Was Jesus a “man”?

He kinda seems girly to me.

“Our Savior was no pale, thin, wispy-looking man. He was strong. He was muscular.” A line from Greg Laurie’s 1993 book Every Day with Jesus brings it all back: the Evangelical obsession with gender performance. We were raised to think that being “a man” is the key to it all.

If you’re a girl, you‘re to look to such “men” as standard-bearers, their divine gender being the measure of everything. Then I realized: Jesus was hardly a masculine figure. He’s a bit girly.

From weeping to being a “mother hen” (Matt. 23:37–39; Luke 13:34), from washing feet to cooking, from his female disciples to his love of children, he is not checking many ‘manly’ stereotypes.

Then there’s that hair . . .

Halim Time & Glass Museum, Evanston, IL

For Jesus, androgyny is kind of a family thing. Note Genesis 1:27:

And God created man in his image,
in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them.

Let’s follow the connections: If man is created male and female—in God’s image—then God’s image is . . . male and female.

“The one God manifests attributes of both genders, for he both fathers and mothers his children,” as John D. Garr notes in God and Women.