November 20, 2005

A God Who Cares About Women

John 4:4-42

It was not until after class that I discovered why Jennifer, one of our pre-ministerial majors, had been so distracted and red-eyed during the hour. The pastor of the church where she had been contracted to spend the summer as a youth intern had called the night before. Upon learning that their new youth leader was a female, several newly elected members of the church board called for a special board meeting. Arguing that this was ‘going against Scripture,’ they voted to rescind the previous board’s action. The pastor apologized profusely but said that his hands were tied.

This sad episode tragically reminds us that the church is the last bastion of institutionalized bigotry against women in our day. Women have constituted the most discriminated-against majority in every civilization, culture, race, nation, and religion throughout recorded history. They have been relegated to a second-class status and treated as a sub-human species. They have been regarded as property to be bought, sold, or cast aside when they no longer serve men’s purposes. It gives us pause to recall that in the United States of America, where freedom and equality have been prized national values, women did not gain the right to vote until 1920!

In a recent gathering bringing together over 3,000 evangelical pastors, Anne Graham Lutz—Billy Graham’s daughter—was introduced to speak. Immediately, well over 200 conferees got up and noisily walked out. Several dozen others sitting close to the front turned their chairs around and sat in them backwards as a form of protest.
If we are going to appreciate how counter-cultural Jesus’ teachings and relations with women were, we need first of all to assess

I. The Demeaning Face of Patriarchy

New Testament scholars have reconstructed a detailed portrait of how women were viewed and treated in Jesus’ day. They were to remain in their houses and devote themselves solely to domestic duties. It was preferable for women, especially the unmarried, to avoid going out at all. When a woman ventured out, the Mishna (Traditions of the Elders) forbade a man to give her a greeting or even to look at her. Of course, when she went out in public, her head had to be covered and her face veiled. To appear in public without her face covering was sufficient cause for her husband to divorce her. It is difficult to imagine any social custom more dehumanizing and depersonalizing. Men did not treat their donkeys like that!

According to the tenth commandment, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or his maidservant, or his ox or donkey” (Exodus 20:17), it was clear to the rabbis that women had been ascribed by God the status of a slave, an ox, or a donkey. She was denied an education. She could not receive an inheritance or keep any money she earned. A father could sell his daughter into slavery until she was twelve. Daughters were valued primarily as a source of profit and cheap labor. A father arranged for his daughter’s marriage and retained the dowry which her fiancé had to pay. Wives were considered the acquisition of their husbands, as were slaves and animals. While a woman could have only one husband, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. Her sole reason for existence was to bear him children and to meet his every need. Her only hope of gaining any respect was to give birth to a son. If her husband died without a male heir, she was bound by Moses’ Levirate law of marriage to her husband’s brothers until she conceived a son to carry on her deceased husband’s name and inheritance (Deuteronomy 25:5-10; cf. Mark 12:18-27).

Wives prepared the meals but were not permitted to eat with their husbands. Other duties included clothing him, bathing him, preparing his bed, and caring for him when he grew old. She turned over to him all money earned from manual work. She rendered to her husband absolute obedience in all things.

Women were forbidden to pray aloud over a meal at their own table. They could not offer sacrifices, or go into the inner courts of the Temple. They could attend the first part of synagogue worship called the Sabbateon, as long as they went in and out by the back door and sat in a balcony or behind a latticework at the back of the sanctuary, hidden from the view of the male worshipers. They were not permitted to participate in singing, prayers, or responses in deference to “the dignity of the congregation.” They were dismissed before the second part of the service, called the Andron (male), where the Torah was read, taught, and discussed. The rationale for this exclusion was that since Eve was deceived and thus was responsible for bringing sin into the world, all her daughters were thereby bound under a curse which rendered them unworthy to hear, much less discuss, or teach the word of God. One rabbi said, “It would be better that the Torah be burnt than spoken from the lips of a woman.” This exclusion continues to the present day in Orthodox Jewish synagogues. Mothers cannot even attend their own son’s Bar Mitzvah.

Jewish literature is full of expressions of joy over the birth of a son and sorrow over the birth of a daughter. The Genesis Rabbah, a rabbinic verse-by-verse commentary, describes women as “greedy, eavesdroppers, lazy, jealous, querulous, and garrulous.” Rabbi Hillel taught that wherever many women were gathered together, there was much witchcraft. The Shabbath, which dates from around the time of Christ, describes woman as being “a pitcher full of filth with its mouth full of blood.” Rabbi Judah encouraged Jewish males to utter three thanksgivings daily: “Blessed be He who did not make me a Gentile, a dog, or a woman,” in that order. The Gospel of Thomas, a second century Gnostic letter widely circulated among the churches, contains this supposedly secret teaching of Jesus:

Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “Behold, I shall guide her so as to make her male, that she too may become a living spirit like you men. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Even if there were no other reasons for the early church to reject the Gospel of Thomas as apostolic, its dismissive attitude toward women would have been enough.

