Easter Baskets, or, The Passion According to Kink Bingo

[melannen]

kink_bingo is running, for the second year in a row, an April mini-challenge based around themed gift baskets. Of kink.

I was kind of surprised to find that in two years, they hadn't done the obvious and made an Easter basket! So I asked if they'd avoided that on purpose because religion, and the mods replied, no, they just honestly hadn't thought of the possibility as they don't celebrate Easter, and I was welcome to do one if I wanted.

....this is one of the cases where my cultural blinkers become readily apparent and I am suddenly smacked in the face by the fact there are lots of people in this world, even who grew up in a culture superficially like mine, who don't realize that the Passion story is made of kink. Basically, all the cultural influence that would later become Christianity looked into its id and pulled out all the most powerful bits, and then 2000 years of repressed clergy and sacrilegious laity embellished it into something with twisted unplumbable depths, and as a result millions and millions of people over history have first discovered that they really liked thinking about certain things while being encouraged to adore an image of a naked man with fresh whip-marks and piercings and dripping blood and an expression of exalted serenity.

Lalala.

None of the above is me having a dirty mind, by the way, that's just Christianity.

The below is me having a dirty mind. Because I set out to make an Easter themed mini-bingo card and realized I couldn't do just one because I'd have to leave too much out. So here is the Passion story in five kink bingo minicards, complete with Biblical references. (The references are heavy on Matthew and John because that's where most of the kinkiest wording is, and also because I'm too lazy to properly cross-reference. Also I was trying not to repeat any kinks, so sometimes I ended up using one that wasn't quite the ideal - several of them recur over and over in the story.)

(Um, do I need to still warn that this isn't a very nice story, and a lot of the kink in it is very not safe or consensual? Although a surprising amount of it is.)

The Lead-up to the Crucifixion

	BI	N	GO
	John 12:1-8 Orgies/Decadence	John 12:12-13 Worship	John 13:3-5 Foot Fetish
	John 13:12-16 Service	John 13:34 FREE SPACE	John 13:8-11 Wet Messy Dirty
	Matthew 16:21-24 Danger	Matthew 26:26 Food	Matthew 26:27-28 Bloodplay

In the Garden of Gethsemane

	BI	N	GO
	Matthew 26:39-42 Begging	Matthew 26:39-42 Obedience	Matthew 26:40-41 Sleepy/Unconscious
	Matthew 26:47 In Public	Matthew 26:50 Free Space	Matthew 26:48-49 Oral Fixation
	Matthew 26:48-49 Possession/Marking	Matthew 26:51-52 Blades	John 18:15-18 Anonymity

The Trial

	BI	N	GO
	Matthew 27:1-2 Authority Figures	John 18:22 Smacking/Slapping	John 18:24 Bondage
	Matthew 27:12-14 Silence	Matthew 27:19 Free Space	Matthew 27:30-31 Humiliation
	John 19:1 Whipping/Flogging	Matthew 27:28-29 Dressup	John 19:2 Silk/Velvet/Feathers/Furs

The Crucifixion
...yeah so a lot of these just go under crucifixion, generally, but there's a reason crosses are a dungeon staple.

	BI	N	GO
	John 19:17-18 Exposure	John 19:17-18 Piercings/Needleplay	John 19:17-18 Suspension
	John 19:17-18 Painplay	John 19:37 Free Space	Luke 23:39-41 Penance/Punishment
	John 19:19-22 Writing on the Body	John 19:23-24 Uniform/Military Fetish	John 19:34 Object Penetration

The Resurrection

	BI	N	GO
	Mark 15:46 Medical Kink	Mark 16:1-2 Washing/Cleaning	Matthew 28:1-5 Emotion Manipulation
	John 20:14-16 Domestic/Tradesman Kink	Luke 24:29 Free Space	John 20:16-17 Body Alteration/Injury
	Luke 24:39 Bodies and Body Parts	John 20:20 Scars/Scarification	John 20:24-27 Fisting/Stretching

...and finally, because I admit that was kind of overkill, here's the Best of the Passion Kink Basket:

	BI	N	GO
	Suspension	Whipping/Flogging	Bloodplay
	Humiliation	Obedience	Begging
	Painplay	Piercings/Needleplay	Penance/Punishment

This does, of course, use the kink_bingo + fandom definition of kink which doesn't necessarily involve active sexuality, it just involves things that grip on a level below conscious control, viscerally, cathartically. Serious discussion of the theology involved strongly encouraged. ^_^

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

(...I can't teach any Sunday School lessons to kids with a straight face, which is why Mom now lets me stay out in the hall and write fic and only come in to help with the crafts and snack. :P )

Being a pastor, I don't really have that choice. (Although teaching songs is my best part of working with kids, I have to do everything, or be able to train others to do it.)

