When Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi in the summer of 1955 to visit relatives, he was a strong and vital 14-year-old boy, ready to dance with the world, ready to make his way into a new day that he believed, tragically, was ready for him. When he returned to Chicago, he was dead. A body that by all rights should have only just begun to live had instead been rendered refuse, a lynched body, shot, beaten, broken, and disfigured, left unrecognizable by the blows of the ideologues of racial purity and by the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie River, at the bottom of which he had been dumped, tied by the neck with barbed wire to a 70-pound fan stolen from a nearby cotton gin. His mother insisted on an open casket at the funeral and as tens of thousands of mourners passed his mutilated corpse, the shadow of chattel slavery—of human beings kidnapped, trafficked, bred, bought, sold, and worked to death—passed for a time across the consciousness of America.
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Purity laws operated in ancient Israel to protect the well being of God’s chosen people. They protected particular bodies, but also social bodies, especially the household and the kingdom. The Israelite body, whether particular or social, was to be whole. To be whole meant to be be intact. Thus a pure body was to have “all its parts and functions,” e.g., missing no limbs, no deficiency, such as blindness, no dysfunction, such as eunuchism. But also, and “perhaps most important, a whole body [was to contain] itself within fixed boundaries,” which meant, within its real or imagined uninterrupted skin. Any opening of the skin was tightly regulated and prone to defile the body. Leprosy, oozing or bleeding sores, or genital discharge or menstruation rendered the body unclean, because the flow transgressed the body’s epidermal boundary and thus its integrity. Rituals were thus required to restore it. Whenever the skin is broken, the inside gets out, but also the outside gets in. The broken one is thus no longer unambiguously one.
A household also was understood to be a kind of body. “It [too] needed integrity, wholeness, and productive functioning to survive.” Among the responsibilities of the male head of household was to protect “his” women whose anatomy and fertility constituted, like an unlocked gate, a constant vulnerability to the integrity of the family. And so, a stranger was a threat, since he could easily, by seduction or rape, violate that integrity.
That the kingdom was a kind of body as well, with definite boundaries, is exemplified by Israel’s understanding of “foreign bodies.” From the beginning a differentiation was entailed between those who were Israelites by birth and those who were not. However, ethnic identity became especially important in the postexilic period, when there was no longer a king to center a weakened Israel, now under the heel of Persia. Israelites, having returned from Babylonian captivity, found themselves among non-Israelites native to the very land God had promised to them, Abraham’s children. Ethnic identity came to constitute Israel’s skin in this period.
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The Italian peninsula enjoyed a period of relative peace during the Augustan era, which it celebrated by constructing architecturally striking colonial cities, from c. 35 B.C. to c. 20 A.D. These, of course, were walled cities. They were walled, at great expense and effort, despite there being neither the threat of invasion, nor a deterrent provided by them as they were actually built: by design they were thin or low or interspersed by negotiable gaps. They were, however, beautiful, visible from miles away, their intricate stonework striking upon closer approach. They were decorated by inscriptions and carvings, commonly of erect phalluses, signifying the cities’ power to repel attack.
The function of the walls was symbolic. Walls were understood to signify “the Augustan vision of a new moral order,” a vision of “power, security, and order,” a vision of “identity,” “strength, [and] status.” Perhaps because they had at best only relative practical security, their walls became a boast in the sufficiency of the Pax Romana.
A city’s “foundation ritual” underscored its “metaphysical identity” as a city of Rome. Often a city was built linked to an ancient, local, “pre-Roman sanctuary site,” thus bringing it, too, under Rome’s authority. “City walls of this period should be read as a physical manifestation of imperial values, designed to impress and intimidate and to give visual reinforcement to the Augustan order.” It was in the Empire, with all its divine power and rationality, that these cities were rooted and from the Empire that they drew their vitality and were kept both safe and flourishing.
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When the New Jerusalem comes down from “heaven” and with it God descends to dwell with God’s creatures, what had been hidden from the beginning is disclosed. It is an incomprehensibly roomy city, 12,000 stadia in width, length, and height. It is, we might say, more spacious than the cosmos. It is a city—therefore it is walled; and like Italian Augustan colonial cities, its walls are ornate—but to such a degree that the imagination is overwhelmed. The walls themselves are made of transparent jasper, a glistening multicolored quartz. The twelve foundations of the wall, the names of the twelve apostles inscribed upon them, are covered in jewels. The city itself is made of gold, so pure that it, too, is transparent.
Though it, too, is to be understood as a basileia, as the unveiling of great power, its might is radically different from Rome’s. There are, among other things, no images of erect phalluses anywhere to be seen. Further, though its power is announced to be that of the mighty “Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” when the curtain is thrown back and this “lion” walks to center stage, the spotlight hits “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered” (Rev 5), i.e., the might of this city is that of the mutilated body of a helpless, juvenile animal.
The enormous walls of the New Jerusalem, as high as they are wide, stand agape. Each is interrupted by three enormous gates, twelve in all, each an enormous, single pearl, upon which are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, at each of which is an angel—and the gates stand always . . . open.
