Jesus is not a tele-tubbie.

Every once in a while, a thought slams into my brain like a dart, out of nowhere, and I begin to obsess, rotating around it like a comet in orbit. Then other, seemingly unrelated things start telling me that they are tenuously connected, that there is a message there in the ether of my thought process. This happened to me the other day, when it all culminated in the thought, “Thank God Jesus was not a teletubbie.”

Thought number one: I’d read some feminist literature that spoke of how, in most of society, men take ownership of space, and women are perceived as entering and passing through that space. This underlying dynamic — that woman do not own space but are rather passing through space owned by men — is what feeds the cat calling behavior, and the basic sense of ownership upon women’s bodies that society in general seems to exhibit.

Our society — whether the media, the politicians, or the guys on the street corner — seem to have taken a certain possession of the female form. We use it to sell things. Some use it for their pleasure. We photograph it then photoshop the crap out of it to make it what we want it to be, rather than what it is.

Similarly, we hotly debate highly personal issues that affect women’s bodies as if women themselves were not in the room. Hot topics like reproductive rights go so much further than just being pro-life or pro-choice — that, in my opinion — is an over-simplified if highly emotional argument. (Please note: I am NOT making a reproductive rights statement here. I am simply pointing out how the reproductive rights battle adds to the space/body/ownership continuum.)

Courts have mandated women to have forced C-sections for deliveries that can be done naturally; hospitals have taken women in labor to court to make themselves wards of the soon-to-be-born child if they disagree with a woman’s medical decision. We get judge-y over whether women decide to breast feed or not; while society in general encourages breast feeding, we also tell women that we only want to see their breasts for our entertainment. Don’t show us a picture of you lovingly nurturing your infant in my Facebook space — THAT is highly offensive. But wear a tiny bikini and make your implants dance to Jingle Bells — that is A-okay in society’s space rules. And many people — men and women alike — simply don’t see how upside down all of this is.

I have experienced this space ownership — in public spaces like the street and private spaces like various workplaces — and so have my friends. It’s what makes people think it’s totally within their rights to comment on women’s appearance constantly, to touch us, to pat our bellies when we’re big with child, to insist we smile, to press against us without ever thinking it might make us uncomfortable. When one owns space, one owns everything in it.

Thought number 2: Sweet baby Jesus wasn’t an alien!

A few weeks ago (because when these thought collisions happen, it takes that long for them to blend in the Kitchen-Aid called my brain, takes them a little while to meld together like the chips in the chocolate chip cookies I baked the other day) I thought how clever God was when he decided to make his big announcement first and foremost to a young peasant girl. Jesus was a subversive — he took every social more we held dear, every ounce of religious, gender, and political power and turned them on their heads. He had no patience for organized religion (but he LOVED the faithful) and despised the “business” of the temple.

It makes perfect sense — when you look at the whole thing in retrospect — that a God like that would come not to a big powerful man-king but to a lowly young girl that no one ever heard of before.  This theme continued throughout his ministry — right up until the time he presented his resurrected body first not to Peter, James or John, but to the Mary’s of his world.

And here’s the thing about this: God was intentional. I mean, if we’re going to believe this shindig, we’ve got to go the whole way, right? So if God is, well, God, then he could have done this any way he wanted. He could have come down as a baby in a big banana-shaped spaceship flown by little purple TeleTubbies and made it work somehow.

(For those of you on the fence, the virgin birth doesn’t sound so bad anymore, eh?)

But he didn’t. He intentionally chose women — to be born of a woman, to show himself to women. As far as I can tell, it’s one of two things. Either he said, Gee, I really dig this whole patriarchy thing — it’s exactly how I wanted it, and if I do it this way, that’s gonna mess that whole thing up. Meh, it’s easier than the TeleTubbies, so whatever, or he very much wanted to smash patriarchy to theological bits.

The Big Mind Meld: So today as I was pondering this again, it all came together in a flash — how God chose to turn this space-ownership thing totally upside down by actually and quite literally entering the space of a woman — and to pass through her, very much into the physical world, to enter this sphere we call earth.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus took back space for women, by choosing to pass through a woman for his deliverance. He humbled himself — according to society’s norms — to be born in a manger, through a peasant girl. His redemption is so complete, in spaces I haven’t yet seen. This is what I realize whenever I really think about him — he thought of everything, long before there were YouTube videos of cat calling and feminism, there was Jesus, reclaiming us by entering the space of a woman.

With this wholly visceral act, this allowing himself to be brought forth from a woman, he elevated and reclaimed space for women forevermore. Now, we in our patriarchy may not live like this. The subtleties of how patriarchy and privilege work on our society are myriad, and many people — men and women alike — don’t even recognize how they operate in our day to day lives. Of course, there are the very disturbing times that we do recognize how they operate in our lives.

And often — so often — those times are scary, and infuriating for their regularity, and so incredibly hard to give voice to. And when we do this scary thing of giving voice to them — of saying, Hold up there, Skippy, that was out of line. Your behavior right there was out of line, and everyone in the room looks at you like you’re crazy, and tells you Oh, he was only joking, lighten up, and then calls you a troublemaker and assumes you are evil and doing evil things, and tells you that you shouldn’t be saying anything, just keep your mouth shut, it gets hard. It gets really hard.

But then I always come back to Jesus. The other day, a fairly new Christian asked me to explain the difference — this is not the right word, but there may not be a right word — between God and Jesus. I told her, and utterly failed at answering her but I loved the concept — that if God is this big, huge, inconceivable thing, which he is, he still loves us all so much.

And God needed arms to give us a hug, so he became Jesus, so he could wrap himself around us.

And that’s how Jesus reclaimed space for all of us — men and women alike. He came forth through and from a woman, then he opened his arms wide — from the east to the west. He hugs us in our earthly sphere, loving us in all our messy glory, and victoriously wins back the space of this world for His good will.