by Ashtyn Adams 1 Kings 3:10-12 (NRSV) |
It invites the question, how do we become a second Eve and offer companionship to creation? The lovers treat one another and the entire land with tenderness and respect. If this is a picture of redemption, of restoration, then a harmonious creation is at the center of it along with an egalitarian relationship between the sexes. |
Books:
Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.
Pardes, Ilana. Song of Songs: A Biography. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Matthew 9:20-23
20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment.
There is a deep kinship between women and the Earth which witnesses to a central theme in Genesis: many creations, one Creator. Women’s menstruation is one among many ecological cycles, and, for example, most notably mimics the 28-day lunar cycle. Here, the intimate interconnectedness between our bodies and the earth from Genesis 2 is on full display: the Adam from the Adamah, the Earthing created from the Earth.
Understanding Jesus’ body as one of porous femininity is essential to our insight on the meaning and significance of the incarnation. While we ought to hold in tension how God does choose to work and love in specific, non-generic ways, this account helps us deemphasize the particularity of God becoming flesh as a Jew rather than a gentile, as a man rather than a woman. As one of my professors Dr. Chris Doran has observed, the Greek word for flesh, sarx, which appears in John’s gospel to speak of the incarnation, has its roots in the Hebrew basar, which refers to all living creatures, not just humans. I think the encounter with the bleeding woman uniquely underscores this idea in narrative form, allowing us to see how God indeed took on the stuff of living creatures, becoming a member of creation, and in this instance, a feminine, bleeding one. The incarnation is thus cosmic in scope and speaks to the goodness of creation as a whole. God is not anti-flesh or anti-world. In his book, Hope in the Age of Climate Change, Dr. Doran writes that the incarnation fully affirms that “God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being as fleshy, earthy creatures.”
Jesus does not avoid, but shares in the woman’s flow, becoming a body also marked by porosity.
There is more to be said. Mark and Luke are rich for theological discussion and research. Matthew’s redaction, in contrast, renders the woman passive and saves Jesus from the disordered and embarrassing presentation of porous femininity. We are given three short verses. Yet, attention and questions about what’s not there is as much of an important exegetical practice as to what is there. I find this month’s lectionary text in Matthew concerning the bleeding woman to still be quite pertinent to today in the sense that it testifies to a historic and tragic tendency to see female gendered blood as taboo, to look away, to forbid it in the sacred realm. Christian artwork has reinforced this gender binary time and again, with, for example, the classic images of Bathsheba bathing, presumably a ritual bath after her period has ended, but only showing her naked without any traces of blood. Mary’s priesthood is also denied in images as artists avoid showing Jesus’ birth. This is relevant because tampon and pad companies market their products on these patriarchal taboos around menstruation. Annie Dillon and Hannah Black have highlighted how disposable products dominate the industry and reinforce the status quo by promoting products as “antidotes to the shame and embarrassment women must feel about their periods. They almost always depict blue liquid rather than red blood, and avoid realistic imagery of menstruation by portraying women dancing or swimming. Some even suggest the need for women to accommodate male desires during menstruation.” The 12 billion pads and 7 billion tampons in the U.S. alone that fill up our landfills and contribute to ocean plastics cannot be separated from the messaging that women must hide, conceal, and quickly get rid of any evidence that they are experiencing their period. This is antithetical to the Jesus who freely bleeds on display and chose solidarity with the oppressed on the cross. It is well known that one of the key issues of environmental justice is that those who contribute the least to climate change suffer the most. The production process of menstrual products generates significant fossil fuel emissions, which communities of color will disproportionately bear the cost of. Promoting and providing alternative sustainable products, such as reusable menstrual cups, pads, and underwear, which have minimal impact on the planet, women’s bodies, and their wallets, may be one lasting solution that can save creation, women, and usher in the abundant life Jesus wills for us.
The 12 billion pads and 7 billion tampons in the U.S. alone that fill up our landfills and contribute to ocean plastics cannot be separated from the messaging that women must hide, conceal, and quickly get rid of any evidence that they are experiencing their period. This is antithetical to the Jesus who freely bleeds on display and chose solidarity with the oppressed on the cross.
Although traditionally concealed, menstruation is a form of participation in the divine life, a process which the God-man himself takes on. Like the ecological cycles of the Earth, it points to the Creator. It is an experience which speaks to our place within the created order, to the incarnation, and to the atonement itself.
Books:
Doran, Chris. Hope in the Age of Climate Change. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017.
Harris, Melanie L. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by Barry Windeatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Moss, Candida R. “The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25-34." Journal of Biblical Literature 129, no. 3 (2010): 507–19.
Rogers, Jr, Eugene F. Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Soskice, Janet M. The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Web Article:
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/planet-friendly-periods

