Did Jesus ‘Love’ Anyone?

April 15, 2007

I am continuing to review Theodore Jennings, Jr.’s The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament. The first installation of this series can be found here.

Did Jesus love anyone? I suppose many Christians would, without thinking, suggest Jesus loved everyone. Of course, there are many practical ways Jesus is imaged loving people in the Gospels. However, where in the Scriptures is Jesus said, explicitly, to love someone?

Jennings writes: “[W]ith a single exception, the only Gospel in which Jesus is said to love someone—even God, let alone another human being—is the Gospel of John.” Mark is the single exception (10:17-21).

Jesus Loves…

Jesus is said to love all followers (Jn 13:1; 14:21); Jesus is said to love a group of three people: Mary of Bethany, Martha, and Lazarus (11:5); Jesus, in the view of other people, is said to love Lazarus (11:3, 36); Jesus is said, five times, to love another male disciple (13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20).

The question becomes: what would the contemporary gay reader make of the textual moments Jesus is said to love anyone? Would the ‘gaydar’ bleep upon coming near any of these texts?

Before “cruising the Scriptures” (Koch), I think the Greek terminology for love needs some attention here. Jennings addresses the Greek for love in chapter four: “Reconsidering the Gospel of John.”

In the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) and the the New Testament, agape and philia are used for love. Christian students are often taught that agape is used to denote the “disinterested love of [the philosopher’s] God” and philia is used to indicate love between friends. Eros is not used in either the Septuagint or the New Testament. What might be surprising is agape stands in for eros in the Bible. In John, agape and philia are equivalent—and may be used together in order blunt the asymmetrical form of love often indicated in Greek by eros. The point being made here is not that every instance of agape is one indicating some form of sexual desire, etc…but that agape is not a sterile word, a word that can be used only for a theological construction of God not rooted in the seedy biblical materials. As in all cases, we need context, not a theological dictionary, to help us understand what is being said.

Posted by Tony Posted in Books, Posts by Tony, Queer / Theology, The Church