This introductory chapter explains that the whole book is about the kaleidoscopic landscape of Christian imaginings of Jesus, and that it asks how Christians might learn to navigate that landscape. It sets out the main components of my approach (a focus on ordinary devotion, an avowedly provisional approach to doctrinal theology, a high Christology, and extended conversations with Black, womanist and trans theologies). It gives a preliminary indication of the context from which I write, and it points to the book’s conclusion, which will argue that, to know Jesus more truly, Christians should look to the forms of devotion to him that are sustained where the love, justice, and mercy of God are being lived out. That is where they can expect to find the Spirit most powerfully at work, drawing people into the knowledge of Jesus and of the love shared with the world in him – the love that is God’s own inexhaustible life.

This chapter focuses on gender identity. I begin by exploring the gendered complexity of devotion to Jesus in the Christian tradition, from the gospels to the present day. With the help of a variety of trans theologians, I then return to the idea that in Christian devotion the Spirit gathers people in all the complexity and richness of their embodied existence around the imagined body of Jesus. I ask again what it means to negotiate such bodily life in relation to Jesus in the light of all the affordances and resistances provided by our bodies and by his. The movement for trans, non-binary, and queer liberation provides an opportunity to see how, in this ongoing and unfinishable negotiation, we are all discovering the possible ways of living in, with, and as our bodies, at every level from our chromosomes to the patterns of our feelings and our capacities for certain kinds of experience. This is a negotiation that involves each of us in the discovery and articulation of our own gender identity, and in the invention of forms of community life that will do justice to what we are discovering.