And you *really* should not have missed the naked (or possibly nekkid*) guy in Mark. There's a poem by Robert Cording that I heard back in 2003 that is my favorite Christian poem about that passage. (The Man Running Naked Into the Dark)Have you ever read the "secret Gospel" stuff?** A professor in seminary found out I liked that poem and read the "secret Gospel" excerpts aloud to the class. I had trouble keeping anything resembling a straight face. It was slashier than anything in Scripture, even more so than David and Jonathan, and hearing a middle aged professor read it in the middle of class was ... gah. I mean, you don't need slash goggles, you need straight goggles to see it as anything other than slash. I am always surprised that nobody in fandom has taken it yet and ficced it. Though I am grateful; I can read a lot of other sacrilegious stuff and not be bothered, but I Do Not Want to read about Jesus having sex. With anyone, of any gender. Just, no.

*One of my seminary professors (originally from Texas, with a Southern accent that came and went depending on what he was talking about), used to say that "naked" is being without clothes. "Nekkid" is being unclothed with intent

**fragments of a letter of a leader of the early church denouncing the use certain pieces of a "secret Gospel of Mark" were being put to. I don't know enough about the letter and the guy who found the copy of it to decide whether it was a forgery, but if it is genuine I don't believe the "secret Gospel" itself is genuine. It was probably a Gnostic attempt to insert their own beliefs (i.e. that there is secret knowledge that only the enlightened have, and that's the way to enlightenment/salvation, and it's hidden from the world) into the Gospel least hospitable to them. The entire idea of a "Secret Gospel" is a perfect example of a Gnostic idea--their name means "secret knowledge!"--and Mark has the least gnostic overtones of any of the Gospels. (Sure, he's got the "messianic secret", but not much "only the inner circle can understand this" because by and large the disciples in Mark consistently misunderstand *everything* even when Jesus is explaining things plainly. Also, the gnostics believed matter was evil, therefore in their interpretation Jesus wasn't really human, he was a spirit that looked human, but Mark's gospel is consistently the earthiest of the four gospels.) I mean, if it were supposedly fragments of, say, John, with all its erudite theology and spiritual discourse, I would be much more accepting.

The gnostics were an Eastern syncretic religion/philosophy floating around the Ancient Near East, particularly from the first or second century or so BCE to about the 7th or 8th century CE. They were prone to taking whatever the religion of the area was and arranging/reinterpreting it to fit their beliefs. There were quite a lot of "Christian" gnostics, who appropriated the stories of Jesus, so that's what we tend to focus on today, but there were also quite a lot of, say, traditional Egyptian religion gnostics, and traditional Greek pagan gnostics as well. (In fact, most "Christian" gnostics started out as Egyptian-gnostics and just added in Christian ideas and stories to the mix.) And the majority of Christians were quite consistent about denouncing gnosticism as heretical, far more consistently than just about any other heresy I can think of. Mostly because several of the main tenets of gnosticism mean that some of the critical aspects of those stories are interpreted just about exactly opposite of what Christians believe. Which is why the current fascination with gnosticism annoys me; it is not and never was Christian! If you like it as a philosophy, that's fine--just don't try to tell me it was the true religion of the ancient Christians that got suppressed in a huge conspiracy by evil church leaders.

RANT: The people who subscribe to any of the great Christian Conspiracy theories have no clue a) how diverse the river of Christian tradition really is, b) how many different branches of it there are and have been since the very beginning, and c) how incredibly unlikely it is that they would have been willing to cooperate together to suppress anything effectively, given their historical and theological disputes. I mean, the Roman Catholic church from about 900-1500 might have been able to get away with that in Europe. But even that's not a given, considering how much infighting there was, and the various Orthodox branches and the younger Protestant churches have never been anywhere near unified or hierarchical enough to do it. Given all of that, if just about every major Christian leader from every branch of the tradition who had to deal with a particular issue said "that's not Christian, no matter what stories of ours you appropriate," it's not a conspiracy, it really isn't Christian. Also, conspiracy implies secrecy, and these battles were fought out in the open for everyone to see, with publicly circulated letters and lots of sermons on the subject.

[melannen]

Yes, I know, I know, I am flogging myself enough for having missed the naked guy in Mark! (Especially since Mom just reminded me that we read the Mark passion story on Palm Sunday this year. It's not my fault, I was thinking about Homestuck during the reading. :P) I think I may have read up on Secret Mark the last time I was doing the apocryphal Gospels, and got that mixed up in my memory with the naked guy in actual Mark, and written him out of my version of canon. Clearly I need to sit down and read through Mark properly again. That poem is beautiful! (Secret Mark is still less slashy than Saul and Samuel, though.)

I've always found the Gnostic texts sort of appealing in the way that I find most mystical texts appealing, and I would buy that there was a certain amount of gnostic influence in very-early-Christianity, even outside the specifically gnostic sects (after all, there's no need to denounce something consistently unless people keep doing it) but, uh, yeah, anybody who thinks there's ever been "one true Christian religion" clearly knows very little about the history of the Church.

[beatrice_otter]

I knew I was preaching to the choir!