Lent 2025 Day 41

Patrick Cheng, Theologian and Priest
John 1:1–14 | John 12:1–11
 
Patrick S. Cheng is a queer theologian and Episcopal priest whose work challenges the church to rediscover the heart of Christian doctrine through the lens of radical love. His theology insists that queerness is not something to be excluded from the divine, but a reflection of the divine. In his book Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, Cheng writes that “God is radically inclusive love that transcends boundaries.”

At the center of Cheng’s theology is the Incarnation—the astonishing claim that God became flesh. In John 1:1–14, the Word does not just visit humanity but becomes human, taking on the fullness of our embodiment. This includes queer bodies, disabled bodies, racialized bodies, scarred bodies. The Incarnation is not sanitized. It is gritty, tender, and real. It tells us that God is not afraid of the flesh—but chooses to dwell in it.

On Holy Monday, we read of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with costly perfume, wiping them with her hair. This act is sensual, intimate, and scandalous. It fills the house with fragrance. It disrupts expectations of decorum. And it prepares Jesus for death.

Cheng helps us see this moment as a site of radical love. Mary’s devotion is embodied. She touches, smells, kneels. She refuses to offer Jesus a love that is disembodied or abstract. Like the Word made flesh, her act is fully present in body and spirit.

This is queer love—disruptive, boundary-breaking, poured out in beauty. Judas calls it waste. Jesus names it prophetic. It is queer in the truest sense: it doesn’t fit the rules. It reveals what love looks like when it is unconcerned with approval.

Cheng also reimagines atonement, pushing back against models that glorify suffering or suggest that God demands blood to forgive. In From Sin to Amazing Grace, he critiques substitutionary atonement as theologically harmful—particularly to LGBTQ+ people who have been taught their suffering is redemptive or deserved. Instead, Cheng offers a threefold queer model of atonement: Erotic, Out, and Transformative love.

• Erotic love emphasizes the relational, embodied, and passionate nature of God's desire to be with us in the flesh. 
• Out love is God's coming out to humanity in the Incarnation, fully revealing God's identity in solidarity with the marginalized. 
• Transformative love is about healing and wholeness, not punishment—a love that changes us and our communities through radical inclusion. 

This reframing helps us see Jesus’ death not as divine retribution but as a consequence of confronting oppressive systems. Mary’s anointing, then, is not an act of resignation but of clarity and tenderness. She sees what is coming and chooses love anyway.

Holy Week is full of flesh and fragrance, pain and passion. It is a story of betrayal and belovedness, exclusion and embrace. Cheng’s theology reminds us that the cross and the empty tomb are not about shame or punishment but about love uncontained. Queerness, like God, refuses to be boxed in. It reveals new life in unexpected places.

To follow Christ into Holy Week is to follow the Word into flesh. It is to say with Mary: I will not hold back my love. I will anoint the wounds. I will fill the house with grace.

Reflection:

• How does the Incarnation challenge your understanding of whose bodies are holy? 
• What boundary-breaking love are you called to pour out this week? 
• How does reimagining the atonement reshape your experience of Holy Week? 

Breath Prayer: Inhale: The Word became flesh… Exhale: …and dwelled among us.

May this Holy Week draw us closer to the God who comes close—through love poured out, perfume spilled, and bodies blessed.

Amen.