told me to return to my father’s house and wait until his last son, Shelah, was grown up. Only Judah was afraid that God would put Shelah to death, like his brothers, and so he forgot his promise to me. And in our culture, a woman who does not have a husband to protect her or sons to care for her might as well be a prostitute.

Well, that’s exactly what my father-in-law thought he saw—a prostitute—when he saw me—only he didn’t recognize me—sitting on the side of the road with a veil covering my face. Not knowing I was his daughter-in-law to whom he had broken his promise, he propositioned me. When he offered to pay me with a goat, I asked for his signet, cord and staff as collateral, which he gave me. Then my father-in-law came in to me, and I conceived a child by him.

After that one time, I took off the veil and went back to being a widow. When my father-in-law sent the goat in exchange for his signet, cord and staff, he was told there was no prostitute. Believing he had been robbed he let it go so that he would not be laughed at.

But when my father-in-law heard I had played the role of a prostitute and was pregnant, he did not laugh; he ordered me to be burned to death.

It was then that I displayed the signet, cord and staff and announced to everyone, “These belong to the man who made me pregnant.” 

           

Well, my father-in-law had no choice but to acknowledge that they were his. He was even moved to say, “She is more in the right than me since I did not give her to my last son.”

Never again, with me, did my father-in-law lie—in either sense of the word.

Getting the house ready for Christmas

Getting the house ready for Christmas

We have a new Advent tradition at our place: we get the house ready for Christmas.

The house Jesus was born in.

A couple years ago the young people in my congregation made a model of a typical first-century Palestinian peasant abode, starting with a large cardboard box and opening it up like a doll’s house. The flat roof is a loft or upper room—kataluma in the Greek (Luke 2:7 and 22:11)—where guests would stay, accessible by steps along the side of the house.

The back corner of the main floor is where the elder members of the multi-generational family would have resided. The youth made tables and chairs out of shoe boxes, and wooden Scrabble tile holders serve as benches. One outside wall has a fireplace, complete with magic-marker red flames, although most of the food preparation would have taken place outside in a courtyard formed by several such houses.

The elders’ corner was also the starting point for sweeping the floor across to the opposite corner where the animals would have been installed. This is where bodily functions took place—including the birthing of babies—and it would have been handy to lay a newborn in a manger, or feeding trough, lined with fresh hay. Which is to say, as the gospels do (Matthew 2:11, Luke 2:7), Jesus was born in a house, the part where the animals were kept, just like every other poor first-century Palestinian child.

Given that Jesus was a child of color, there are several nativity sets—all fair-trade—that are ethnically accurate: one from Bangladesh includes sturdy clay characters with brown faces and dark hair (www.createdgifts.org), and one from Java has tall wooden figures whose bodies are painted light brown (www.tradecraftshop.co.uk). I personally like the set handcrafted with care by Paragon Ceramics in Dedza, Malawi; no two figures are the same, and each one has a captivating expression. In one set Joseph is hugging himself with joy, and in another he is kneeling and his mouth is exclaiming, “Ohh!” The Malawi angel is blowing a cattle horn to announce the good news of the birth of the messiah. All the shepherds carry sticks, and one is holding a lamb on his shoulders. And the wise travelers from afar are riding a donkey, a camel, and an elephant, respectively.

Even though I had studied the social and material world of the Bible in seminary, where one of my teachers drove home the truth about Jesus’ racial heritage—You can’t hide a white baby in Egypt—it took children of color coming into my world—my first two grandsons, adopted from Ethiopia and Thailand—to prompt me to purchase African and Asian nativity sets. And because their parents are white I took some figures from my original white nativity and some from the black and brown nativities to make a complete tableau, sent one multicultural set to them, kept one multicultural set at home, and took one multicultural set to church.

Each year a nativity set from a different country is added to the cardboard house so we get a sense of Jesus’ ever-expanding birthplace: babies and parents, women and men, young and old, extended family arriving for the census and star-followers from the East, and a growing menagerie of livestock and their herders. All of which illustrate the fact that Mary and Joseph are staying in a relative’s home overflowing with Middle-eastern hospitality—not in a “cattle shed” behind an “inn,” neither of which are in the Bible although they continue to plague pageants and perpetuate the anti-Semitic notion that Jesus was rejected by his own at birth.

And to mix it up a bit, there’s a female-looking wise person from Java, and a set of light-skinned figures constructed from rolled-up magazine pages and made in Vietnam (www.serv.org). After all, Jesus came into the world for us whites, too.

Finding Jesus to be gay

Finding Jesus to be gay

One day I was phoned out of the blue by a British tabloid reporter who wanted my response, as a pro-gay Christian minister, to a statement made by Elton John. In a magazine interview the pop star—who is British and white and gay and married and a father—had said that Jesus was gay. Or rather, because Jesus so empathized with outcasts and understood intimately where marginalized people were coming from, Elton John found Jesus to be gay.

What was my comment? I am quoted, almost accurately, in the Daily Record (Friday, February 19, 2010, p. 9) as saying, “I think it’s wonderful for anybody, including Elton John, to imagine Jesus as being like them. This is very common, and in the Western world we do it all the time, imagining Jesus to be white when, in fact, he was a man of colour.” Actually I said, “Jesus was a person of color.”

I grew up in the Southern United States surrounded by blond-haired, blue-eyed baby Jesuses. Even Black churches portrayed Jesus as white. I remember from my childhood a print of Rembrandt’s “Head of Christ” with long dark hair, an unkempt beard, and a brooding expression. There’s no way this “long-haired hippie,” as my grandfather would have labeled him back in the 70’s, would be allowed through airport security without close scrutiny these days.

Over the years I have acquired some art books with pictures of Jesus from around the world and through the centuries: colorful paintings of the Christ Child on Austrian glass, Japanese silk, Ethiopian panels, ancient frescos, and modern felt banners. Carvings of Jesus in ivory (11th century Byzantine), wood (20th century Philippines), marble (13th century Italian), and scrimshaw (19th century Native American). Crucifixes made of all types of castable metal, stained glass, gold-leaf iconography, and woven straw. Each face a different color and reflecting a distinct culture.

Around the time that Elton John came out about Jesus being gay, a painting by Marc Chagall was discovered in an auction in Paris by someone from The London Jewish Museum of Art. Made in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War Holocaust the painting shows Jesus as a modern Jewish person, naked and hanging on a cross, with a Nazi officer at the foot of a ladder that’s just been used to carry out the crucifixion. Chagall—who was Jewish, as was Jesus—depicts Jesus with a male face and upper body but with feminine hips and female genitals, symbolizing the genocide of Jewish women and men and girls and boys in Nazi concentration camps.

I find Jesus to be not only a transgender person but also a lesbian woman and a gay man and a bisexual individual, just like the many “homosexuals” persecuted by the Nazis. And, sadly, still persecuted today. Even for just stating the obvious.