Her Hour Has Come
Birth and Breastfeeding Imagery in the Gospel of John
This is a paper I presented at the Fellowship of Biblical Scholars conference in Sydney in September 2023.
Abstract
The centrality of birth imagery is a secret hidden in plain sight in the Fourth Gospel. From the very beginning, the author declares that new birth is experienced by all who receive and believe the Word (John 1:12-13). Nicodemus, in John 3:3, is famously told he must be born again/from above in order to see the Kingdom of God. Beyond these well-known statements we find imagery of birth and nursing in John 1:18, 6:51, 7:37-39, 13:23-25, 19:25-35, 20:17. When these passages are read in isolation, readers may not see how pervasive such imagery is, or how central it is to this Gospel’s framing of the invitation to life. When we choose to bring birth imagery into focus, we begin to see how powerfully this Gospel speaks of and to the embodied experience of people who are biologically female. In a Gospel that presents a biologically male saviour in eternal relationship the God he calls his Father, use of birthing and nursing imagery de-centres any implied maleness and makes space for all humanity in the bosom and womb of Triune love. Drawing on the work of Dorothy Lee, Alicia Myers, J. Massyngbaerde Ford, Juliana Claassens and others, this paper will survey the use of birth imagery throughout the Fourth Gospel, noticing the overall impression given by the various ways this thread is woven through the text, and will point toward implications for Christology, Soteriology, Pneumatology and Ecclesiology.
My goal for this paper is relatively unambitious. I am joining a conversation that has been gathering interest and participants over the past two or three decades. In this paper I will simply be putting my hand up and adding a few words to the conversation.
There has been a rising tide of scholarship around birth imagery in the Bible over recent decades.[1] In my pastoral ministry I have found that drawing attention such imagery can add profoundly to the sense of inclusion and embodied engagement with the text experienced by people who have the capacity to give birth – people who have so often been excluded from the work of Biblical scholarship over the past two millennia.
Attention has tended to focus on the writings attributed to St Paul. My contention today is that Johannine Literature also provides rich material for the discussion of birth imagery in relation to Christology, Soteriology, Pneumatology and Ecclesiology, and therefore that the embodied experience of people with the capacity to give birth is deeply relevant to each of these disciplines.
I have no intention of implying that all women have the same embodied experiences or that all women or only women can or do give birth. Indeed, the gendering of birth imagery is blurred by its application to Jesus in the Gospels, as it is in its application by Paul to himself.
In the Gospel of John, the prominence of birth imagery is a secret hidden in plain sight. I suspect that many of us memorised John 3:3 when we were Sunday School children, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again/from above.”[2]
This verse brings birth imagery to the centre of soteriology. There is no entry to the Kingdom of God without a second birth. This verse reinforces what was said earlier in John 1:12, “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”[3] This also touches on Christology. It is central to the identity of Jesus in the Gospel of John that Christ is the divine Word who took on flesh in order to bring children of God to birth.
Employing birth imagery for theological purposes is far from a Johannine innovation. I refer you to the work of Juliana Claassens for a discussion of mothering imagery used in relation to God throughout the Jewish Scriptures.[4] John’s Gospel picks up on this imagery and brings it into focus.
These early hints about the centrality of birth imagery in John[5] might lead us to expect to find further birth imagery during the climactic scenes of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. And so we do, but we could easily miss it.
In John 19:34 we read that “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.” [6]
In Ford’s Redeemer, Friend and Mother[7], you can find an extensive discussion of the history of interpretation of the spear and of the water and blood. Particularly intriguing is her discussion of the Syriac tradition where the spear was taken to represent the sword that guarded paradise, and the flow of water from Jesus’ side to echo the birth of Eve from Adam’s side. In the sixth century, Jacob of Serugh wrote:
Water and blood for the fashioning of spiritual babes
Flowed from the side of that living one who died,
In order to bring life to Adam.[8]
We can see that, while the interpretation of the blood and water as an image of birth has undergone a resurgence in recent feminist scholarship, it is far from new. Anyone who has been present at a birth knows that the most common occasion in human life when water and blood flow from a human body is when giving birth. John is using this imagery to communicate that at the cross, new life is delivered into the world through the body of Jesus.
I have said that anyone who has been present at a birth would see the connection. It is reasonable to ask, then, how likely it is that the early readers and hearers of this Gospel would have witnessed or participated in the birth of a child. For a long time, Biblical Scholars of a social-scientific bent considered it a settled truth that houses throughout the Greco-Roman world were segregated by gender and that “men and women tend[ed] to move in two exclusive spheres which occasionally touch but rarely overlap”[9] It might therefore have seemed logical that men might not witness birth and that children could be kept away from the labour room as they usually are now in Australia.
