Male and female created He them

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God created He him ;

male and female created He them.

(Genesis 1 : 29)

I read once a fascinating story. A woman had been counselled for years but remained with the same unsolved identity problem. She would doubt to be herself and each time she would look at herself in a mirror, she would believe to see her twin brother.

Though the sister and the brother looked surprisingly alike, nobody would have doubted that they were heterozygote twins, since they had not the same sex.

However, as no traditional psychological help seemed to have any impact on the sister, a doctor tried to explore possible genetic causes and did her karyotype.

It was not a little surprise to find out that the sister had only 45 chromosomes instead of 46.

She missed one of the two chromosomes of the sexual pair.

Now, the doctor could understand what had happened.

In the mother's womb, the egg had divided into two cells which ought have become two homozygote boys. But, during the first division, one of the two parts lost the Y chromosome, the part that eventually became the sister.

Stunning consequences can be drawn out of that :

1) If a cell has only one sexual X chromosome, the foetus will get a feminine body. That human being will eventually grow up as a woman, though a sterile one. To be able to beget children, a woman would need to have a full pair of two sexual X chromosomes.

2) Since normal men have a XY pair of sexual chromosomes, it means that men have in fact the two sexes in their karyotype. It was indeed easier for God to make Eva out of Adam that it would have been to make Adam out of Eva, though, of course, nothing is impossible to God.

3) The feminine sex is basic in the whole humanity. It is genetically present in both sexes. Males are in a way "females" with that something more that derives from having Adam's Y chromosome.

4) Genetically, the proportion in the humanity is thus not 50 % male and 50 % female but rather 75 % female (XX female + X half male) and 25 % male (Y half male).

5) Clearly, the male Y chromosome is dominant while X is recessive. It means that males are men because masculinity is programmed to dominate their feminine sterile part. It is striking that, in most human groups around the world, there has been some kind of initiatic rites for boys to be admitted and recognized as men. In lots of countries, men would be asked in a way or another to prove that they are males, something which is usually never expected from women. Being a woman is a state while becoming a man has been felt like a test and a conquest all over the world.

This may just be the expression of the tension that exists in all males in whom chromosome Y is holding chromosome X in custody. In other words, there is an internal strain in the masculine sex, an unbalance that has to be kept between two unequal components. Male intrinsic instability may well explain that so many expressions of masculinity have been competitive and violent throughout history. Males tend to transfer their internal struggle onto an external scene.

There are two extreme ways for males to address that strain, both being equally sick.

The first one is the full Y dominant pattern. Feeling jeopardized by their own X part, uncertain males will try to hold iron dominion over all women. Islam is paradigmatic of this nevrose. It is a religion where a man, prophet Muhammad is in fact praised as if he were God himself. Muhammad is Islam's actual god, a figure of a violent man that would reign over a cattle of submitted spouses, a reassuring image for males that have failed to address adequately their internal strain between their Y and their X parts.

The other one is the defeated Y pattern. Y has not felt strong enough to win the battle and has renounced to become a grown-up male. It remains dependent on women the way a little boy is dependant of his mother. Popular Catholicism is paradigmatic of that. That Catholicism true god is the queen of heaven or mother mary. In her arms Jesus is a naked and vulnerable babe, not the adult man that had said to the Father in Gethsemane : "O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done."

Against this background, we can understand much more deeply what God means in Genesis 3 : 16 where He tells this to Eva : "and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." The system that a man and a woman build when they are together is much more complex than the Yin and the Yang. The woman is attracted by that something in man that she does not have. Freud has identified it to the penis. But the penis is nothing more than the symbol of all what Y bears. The difference is not essentially physical since male and female organs are made out of the same components just like Lego bricks put into a different order. What attracts women to men is that Y part, masculinity, that they do not have at all in their genes. 
 

Men should find in women their own X sterile part, which God has made alive, attractive and fertile in women. They should feel reassured by this feminity that is external to them and does not jeopardized their masculinity, as their own X part could.

But such a very complex system could only find a lasting stability with a controller, just like computers nowadays control sensitive processes on airports, railway stations and so on. 

In the garden of Eden, the Spirit of God was at work in the first human couple. But as they believed the serpent's lies and as their sin seperated them from God, He could only tell them that the system would not work without Him. Eva's daughters would feel attracted by Adam's sons but would feel frustrated to find only a wounded masculinity in them instead of the blessed one they are thirsting for. And Adam's sons would be so scared by their unresolved X - Y internal strain that they would end up ruling over women in an abusive and destructive way.

Human couples will never fit without God. This is the very curse.

Indeed, as we know, the God of Israel that has taken human flesh in Jesus is among others the way, the truth and the life (John 14 : 6). As Adam and Eva ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their unconfessed disobedience separated them from God and death entered into their bodies. Death would from then on have a devastating impact on the whole humanity, on the whole living creation. Yet, because they give birth, women have been impacted in a lesser degree by the destructive power of the spirit of death than men whose specific culture is almost entirely pervaded by it : violence, fights, wrestlings, riots, rapes, murders, wars and so on. The first murder mentioned in the Bible is perpetrated by a man, Cain, on his own brother Abel.

Therefore, through the life and the very person of Jesus, the Father wants to show us how He has intended true sound masculinity to be.

First, Jesus was unquestionably masculine in His firm and uncompromissing opposition to the Pharisees' religious hypocrisy as well as to the greed of the traders of the Temple.

Second, Jesus was not afraid of women. He would talk openly to the woman of Samaria (John 4) in front of troubled disciples (John 4 : 27). He would even allow a prostitute to touch Him (Luke 7 : 36 - 50) before utterly shocked Pharisees. Jesus proximity to women was not only revolutionary at the time He was in the flesh. Nowadays, Jesus' behaviour would still shock orthodox Jews and religious muslims. Religious males are indeed everywhere afraid of women and get never aware that their fear is rooted in their own unsettled ramshackle masculinity.

Third, Jesus' masculinity is a sensitive and tender one. He knew that Lazarus would resurrect through the power of the Spirit. Yet He cried (John 11 : 35) because He was deeply moved by the two sisters and their friends sorrow. Jesus' tears tell us that the Father did not want death at all. He has been crying over all our sufferings since Abel's death. He has been crying oceans of tears. What a sensitive loving God we have !

Now, many nations throughout the world have been claiming to belong to Christ.

Have they been sufficiently aware that this ought to have implied recognizing that Jesus resolutely opposes war : "all that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matthew 26 : 52) and death penalty (John 8: 1 -11) ? Shouldn't so-called Christian nations behave accordingly then ?

Finally, healing men from their covenant with death is at the very core of healing humanity as a whole. The new men that the Father is willing to reshape in Jesus through the action of the Spirit are meant to overflow life onto their spouses and children, thus becoming springs of blessing instead of tools of physical and emotional abuse and death.

Let it be !