Matthew 10:40-42 (NRSV)
40 “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 41 Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous, 42 and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
Key to these three verses in Matthew though is the designation of prophets. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about how prophets are “highly disturbed individuals.” Anyone who has read the prophets might laugh at the ironic language of reward if it is equated to a modern conception, because the prophets were ostracized, exiled, and killed. You do not want to be a prophet, the one who tells the truth about the moral state of the people, who says that few are guilty, but all are responsible, who delivers judgments of God’s wrath (which is only ever a wrath against injustice and for the purposes of restoration). The ceaseless shattering of indifference is the primary task of the prophet, and that is never something encouraged among a comfortable, gluttonous people. Today in the Anthropocene, the undertaking of the prophet will still include no fringe benefits. The message that our rhythms of production and consumption mean that land, water, plants, livestock, and people are being abused will be resisted for the purposes of convenience and indulgence. Yet, the truth remains that we are failing to give the time or affection to properly nurture the gift of creation. We must cling to the promise of the prophet which has always been the same: a promise of presence, of Immanuel, God with us.
This command might hold even more significance to us in our modern age with our particular disregard for abundant and clean water. We must remember that God is not somewhere up in the clouds, but the one providing manna in the wilderness, calling prophets to critique and restore our socio-political institutions, shifting our eyes to the ones without water.

Romans 6:1-4 (NRSV)
1 What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.
Paul’s own life of sin was marked by his time as a militant pharisee and violent persecutor of the Church. Then he was Saul, the man party to the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr killed for his faith, and who voted for the death of other Jesus followers. When he traveled along the road to Damascus he had a conversion experience: a light flashed around him as he fell to the ground, hearing a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” After being blind for three days, Saul the Pharisee becomes Paul the apostle to the gentiles, the very people Stephen gets his name from. For Paul, grace is an event that happened on the road to Damascus and he never gets over the fact that he has been saved by the same God he once so strenuously opposed. It compels him to go where no apostle has gone and ultimately be imprisoned and martyred himself. The church would look very different without his conversion, if Paul had simply continued as he had before.
In chapter six, we see Paul’s soteriology displayed, what it exactly means to be “saved.” We, as Christians, are not saved from something, but for something. In chapter two Paul has already asked, "Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" (Romans 2:4). The good news of Christ is not a get out of jail free card. Here, in chapter six, Paul further presses, “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? By no means!” Me genoito is the Greek word used here, almost a “hell no!” It is not quite a curse word, but it is a very strong no. Anyone who claims that sin can abound so grace abounds has missed the Gospel. A true encounter with the risen Lord leads to newness of life which witnesses to the daily, incremental grace and mercy of God. Yet, this is still the same sort of pervasive thinking in the climate crisis today. When there is a call to action over the rising seas and warming earth, Christians hide under excuses of pragmatism or realism. There is often an attitude that God will fix it, and display his power all the more. It is an unfaithful, passive, and misguided posture which Paul would abhor. The spirit infused process of sanctification only makes us more and more into the likeness of Christ, and empowers us to live into the Kingdom here and now. If we have truly died to sin, we cannot go on living in it. Yet, our relation with the rest of creation is marked by sin, the sin of violence and indifference. We must be radically changed like Paul on the road to Damascus. As Todd Still says, “imitatio Pauli is in fact imitatio Christi, this is, in seeking to emulate Paul in general I am more able to follow Christ in particular.”
If we have truly died to sin, we cannot go on living in it. Yet, our relation with the rest of creation is marked by sin, the sin of violence and indifference. We must be radically changed like Paul on the road to Damascus.
Are we to continue damaging the Earth in order that grace may increase? Me genoito! By no means.