In my book, Son of Mary, I examine the archaeological evidence for this assumption – particularly in Galilee but with implications for other areas – and conclude that while gender segregation might have been a theoretical ideal espoused by ethicists of the time, it could not have been a lived reality since the vast majority of families lived in single-roomed houses. I quote from Son of Mary:
Given that ancient homes were places of production and industry[10], the assumption that domestic space was gendered tends to lead to the conclusion that the labour of women was relegated to the domestic sphere (inside, away from the gaze of men) [and in this context I mean labour in both senses of the word] and the labour of men to the fields. However, in Galilee at least, it appears that men sometimes worked inside and that women sometimes worked in the courtyard.[11] It may even be that on occasion the harsh realities of subsistence agriculture could have taken women out into the fields.[12] [13]
Theoretical ideals and lived reality can sometimes be vastly different, so we need to take care when most of our textual evidence for the lives of first century families is derived from the musings of wealthy, educated men who lived in large houses and had little understanding of the lives of the vast majority of the population.
My contention, then, is that most ordinary family members would have lived in such close and unavoidable proximity with each other that the messy business of childbearing could not have been completely hidden from the view of men and children.
I know a woman who grew up in Sudan whose mother insisted on her cutting the umbilical cord of her younger siblings. In this action, her mother was calling her to be a leader in her community. Cutting the umbilical cord was as significant exercise of leadership within the family. I do not mean to imply a similarity between her culture and that in which the Gospel of John was written, but simply to point out that cultures vary widely in ideas about the presence and participation of children and other family members in childbirth. Our own culture tends to cloak childbirth in clinical privacy, but in this we are cultural outliers – far from the norm.
In all probability, in the first century, most people would have observed at least some of the processes of labour and birth, and certainly of breastfeeding. Therefore, most people would readily discern birth imagery in the pouring of water and blood from Jesus’ body.
Birth imagery at this climactic point in the Gospel of John points toward implications for Christology, Soteriology and Ecclesiology:
1. The Word made flesh is the one through whose body, and in whose death, new life is born into the world. Birth has a place in Christology.
2. While there are multiple theories of atonement, and each has merit, I argue that birth should be numbered among them, since it is so prominent in John’s presentation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Birth has a place in Soteriology.
3. The church is the family that is formed by birth at the cross. At this point it would be appropriate to reflect on the nature of the family that is birthed at the cross, but our time is limited so I will refer you to chapter Nine of Son of Mary. Birth has a place in Ecclesiology.
ποταμοὶ ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας αὐτοῦ ῥεύσουσιν ὕδατος ζῶντος[14]
In John 7:37-8, we read, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, 38 and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of his womb shall flow rivers of living water.”[15]
It is grammatically unclear whether αὐτοῦ (his) here refers to Jesus or the one who believes. My acquaintance with John’s Gospel leads me to take this sort of ambiguity seriously. This author has a flair for multivalence that can be somewhat frustrating for scholars seeking one correct interpretation, but that can also be delightful in the way it challenges our binary assumptions. I therefore suspect that the ambiguity is deliberate here, just as it is in John 3:3. Jesus births life into the world, and believers drink of that living water and so become co-life-bearers with Jesus. Believers also bring life into the world, so that those who are thirsty in every place and age can find living water.
You will notice that I have translated κοιλία as womb, whereas most of our English versions of the Bible prefer belly or even heart. In fact, “bowels” would also be a possible translation but that would be a bit disturbing. κοιλία can refer to any internal part of the human abdomen, but the reference to water, when taken in conjunction with the water imagery in chapters 4 and 19, suggests that “womb” is the best translation.
Believers of all genders are given figurative wombs out of which we continue Jesus’ work of bringing life into the world.
All these uses of birth imagery in John are tied together in John 16:21.
21 When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.[16]
“Hour” is a word that is used to build tension in this Gospel and to announce the climax. After several repetitions of the phrase, “His hour has not yet come” we here find the hour finally coming like the hour of childbirth – suddenly and in pain and fear that are eventually forgotten in joy. Here we find the same ambiguity that we noticed earlier. It is Jesus’ labour on the cross that brings life into the world, but the disciples join his labour – they also are in pain, and they also will share the joy of bringing new life into the world.
It is appropriate in this context to also briefly mention breastfeeding. The relevant word here is κόλπος. As with κοιλία, the association with biologically female bodies tends to be obscured by our English translations. While some older translations say that the beloved disciple reclined on Jesus’ bosom in John 13:23, most say something like “he reclined next to Jesus”. The most natural translation of κόλπος is “breast”, and when this is avoided, the imagery of breastfeeding is lost.