II. Jesus’ Attitude toward Women

There are few places where the teachings and example of Jesus are more counter-cultural than in His relationships with women. He always treated them with utmost dignity and respect, as befitting daughters of the Most High God. He neither ignored nor patronized them. He did not deal with them as females but as human beings. Unlike the ‘bleeding Pharisees,’ so named because they closed their eyes at the approach of a woman and thus kept bumping into things, Jesus conversed and socialized as naturally with them as with men. Women may have been forbidden to hear the Word of the Lord in their synagogues, but they were welcome wherever He taught. He was as sensitive to the needs of an abhorrent, hemorrhaging woman who touched the hem of His garment as those of a prestigious synagogue ruler whose daughter was sick unto death (Mark 5). Women were among His closest friends and most devoted followers. He and the disciples largely depended upon them for their support. That a rabbi, a teacher, would welcome women disciples and followers was unheard of in His day.

Jesus not only violated rabbinic tradition but offended Martha’s sense of propriety when He permitted Mary to hear the Word. When Martha complained that she was not fulfilling her proper domestic role in the kitchen, He defended her: “Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42). In so doing, Jesus affirmed the right of women to hear and be taught God’s Word! In His gentle rebuke of Martha, Jesus was stating a new principle that would break the autocracy of women’s culturally and socially imposed role: namely, it is as important for women to attend to the Word of God as to fulfill household duties. A woman is greater than what she does. She has worth and dignity apart from childbearing. Her status is not dependent upon her relationship to a man but to God.

Jesus broke protocol by freely conversing with women. He scandalized His own disciples by spending a lunch hour talking to a woman, a despised, Samaritan woman at that. No self-respecting rabbi would stoop to speak with any woman in public, much less talk theology! Yet it was to this most unlikely of all women, that Jesus first disclosed himself as the Messiah of God. He taught her that God is a spirit and that God is no respecter of persons or national boundaries. It is ironic that it was not a Jew, not even a male, but a Gentile woman who became the first preacher of the Gospel. Through this woman’s witness Samaria was opened up to the ministry of Jesus, which in turn prepared the way for a great revival under the post-Pentecost preaching of Philip, Peter, and John (Acts 8:12-17).

Jesus enjoyed a special friendship with Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. It was to Martha that Jesus disclosed himself as “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). John’s Gospel does not record Peter’s confession of faith but rather Martha’s: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God” (John 11:27). Jesus accommodated His teaching to women by referring to objects and situations with which they were most familiar, such as wedding feasts, lost coins, grinding corn, putting yeast in bread, and bearing children. By taking children into His arms and blessing them, He was assuming a more maternal than paternal role as it was practiced in that day.

Jesus did not recoil in horror when a ceremonially unclean woman touched the hem of His garment, but healed her. In a religious culture where Jewish males were regularly identified as “sons of Abraham,” Jesus spoke of this woman as a “daughter of Abraham” and the synagogue official was indignant (Luke 13:10-17). On another occasion He shocked his host, a Pharisee, as well as the male guests, by allowing a woman of disrepute to anoint His feet with perfume and wipe them with her hair. Rather than rebuke her, Jesus turned it into an opportunity to teach a wonderful lesson about the grace of God. It concludes with Jesus saying to this woman what He also said to the woman who touched the hem of His garment, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:36-50). Women, even the immoral and ritually unclean, are capable of exercising saving faith and of receiving the unconditional forgiveness of Christ. In so doing, Jesus struck the chains of social isolation which had cut them off from respectable society, and gave back to them dignity and respect as “children of God,” a right that was theirs by creation and redemption.

