Out of the Tomb: The Black Queer Jesus & the Easter Vigil, Part 2
Written in the spring of 2018, “Out of the Tomb: The Black Queer Jesus and the Easter Vigil” was produced for the completion of my Masters of Divinity Degree at Vanderbilt University. It is an offering that seeks to reflect upon the intersections of embodiment, theology, and ritual practice. As I prepared to share this, I found myself surprised by how much has remained the same and changed within me since then. I offer this three part series in honor of Holy Week, the time in which the Christian/Jesus Following Community honors The Anointed One’s entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday leading up to his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
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Construction
“And he walks with me/ and he talks with me/ and he tells me I am his own/ and the joy we share as we tarry there/ none other has ever known” speaks of a Jesus who is personal, human yet divine, present and aware, knowable and touchable. The hymn, In the Garden, a personal favorite of mine, reflects my own work towards rebuking the White Jesus and claiming the Black Queer Jesus as one who has witnessed my struggle as a black queer person in the midst of the Tempter’s snares. He is the one who has taken on life in warm black flesh over and against the Jesus of my childhood who was indifferent, muted, and aloof. The Black Queer Jesus is he who has taken upon the struggle of my people, who has taken on my suffering. Not in the sense of the conventional suffering servant, but one who witnesses the convoluted nature of the human experience, reminding me, reminding us, of the God who sees us and who made us in Her image. It is a Jesus who reminds us that he is not just in solidarity with us, but has, and continues to experience the suffering of non-normative people as he did in his own lifetime — he is one of us. In Jesus we are reminded that God is the giver of all good gifts, the Blessed One, who will never forsake us, as She is concerned with our liberation from death-dealing systems of sin in all of their interlocking forms via her self-disclosure in Jesus the Christ.
Birth & Ministry
Jesus’ oneness with us as the Black Queer One, both alongside us and as one of us, can be seen in the context of his birth. It is important to remember that Jesus is the child of a subjugated people who lived under oppression enacted by the Roman state and overseen by an apathetic local government. Within the context of Jesus’ birth to the virgin Mary, the incarnation stands as to signify the innate presence of God within creation unfolding. It is here that resistance and resilience are known in light of daunting obstacles that would in normal circumstances crush the human will to live, let alone thrive. Such resiliency overall is rooted in the blessings of the Spirit: “persistence, hope, joy, justice-making, and fortitude.”[29] As the Black Queer Anointed One who walks along side us today, who experienced our struggle some 2,000 years ago, the gifts of the Spirit serves as that which gives life to our weary bones, sustaining us through familial rejection and societal ostracization. This is the lived context to the birth and formative years of Jesus’ life, that which exemplifies his own struggle as it mirrors our own. It is that which gives foundation to his ministry as he speaks to our own suffering in a convoluted world where we miraculously find strength in the midst of chaos.
While perceptions of Jesus’ ministry can be understood in a variety of ways as demonstrated throughout the gospels, scholars have attempted to summarize his ministry as emphasizing the closeness of God’s Kingdom (Mk. 1:15) and the importance of supporting the poor (Lk. 4:18). Beyond simply a critique of capitalism in its creation of financially vulnerable peoples, more broadly, the Black Queer One’s ministry honed in on the multifaceted nature of the death-dealing systems of sin that created poverty amongst God’s children. This includes the critiques of unethical religious authorities (Mt. 23:13), the shrewdness of the Roman Empire against God’s Kindom (Jn. 18:36), and those considered outcasts and most in need of support due to an apathetic society at large (Mt. 5: 3–12). The Black Queer Jesus works at the intersections of the human experience, one that acknowledges the complexities of the flesh as it is subjugated to the plight of an empire that finds its foundation in white supremacist capitalist regime of heteronormativity. It is ultimately in Jesus’s context as a Jew, the child of an oppressed people, that he finds his moral mission to fully live into the covenant crafted by the Good Giver.
When Jesus’ mission is held in relation to the queer black experience of today, we as queer black men are able to locate a deeply meaningful insight that allows us to be in relationship with ourselves, with our community, and with God Herself in a different way. It is one that says that while our world might prioritize everything that we might not be and everything we might not have, in God, the Creator of All, we are named and claimed and known as good. We might be outcasts of an apathetic society, but God has enacted grace through Jesus’ ministry to those like us, as he is like us. God enacted a revolutionary event in Jesus’ personhood that speaks against society and claims unapologetically that we are worthy, loved, and whole. That our skin is as rich as the black earth, that our love is as righteous as that which formed us, and that our being is pleasing before Her. In truth, Jesus’ ministry was not one rooted in the respectability politics of the empire but was and is a prophetic administration of radical divine love firmly rooted in his own ancestral heritage of resistance and resilience as the Black Queer One.
