Sexy Billboard of Joseph and Mary Stirs Outrage
Controversial billboard portrays Joseph and Mary in postcoital encounter.
Dec. 18, 2009 — -- What would Christmas be without a little Down Under controversy? As idyllic creches of Mary and Joseph with their newborn babe enhance Christmas displays worldwide, there is another image of the holy parents that is not being as universally embraced this Christmas season.
Saint Matthew's Anglican Church in Auckland, New Zealand, has taken a bold step to shake up long-held theological views of faithful Christians by posting a billboard of Mary and Joseph in bed after what appears to be a postcoital encounter.
Employing a classical fresco style, the billboard depicts Mary and Joseph lying awake: Mary in blue veil gazing longingly heavenward, while her seemingly dejected, bearded and shirtless spouse Joseph looks downward. The caption above the image reads: "Poor Joseph. God is a hard act to follow."
Church vicar Archdeacon Glynn Cardy said that the intent was to get people to reconsider ingrained stereotypes and misconceptions about God, such as the virgin birth and the maleness of God.
"This billboard is trying to lampoon and ridicule the very literal idea that God is a male and somehow this male God impregnated Mary," said Cardy, who admitted that his church is theologically liberal. He went on to say, "We would question the virgin birth in any literal sense. We would question the maleness of God in any literal sense."
While the virgin birth has been a long-held theological teaching in Christianity and Islam, some claim it should be viewed more as metaphor with powerful mythic teachings.
Spiritual writer Beatrice Bruteau suggests that the virgin birth needs to be interpreted as a story of Christian identity and human possibility: "To recover the spiritual power of the myth (virginal conception), we have to understand that what it is ultimately doing is revealing the deep truth about ourselves. The stories are about us. It is to us that the angelic herald announces that through the power of the Holy Spirit we will bring forth from our emptiness divine life. Or, taking it another way, nothing has to come into us from the outside; the secret of divine life is already within us and needs only to be accepted and nurtured."
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