III. Jesus Champions Women’s Rights

Nowhere is Jesus’ concern for women more powerfully portrayed than in His teaching on divorce. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus states, “But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress” (Matthew 5:32). How so? The answer lies in reminding ourselves of the handicaps women faced in that culture. What was a woman to do to support herself when turned out of house and home? Denied an education, she was untrained for anything except domestic duties. In a society that had no teaching, clerical, or industrial occupations for women, there were only two options open to her if she wished to survive: one was to sell her body as a prostitute, and the other was to bind herself into someone else’s household as a bond-slave, which amounted to the same thing. Masters then, as throughout history, had absolute rights over the bodies of their female slaves and servants. Consequently, Jesus’ strong and uncompromising teaching on divorce struck a mighty blow on behalf of women’s rights. No longer would two sets of standards apply. If the husband forced his wife into a life of immorality, he was likewise guilty of an immoral act. Women were no longer to be treated as objects to be used, abused, and cast aside.

Luke, who is the only Gentile to author biblical books, must have been especially impressed by Jesus’ extraordinary relationships with women. In his Gospel he demonstrates the impartiality by which Jesus dealt with both men and women by consistently linking stories about men with stories about women. Such pairings can be found in almost every chapter of his Gospel. He carries on that sensitivity to the role and importance of women in his account of the early church, where he often links them together with men. Women waited with the men in Jerusalem for the promised Holy Spirit (Acts 1:12-14). Peter proclaims that the promised Spirit will be poured out upon men and women and “they will prophesy (preach)” (Acts 2:17-18).

Luke makes it abundantly clear that because of Christ, all walls separating people by race, social class, or gender are to be torn down within the body of Christ. Women, as well as men, are recipients of the grace of God, and equally share in all aspects of life together in the church. So when Paul wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28), he was not envisioning an age yet to come but describing what was already the case in the earliest church, as it lived out the teachings and example of Jesus. Clearly, women have never had a greater champion, a mightier “liberationist,” than Jesus of Nazareth. In word and deed, Jesus struck the chains that had for so long imprisoned women in a demeaning state of depersonalizing and dehumanizing subordination, and set them free to claim their inheritance as choice and chosen daughters of the Most High God.

IV. Women’s Role in the Earliest Church

Women were the last at the cross and the first at the tomb. Given the lowly status of women in Jesus’ day, it is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that the first Christian preachers of the resurrection were not men but women! It was women who had come to the tomb early on that historic first day of the week; it was women who were the first to hear the good news that “Jesus…is not here; he has risen just as he said;” it was women who first heard and obeyed the Great Commission, “go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘he has risen from the dead’” (Matthew 28:5-7). Since it would have been just as easy for the divine messengers to announce Christ’s resurrection to the male disciples huddled behind locked doors, we can only conclude that these post-resurrection events which focus so pointedly upon women were divinely ordained. After centuries of being denied access to the Word of God, it is almost as if God were saying, “These are my beloved daughters in whom I am well pleased. Listen to them!”

The major objection to women preachers and leaders, cited most frequently by those who deny them ministerial roles, comes from two isolated passages in the Pauline letters (1 Corinthians 14:34-35; 1 Timothy 2:11-15). There are no texts in the Bible that have done greater damage to the church over so long a period of time as these. Because of a failure to study them in their immediate ecclesial context, and to take into consideration how warped was the wider culture of their day in their attitudes toward women, the church has been deprived of the potential ministry and leadership services of half its members.

Suffice it to say that a careful study of these texts conclusively shows that in both instances where Paul tells women to “keep silent in the church,” he was dealing with local problem situations in the churches at Corinth and Ephesus. He did not intend that those specific instructions to two troubled local congregations were to become a universal church law for all succeeding generations. To the contrary, when we see all that he had to say about the vital role of women in evangelism and ministry, and observe his own positive relationships with women, it can be asserted that aside from Jesus women have never had a greater champion than the Apostle Paul.

The New Testament explodes upon its world as one of the most egalitarian documents in history in the way it smashes walls and bridges chasms that have divided people from each other all across the religious, racial, social, and gender spectrum. The Gospel of Jesus Christ elevates women as coequal with men in all matters pertaining to the Kingdom of God, and their life together as fellow members of the body of Christ. It presents us with the earliest and most compelling vision of what a community of believers can become when we take Paul’s liberating word seriously: namely, that “we are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

There is a sequel to Jennifer’s story. When our local church heard about the shabby way she had been treated, they offered her a summer youth intern position that provided her with more remuneration than she would have had otherwise. In the meantime, the pastor of the church that had reneged on their original contract with her, walked his church board through all the New Testament had to say about women in ministry, using my book as a guide, after which the board reversed itself again. Although it was too late bring her to their church, they voted to send her a check that was double the amount they had originally agreed to pay her for her summer’s work. Jennifer went on to seminary and graduated with distinction. She is presently serving as a youth minister in a large Nazarene church.