Matthew 9:35-38 (NRSV)
35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

When I hear the phrase, “Lord of the harvest” though, one of the first images in my mind comes from my own grandpa preparing for his almond harvest in Madera, CA. I would watch him out in the fields for hours by himself, shaking and sweeping trees. To see the abundance afterwards was striking. I found myself in awe of how the harvest was there all along, how the green kernels hiding in the trees I stared at months prior were brought to completion as the brown hulls cracked open. Although my grandpa worked from dawn to dusk during harvest season, as an outsider looking in, I felt as though there was a sort of ease to it all, a rhythm and freeness I was drawn to. Was there a holiness to this process? Could I grasp something of the divine in the harvest? Was God like a humble farmer?
Jesus’ instruction to pray to the Lord of the harvest arises from compassion on the harassed and helpless among them and immediately precedes the commissioning of the twelve apostles to heal, cleanse, and proclaim that the Kingdom has come near. This metaphor of harvest and posture to be a worker in the field is essential to understanding how this kingdom is an alternative Kingdom to Caesars in Matthew’s Gospel. To pray to be a worker in the Lord's harvest field means life is not something to be possessed and safeguarded, raw materials are not something to be hoarded and exploited. There is plenty for all when we acknowledge whose the harvest is and do not take more than we need, which is why Jesus also reminds the apostles in the commissioning, “freely you have received, freely give.”
What does it mean to pray to the Lord of the harvest while we farm in a destructive way, without concern for our families, communities, and future generations?
Resources
Books:
Painter, Betsy. A Christian's Guide to Planet Earth: Why It Matters and How to Care for It. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022.

Matthew 9:9-13 (NRSV)
9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. 10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”


We should shamelessly apply this biblical story to ourselves and our time. We are the sinners too preoccupied by the demands of our consumer capitalist culture to perceive Christ’s searing, demanding, and electing gaze. We are implicated in acts of injustice against God’s people and planet. We prioritize profit and convenience over and against the flourishing of creation.

Genesis 1:26 (NRSV)
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
One of my Old Testament professors, Dr. Ellen Davis, reminds me that the divine image is not a widespread biblical characterization of human status. In fact, it’s rarely mentioned in our Holy Scriptures, which may denote more of “a possibility, unique but unspecified, rather than the established and permanent condition of human existence.” I find this notion constructive in our desire to understand God’s creative intention, particularly because the Christian fascination with image bearing has misappropriately endorsed unlimited human power over and against nature. Too often we have used this biblical language for exploitation rather than loving service to the created order. The Genesis narrative does not depict an anthropocentric, but a cosmocentric view of creation, in which humans are blessed with the high responsibility to bring flourishing to every living thing. Dominion is better understood as an exercise of skilled mastery in order to bless and nurture. We fail to mirror God if our power does not bring life, if harmony is not its ultimate function.
Dominion is better understood as an exercise of skilled mastery in order to bless and nurture. We fail to mirror God if our power does not bring life, if harmony is not its ultimate function.
How will we respond and honor the dignity bestowed upon us, the risk God has taken in making us “little less than divinity” (Ps 8:6)? How will we renew our commitment to bear the image of God and restore the integrity due to God’s oceans and marine life?
How will we respond and honor the dignity bestowed upon us, the risk God has taken in making us “little less than divinity” (Ps 8:6)? How will we renew our commitment to bear the image of God and restore the integrity due to God’s oceans and marine life?
Books:
Davis, Ellen F. Opening Israel's Scriptures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

About this Blog
This blog shares the activities of Creation Justice Ministries. We educate and equip Christians to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation.
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