My theological education continually confronted me with the claim that theological language is symbolic and analogical. Not just some God-talk, but all of it. Everything we say and try to say about “God” is a symbol (it points toward a reality we cannot grasp directly) or an analogy (a comparison of two things that are not the same but sufficiently so to help us think and communicate).
Most people get this readily enough when they come across biblical texts with images that so clearly rely on common literary tropes: God as a “mother eagle,” for example, who hovers over her nest (Deut. 32:11-12), or describing God as a “fortress,” “rock,” “shield,” and “horn” (Psalm 18:2), or Jesus as the “vine” and his disciples as the “branches” (John 15:1). But the claim about symbolic language applies not only to the obvious examples, but as some theologians have noted, to all theological speech. Even when we declare that “God is love” our experiences of human love fall far short of what divine love is actually all about.
This coming Sunday, as it does every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary gives us another image from the Gospel according to John. It comes from John’s tenth chapter about Jesus as the “good shepherd.” Also appointed for this very same day is a passage from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to John (7:9-17), where Jesus is portrayed as the “lamb who was slain”—a lamb who is now not only alive but living at the center of heaven’s throne as a shepherd.
Tossing those two readings together on a single Sunday puts “theology-as-symbolic-speech” on steroids. The peculiar pairing of lamb-as-shepherd is just one of many illustrations of what drew me more than 20 years ago to the academic discipline known as “queer theory” in my theological work, and why I felt certain it could provide useful tools for Christian theology.
As queer theorists often want to note, the categorial classification schemes we devise for our identities and relationships—male and female, gay and straight, among so many others—simply fall short, and sometimes hideously short, of how people actually live and who they understand themselves to be. Those categories become tightly sealed boxes, restricting our movements and dictating our behaviors. In that sense, at least for some of these social theorists, to “queer” a category is to scramble its standard definitions, unravel its regulatory certainties, and liberate a whole new set of evocative possibilities from its conceptual prison. Surely this is what John the Divine intended (even if he didn’t think of it this way) when he queered the image of a lamb, the one who had been slain by the Roman Empire, and who now sits enthroned as a heavenly shepherd.
Dealing with the limits of language in texts where the symbols are obviously scrambled is one thing; it’s quite another to loosen one’s grip on religious terms that more truly have their grip on us, as it were. One of the most obvious and highly-charged examples of this is the language of God as “Father.”
That paternal image of God was so deeply embedded in my Christian faith for so many years, I could scarcely imagine a Christian life without it; therein lies the challenge of appreciating the symbolic character of not just some but all theological speech. I find it helpful in that regard to remember the long history of patriarchal societies from which most religious traditions emerged; in those societies, anyone who is “in charge,” or has power, or can make decisions, is almost assuredly male and probably a father. It’s a fairly short step from that social arrangement to configuring “Creator God” as a paternal figure.
But there’s another underlying assumption to notice carefully in that historical development: the analysis I just outlined relies on a notion of God that involves, by definition, someone “being in charge” and “in control.” Power itself needs to be “queered.”
So I have to wonder: could the annual observance of “Mother’s Day” falling on “Good Shepherd Sunday” in the Easter season help us navigate these quandaries in theological speech? Maybe. But just exchanging one word for another—God the Father is now Mother—won’t take us very far down that road if all the patriarchal power is still in place. What is “power,” anyway? Who wields it? Under what conditions and for what ends? I’m certainly glad my own mother ran our household—my dear old novelist-dad would have made a mess of it. Did power actually reside anywhere in that domestic arrangement, or did it continually circulate throughout our relationships in glimmering gyres of affection and Midwestern practicality?
I’m not paying nearly enough attention to my own power as a white man as I write this (what this blog post needs is a trans-woman of color at the helm), but I am trying to pay attention to the image of the “lamb as shepherd” even as I harbor lovely memories of my mother—as she writes the checks to pay the bills while dad sits at his desk in the basement writing his novels.
It’s at least a bit subversive to suppose that a lamb can function as a shepherd, and by putting a lamb on the heavenly throne at the pinnacle of divine glory John the Divine certainly invites a reassessment of our standard modes of describing divine authority—or rather, that those typical modes just don’t apply. And that’s when I need to get busy and sort out what my own gendered power and privilege.
In the end, we only begin to realize that our job is not somehow to “make sense” of our theological traditions (whatever that may mean) but instead to allow those traditions to invite us ever deeper into the mystery of divine life at the very heart of the Universe—a mystery not merely to marvel at but find ourselves undone by and then changed.
For now—or maybe for always—in this world of so much pain and sorrow, I turn to the queerness of theological speech for comfort. It might lead me still deeper into the heart of the Universe where a rather queer Creator God transcends yet also fulfills everything I had always hoped a “father” and a “mother” might offer: unfailing care and undying love.
Or as John the Divine will invite us to imagine for Good Shepherd Sunday:
“The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,
guiding them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