Death
Due to Jesus’ unapologetic ministry, one simultaneously rooted in both the divine covenant of inherent worth and intentional resistance, the state deemed it necessary that he die in a violent, public way. Such an execution, based on trumped-up charges, only makes sense in the context of antiquity as to enforce further submission to the status quo. Historical record reveals that Jewish authorities in Judea during the 1s century lacked the use of such a corporal form of punishment as that of crucifixion. And as such, Jesus’ public hanging was ultimately enacted by the Roman state that found itself threatened by the resiliency of Jesus’ black queerness. It was a proclamation given in hopes to extinguish further objection to the cultural standards of subjugation and oppression as decreed by death-dealing institutions of power.
In our contemporary moment, crucifixion is synonymous with the violent slayings of black queer men in public and private spheres. Most notable are the slayings of black men and children by the hands of law enforcement — sanctioned by the state as a plausible means to execute if an officer feels threatened or physically endangered. Yet rarely discussed are the thousands of men who lay waste, either literally or metaphorically, to drug addiction, a lack of access to public assistance in the forms of housing and medication, suicide, depression and loneliness, and having to be a “Down Low Brutha.” All of these produce slain black bodies which lie for hours in streets, hunched over in alleyways, unclaimed in morgues, all to somehow appear as the next viral image or video to display yet again the United States’ open hostility and indifference towards black queer existence.
Resurrection of the Black Queer Jesus
Yet in Jesus there is life over death, hope over despair, and truth over deceit in the ways that society seeks to create a narrowly defined notion of lived acceptability. As Robert Goss states, “A queer reclamation of Jesus retrieves the socially embedded Jesus and the political dimensions of his crucifixion. It was a brutal political death at the hands of a repressive political infrastructure.”[30] These characteristics of the Divine are seen and known via the resurrection of the Black Queer One. “The queer Christ not only bursts forth from the empty tomb, leaving behind the grave clothes of homophobic violence and compulsory heterosexuality,” Thomas Bohache states, “but also is resurrected in each of us as we accept our queerness — our divine birthright to imagine, to stir up, and to spoil in God’s name.”[31] The resurrection of the Black Queer Christ vehemently rejects the confines of heteronormativity and white supremacy, and boldly proclaims God’s self-disclosure as a God of overwhelming acceptance and radical love. This love spoils the empire’s plan for domination and reminds those of us who stand at the margins that we are seen in God’s enactment through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We are thus not invited into the tomb-closet, but are called out of the wasteland as to step into our blessed authenticity.
In the resurrection we are pulled even closer as the benefactors of God’s preferential treatment as demonstrated through Jesus. Whether one believes in a physical resurrection or not is of no concern, because to do otherwise would be to confine God’s ability to enact radical change, and to do so would be just another example of Christian supremacy attempting to separate us from the Divine. As queer theologian Gary Comstock so artfully articulates, “the resurrection is not some tricky maneuver of raising the actual body of Christ or even of devotedly remembering everything he was and said we should do; the resurrection is instead lifting up our own lives, taking responsibility for making them full and responsive to the lives around us.”[32] It is in the principled struggle of both black and queer theology that this is most clearly known, two theological trajectories that seek to speak from the embodied experience as to witness to the work of She Who Is. The resurrection event isn’t simply a passive action but is instead a metaphysical collision of life-giving proportions, reminding us that the Black Queer One struggled himself and carries on in our struggle towards liberation in the Beloved Kindom as initiated by God Herself.
Resistance and Resilience
The resurrection of Christ within us is a divine mission that overrides the pain caused by death dealing systems given form by empire. This radical turn via God in the Black Queer One doesn’t mean that pain will cease to be, but instead stands to honor our truth, our being-ness, ensuring that it is both embraced and realized as divinely ordained. There is something true within Bohache statement when he says “the Christological importance of the cross for queers is the possibility of meeting God in our pain and receiving ultimate transcendence.”[33] Yet we should not stop there, for to do so would place a burdensome emphasis on the systemic injustices that we as queer black men experience because of our embodiment. Suffering and pain is not the signature of life on earth but is a part of the overall complexity that is our membership within creation unfolding. Suffering and pain known in either the cross or in the coming out experience, one that could be interpreted as being the same, is but only half of the triumphant narrative that is the Black Queer Jesus’ resurrection in which God makes herself known. Like Jesus on the cross, awkward and painful, so is the realization of embodiment as sexual people from womb to tomb. While White Supremacy seeks to shape us to insatiably crave one thing: white, heterosexual, cis-malness. Christ calls us into our own being as divinely created queer black men made in the image of the Most High and bestowed with such gifts as only God Herself could bequeath. It is one that goes above and beyond the narratives of death and destruction which society says we deserve because of our skin tone and means of loving making! It is one that transcends death and says we are resilient! In a God who breathes on dry bones and quickens life into being, fully and completely — we are triumphant.
[29] Bohache, Christology From the Margins, 241.
[30] Robert Goss, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 81.
[31] Bohache, Christology From the Margins, 256.
[32] Gary David Comstock, Gay Theology Without Apology (Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1993), 102.
[33] Bohache, Christology From the Margins, 253.
