Thus, many medieval assumptions linked woman and flesh and the body of God. Not only was Christ enfleshed with flesh from a woman; his own flesh did womanly things: it bled, it bled food and it gave birth… Thus, it was women’s bodies almost exclusively that bled as Christ bled.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1992)
I don’t get the “gave birth” part. Do you know what she meant by that? Is she referring to Christians being “born again”?
(via loverofstories24)
Sorry for the late response on this. Jesus Christ as the one who gives new birth through the labor of his Passion has a long tradition in Christian mysticism and imagery. Its roots are biblical, with Jesus of the Fourth Gospel comforting his disciples with this metaphor:
Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, 'Are you discussing among yourselves what I meant when I said, "A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me"?... 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. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.'
(John 16:19,21-22, NRSV)
Jesus's direct metaphor is about the disciples' pain turning into joy, but the "woman giving birth" aspect fit in well with other images of Christ as a mother hen (Matthew 23:27, Luke 13:34), and the images of self-sacrifice used in the early Christian world, such as a mother pelican willing to feed her children with her own body. It also was a fairly inevitable comparison since childbirth is probably the most common example of being willing to give one's body, put it through torture and risk death, out of love.
Medieval women with their devotion to Jesus's suffering, bleeding, (womanly) loving flesh obviously went to town with this metaphor, Julian of Norwich's description in the late 14th century being the most famous:
But our true Mother Jesus, he alone bears us for joy and for endless life, blessed may he be. So he carries us within him in love and travail, until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and cruel pains that ever were or will be, and at the last he died. And when he had finished, and had so borne us for bliss, still all this could not satisfy his wonderful love… The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament... To the property of motherhood belongs nature, love, wisdom and knowledge, and this is God. For though it may be that our bodily bringing to birth is only little, humble and simple in comparison to our spiritual bringing to birth, still it is he who does it in the creatures by whom it is done… And in our spiritual bringing to birth he uses more tenderness, without any comparison, in protecting us… And from this sweet and gentle operation he will neither cease or desist, until all his beloved children are born and brought to birth.
-- Julian of Norwich, Showings (Paulist Press edition, 1978)