Unlike Italian Augustan colonial cities and Judean Herodian Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem is linked to no sanctuary or temple. The disclosure of “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” is enough. God’s holiness is manifest here. It dwells in the Lamb, as a flame dwells in a lamp, and through its hide, ruptured by the wounds of slaughter, it shines with a brightness that makes the light of the sun and all other heavenly bodies redundant and obsolete. The river of the water of life flows through the city and the tree of life stands on either side of it. The life in this city has no opposite in death. The opposition “life/death” is undone.
The city is too large to allow for any outside—but there is an outside and from it outsiders enter and with them “bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.” The New Jerusalem opens to welcome all who would be welcomed and does so with such abandon that the opposition “inclusion/exclusion” is undone. The city has walls that walls may be undone. This city, i.e., is the crucified/resurrected body of Jesus opened to embrace everyone and all—past, present, and future. “For in him [rendered forever unwhole] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19). This is a city that undoes cities.
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Though daily bodily life was minutely regulated in ancient Israel, it was not for the sake of purity that its Holy Scriptures declared it to have been gathered and protected by God. Purity was a means to, a condition to be met for the sake of, a far greater end. The chief calling of Israel was to a differentiating faithfulness to God: “For I am the Lord who brought you up from the land of Egypt, to be your God; you shall be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 11:45). Its prophets imagined a day when the path to holiness would be other than the regimen of bodily or societal integrity. “For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths. . . [a]nd the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord . . . these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isa 56:4–7).
The Jesus, say, of the gospel of Mark is—in the midst of unmitigated disintegration—the embodiment of obedience to the command, “you shall be holy.” Indeed, he is obedient into and from the depths of absolute defilement, from the heart of a chaos into which he had been faithfully baptized (Rom 6, Phil 2). When the gospel tells of Jesus’s eating with sinners, touching and being touched by the unclean, befriending the outcasts of the world, it is foreshadowing his bloody end on the cross and the confinement of his body to the grave. When that body is resurrected, it is bathed in new life, new purity, in a peace that defies the understanding, but its wounds are not sealed, its history is not unwritten, its entanglement with the abject bodies of Galilee is not untangled—rather every act of solidarity with the broken people of the world is resurrected with him. His resurrected body is an agape body, a body with transgressed boundaries. There is no wall around him that might keep him safe from incursion, from breach. In his mutilated resurrected body there is no barrier between inside and outside. He lets it all in. And insofar as the whole fullness of God is pleased to dwell in him, he is the site of the hallowing of all creation. He is the New Jerusalem. He is God’s embrace of all creatures, the sheet lowered to Peter as he prayed on the roof of the house of Simon, the tanner (Acts 10).
Thus all that “the Augustan vision of a new moral order” promulgated, the vision of “power, security, and order,” the vision of “identity,” “strength, [and] status,” finds in this crucified/resurrected body, finds in the agape walls of the New Jerusalem, a percussive “No!” an apocalyptic reversal. Power, security, order, identity, strength, and status are all to be baptized with Jesus, to be crucified with him, and in resurrection they will have no more in common with the Pax Romana than a slaughtered lamb has with a roaring lion.
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And so, what of Emmett Till? What of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, or Atatiana Jefferson? What of the 3,500 men, women, and children of African descent who were victims of lynchings? What of the victims of mass incarceration in the era of the “New Jim Crow”? What of the millions of people in America who have been born into and have lived or continue to live all their days under the shadow that first fell across this land in 1619? What of a past that will not stay past, a centuries-old institution of rape, breeding, buying, and selling that will not stay dead, that continues again and again to come at the descendants of the American chattel-enslaved as an armed intruder who always manages to kick in the door? What does the gospel have to say to them?
The gospel does not jettison wholeness, flourishing, as a good. How could it? The tragedy of leprosy and lameness, of poverty and subalternity, of eunuchism and foreignness—of crucifixion—is that they rob the afflicted of good work and play, of robust sociality and adventure, of friendship and a thriving household, of life. Boundary lines are drawn in order to increase the likelihood of prosperity for those rightfully, i.e., customarily or legally, included within those borders. But borders of whatever kind—national, familial, tribal, racial, gender, age, class, sexual—also exclude. The radical directive of the gospel is not that it is to pursue well being, though, again, it is to do so. The radical directive of the gospel is that well being is always outbid by love. Thus insiders are to prioritize outsiders, whether or not they would contribute to the flourishing of those who would take them in, even if they would continue to live a painfully difficult life and die an unhappy death even among attentive, self-sacrificing, loving people.
This is not to say that a social body that has taken up its cross and followed Jesus is a heroic church, perhaps of Mother Teresa lookalikes. The outsiders who by coming in have undone “insider-status” need not have been picked up dying in an alley; they need only be other, in concrete bodily ways. That is, the boundaries that make for insiders and outsiders are to be transgressed, again and again. Indeed, the labels, “agent” and “patient,” “caregiver” and “cared for,” “benefactor” and “recipient,” do not stay put in such a fellowship. A church is a journey, an ecclesia in via, never a settled institution. It journeys as an exercise in solidarity with those sidelined by this world. When a line is drawn to keep outsiders out, this ecclesia in via transgresses it in order to learn to stand and fall, to live and die, with those who may or may not ever be an asset on someone’s balance sheet. This must be how it is for the body of Christ, for the body of Jesus was raised a mutilated body that will never keep anyone out and the wall of the city to come, the New Jerusalem, has huge gates that are wide open all day long—and there is no night there.