In first century understanding of physiology, breast milk not only gave the baby nourishment, but was also a factor in forming their personality and character.[17] The assumption was that the baby would become like the mother whose milk the baby drank. They also believed breast milk was menstrual blood, “heated [by male semen] and pressed upward by the growing foetus”.[18] The Eucharistic imagery is obvious.
So, when John 1:18 speaks of Jesus being on the breast of the Father and John 13 speaks of the disciple being on the breast of Jesus, the image is of Jesus absorbing the character of the Father and becoming like the Father, and the disciple absorbing the character of Jesus and becoming like Jesus. Breastfeeding is used here as a powerful image of discipleship.
Imagery of birth and breastfeeding are not marginal to the Gospel of John. They are central and unifying, not only informing Johannine exegesis but also theology more generally.
According to Alicia Myers:
These images not only reflect and shape audience members’ views of one another, but also of the Divine. Rather than simple decoration, then, maternal images and characters evoke the necessarily embodied nature of theology – that is, the need to communicate, comprehend, and live it out among the vicissitudes of daily, and very fleshly, life.[19]
And I would add, not the vicissitudes of male embodied life only, but also the embodied reality of people with wombs and breasts. Birth and breast-feeding images are so intimate and so embodied that translators have found them uncomfortable and so have obscured their presence in the New Testament, but we do well to re-engage with them and reflect more deeply on their implications, not just for New Testament Studies but for all areas of systematic theology as well.
In John’s Gospel the church is born from the womb of Jesus at the cross and called to birth new life into the world. Disciples of Jesus are called to suckle at his breast, as he suckled at the breast of his Father, and so become like him, as he is like his father. Disciples become like him, in particular, in the capacity believers are given to continue to bring life to birth through living water that satisfies and comforts all who are thirsty – in all the places and times to which the church is scattered.
You might like to respond with a related prayer that I have shared earlier (click here).
Bio
Rev Dr Margaret Wesley serves as parish priest at St Paul’s Anglican Church in the Brisbane suburb of Ashgrove. Her ThD thesis was published by Wipf & Stock in 2015 as Son of Mary: The Family of Jesus and the Community of Faith in the Fourth Gospel, and she continues to be fascinated by the language of family formation and community in the vibrant tapestry that is John’s Gospel. Margaret taught across a range of theological disciplines for six years at Mary Andrews College in Sydney, and so developed a love for integrative teaching and learning. Being a pastor and spiritual director as well as a scholar, poet and liturgist, she is attentive to the ways Scripture draws people from the margins into the delighted heart of God.
Bibliography
Claassens, L. Juliana M. 2012. Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God's Delivering Presence in the Old Testament. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Ford, J. Massyngbaerde. 1997. Redeemer, Friend and Mother. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Myers, Alicia D. 2017. Blessed Among Women: Mothers & Motherhood in the New Testament. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wesley, Margaret. 2015. Son of Mary: The Family of Jesus and the Community of Faith in the Fourth Gospel. Eugene: Wipf & Stock.
[1] See, for example, (Myers 2017)
[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Jn 3:3). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[3] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Jn 1:12–13). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[4] (Claassens 2012)
[5] In referring to “John” I am following convention and am not making any sort of claim or statement about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel.
[6] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Jn 19:34). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[7] (Ford 1997) p193-9
[8] (Ford 1997) p197
[9] Ritva H. Williams, "The Mother of Jesus at Cana: A Social-Science Interpretation of John 2:1-12" Catholic Biblical Quarterly 59, no. 4 (1997), 681
[10] See also Meyers, "The Problems of Gendered Space in Syro-Palestinian Architecture: The Case of Roman-Period Galilee", 58f
[11] In large courtyard homes it may be that labour was carried out by slaves, who were without honour. The female slave had no shame to be hidden by keeping her inside, and the male slave had no honour to be demonstrated in the outside world.
[12] R. Saller, "Women, Slaves, and the Economy of the Roman Household" in Early Christian Families in Context, ed. D.L. Balch and C. Osiek (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 192,198
[13] (Wesley 2015) – Section on household space around p 149 of Thesis
[14] Aland, K., Black, M., Martini, C. M., Metzger, B. M., Robinson, M. A., & Wikgren, A. (1993; 2006). The Greek New Testament, Fourth Revised Edition (with Morphology) (Jn 7:38). Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.
[15] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Jn 7:37–38). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[16] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Jn 16:21). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[17] (Myers 2017), p79
[18] (Myers 2017), p79
[19] (Myers 2017), p4