A Queer Reading of JUDE
1 Jude, an intimate of Jesus-the-Anointed-with-tears and lover of James; to those who are called to come out of their closets, who are adored in God the Lover and kept safe for Jesus-the-Anointed-with-tears:
2 May mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.
3 Beloveds, while eagerly preparing to write to you about the jouissance and the struggles we share, I find it necessary to write and appeal to you to debate the faith that was once for all entrusted to the queer.
4 For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for this condemnation as ungodly, who pervert the grace of our Lover into licentious patriarchy and selfishness, and deny our comrade and fellow-alien, Jesus-the-Anointed-with-tears.
5 Now I desire to help you think again, though you are fully informed, that God our Lover, who suffered with a people in the land of Egypt, afterward drowned with tears those who did not empathize.
6 And as for the queer angels who did not keep their own respectable position, but left their decent dwelling, God has eaten and talked and slept with them in the darkest places, in prison, in slums, in cities, in brothels, in eternal chains, and will do so until the Centre implodes.
7 Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which indulged in sexual immorality by denying their true desires and substituting violence for beauty, and pursued unnatural lust by craving power and domination, by subsuming Otherness to the hegemony of the same, serve as an example by suffering in an economy of eternal loneliness.
8 These homophobe dreamers also defile the flesh by denying the beauty of its carnality, crave authority, and slander the glorious ones, the exquisite boys, the saintly whores, the garment workers, the daughters of prostitutes, those who are crushed and disappeared.
9 When the archangel Queen Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, she did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, “The Anointed-with-tears embarrass you!”
10 But these phallogocentrists slander whatever they do not understand, and they are destroyed by those things that, like irrational animals, they know by instinct, like the fact that God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and that man was made to rule over woman, and that gays are paedophiles and Muslims are terrorists and the poor are lazy.
11 Woe to them! For they go the way of Cain, presuming to deceive his Lover, and abandon themselves to Balaam’s error (ignoring the wisdom of his ass which told him when his diet was unsuitable for his body and the earth, and when his sexual activity was not promoting his true desires) for the sake of gain, and perish in Korah’s rebellion, desiring the restoration of the old order with all its privilege and injustice.
12 These are blemishes on your love-feasts, while they feast on your excluded bodies without fear, feeding themselves and their economics of scarcity and their politics of war. They are waterless clouds carried along by the winds; autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, uprooted;
13 wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness of loneliness and fear is their trajectory.
14 It was also about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Hear the groaning: God the Lover is coming with ten thousand holy indecent ones, trafficked children and gay priests, transsexuals and monsters, Women’s Institutes and sex workers’ unions, those for whom small is beautiful and enough is enough,
15 to cry tears of brokenness on all, and to convict everyone of all the deeds of injustice that they have committed in such an ungodly and inhuman way, and of all the harsh things that have been spoken against them.”
16 These are grumblers and malcontents; they indulge their own lusts and presume to police the desires of others; they exploit others and indulge their own privilege; they are bombastic in speech, flattening and tearing down people to their own advantage.
17 But you, beloved, must rebuild the predictions of the intimates of our comrade and fellow-alien Jesus-the-Anointed-with-tears;
18 for they said to you, “In the time of neo-liberal market capitalism, in the last days before the ice melts and the seas swallow the land forever, there will be scoffers, indulging their own ungodly and inhuman lusts.”
19 It is these people, devoid of the Spirit of Queer, who are causing divisions between saint and sinner, sex and gender, East and West, Muslim and Christian, nature and culture, animal, vegetable, human and God.
20 But you, beloved, nourish and grow yourselves and your children and the refugees of war on your most queer faith; pray in the Indecent Spirit;
21 make love with God; live by the mercy of our fellow-alien Jesus-the-Anointed-with-tears that leads to eternal life.
22 And have mercy on those who are wavering about the infallibility of scripture, substitutionary atonement, and the veracity of the pseudo-Pauline letters;
23 save others by weeping with them when the fire of Allied forces has destroyed their homes and raped their daughters; and have mercy on still others without fear, seeing that the tunics which conceal their bodies and their bodiliness, which let them hide from themselves and the questions about their sexual and capitalist status which they cannot face, are nothing but the Emperor’s new clothes, illusory, a house of cards.
24 Now to the Lover who is able to keep you from falling out of love, and to make you stand blemished, wounded, scarred and vulnerable in the presence of the bleeding cosmos with rejoicing and repenting, mourning and joy,
25 to God our Lover, through Jesus Christ our fellow-comrade and alien, our friend in need, be glorious indecency, solidarity with the disempowered, and subjectivity, in and with those who suffer for all time and now and forever. Let it be.
Susannah Cornwall
