This essay is collected in the Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) Project at Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Religion and the Human. The project takes the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene in the garden after she discovers his empty tomb — noli me tangere (“touch me not”) — as a provocation for reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, and on other pandemics, viral and social, that engulf us.
The invitation to contribute to the Noli Me Tangere project arrived while I was sitting in on a course taught by my colleagues Dr. Zeyneb Sayilgan and Dr. Benjamin Sax entitled “Jesus at the Borders of Islam and Judaism” at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore, Maryland where I am currently serving as the Executive Director.
In Sayilgan’s and Sax’s public-facing short course, I was helping facilitate small-group conversations with adult-learners around selected texts on Jesus from Jewish and Muslim traditions. The class challenged self-identifying Christians to really sit with a dechristologized Jesus, and hear not only how Jewish and Muslim traditions have viewed Jesus historically, but also how their Jewish and Muslim neighbors experience Jesus, here and now. Some Christians embraced this experience, and others firmly rejected the invitation to seriously entertain the Jewish Jesus and the Muslim Jesus. The latter said, in essence, “Touch him not.”
While many participants were familiar (and somewhat comfortable) with the Jewishness of Jesus due to the effective popularization of scholarship from the last forty years, many Christians engage the Jewish Jesus with the aim of enhancing (not challenging) their own Christological commitments. And most Christians know nothing of the Muslim Jesus, let alone entertain what a Muslim accounting of Jesus could do to enhance or challenge their Christological commitments.
The course brought to the fore the importance of Christological conversation within interreligious encounters, and the role of recognition, misrecognition, and the setting of boundaries. While acknowledging that the matter of seeking scriptural warrants for interreligious dialogue is an ongoing (and perhaps quixotic, though, for some, necessary) task, could the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus outside the tomb as depicted in the Gospel of John provide a context for exploring the place of Christology within a multireligious exchange?
Heather Miller Rubens is Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at ICJS.