Introduction
It has become a passion with me, to find new ways of looking at the gospel material that might speak to grown-ups in the here and now. The material is so familiar and its interpretations so formulaic that it may seem impossible to present them as new and vital. However, if we believe the message of the gospel is for all time, then this must be authenticated by their re-interpretation in the language and world view of now. It is not the enduring interpretations that are claimed to be for all time but the message contained in the stories themselves, time conditioned as they are, and they, we, deserve to find our own ways of looking rather than following those of generations who lived within a world view so vastly different from ours. I hope that the material herein will have relevance for people within the church who struggle with their commitment to the faith as well as those who gave it up long ago and maybe also to those young women who have had no religious background and now would like to know what it is about. (From the Introduction to my Seeking Sophia)
Perhaps it is the case that the Jesus of religion, i.e. the Christian church, and the Jesus of spirituality might be two distinct ways of looking at the Jesus of history. Religion and spirituality once were synonymous, but no longer. These days the differentiation seems to go along the lines of religion equating with an organized community of some sort, e.g. a church and the dogmas and rituals that express its beliefs and meanings. Spirituality has a more fluid definition, which goes along with a good deal of personal development that assumes and ministers to the understanding that there is more to life than the physical, material reality. It acknowledges that humans are body, mind and spirit and the harmony of the parts makes for security, peace and a meaningful life. As one researcher put it, “Spirituality and neurobiology are both about being a complete human being”. One could say that the church is primarily focused on the divinity of Jesus: the Son of God. Perhaps for many people today who have no church teaching in their background the term Son of God is meaningless. My fantasy for the purpose of this exercise is that the Jesus of spirituality might focus on the manhood of Jesus, to see in Him what it is to be a truly whole human being, the fullness of humanity made actual.
I try to imagine what it would have been like to have been among the women who encountered Jesus in His earthly life. Of course, we have no information about Him that is not reported through the lens of the Resurrection. Whatever anyone knew of His previous life, the telling of it would be coloured by the amazing, subsequent fact of His death not being the end but the beginning of a whole new way of understanding the meaning of His life. Any suggestion of a ‘normal’, even if ‘exceptional’, human life is not available to us, but we can make some astute guesses, especially from the incidental details we do get. It is in these seemingly incidental details in His relating to women that we get a sense that His way was not the norm in His time and mostly not in ours, nor in the centuries between. It has taken two thousand years but now we see the changes in progress, men and women are ‘allowed’ to be friends, parents share in the process of parenting, partnerships tend to be more often the coming together of equals. I see it happening in my grandees’ generation and it is beautiful, but what is more astonishing is that for them it is normal!
Thinking through all this led me to a temptation I could not resist, to look at the gospel stories of Jesus’ encounters with women as we might look at any gorgeous man relating easily to women; to see in these encounters a model for male/female interaction such as we strive for in our day but has not been the norm throughout history. The Jesus stories fall into two groups, there are the healing stories of unknown women and there are the Friends and Relations, and ‘the others’. These others are the women who followed Jesus, some of whom are named, but not clearly distinguished, as in a bunch of ‘Marys’.
We can reflect on something of the religio/historical backgrounds to the gospel accounts, the biblical criticism and the vagaries of translation but we also need to take into account the volume of centuries of priestly sermons, Sunday school teaching and the accent on Jesus’ divine nature. These are some of the forces that have determined the habitual ways of looking at the stories. I want to look at them, not as a theologian, but, as it were, from the point of view of someone who is new, untrained and vaguely interested, maybe encountering the text for the first time. In some ways this is what it was like for the first audiences who heard the stories of Jesus from His mouth or from those who had been close to Him, or like the first men to read the written words.
The big difference between then and now, of course, is that those original people shared a familiar background, world-view and language. We can only make guesses about these things; language is a big one. I have gone on at length, elsewhere, about the issues of translation and how each translation betrays the bias of the translator; I am not going to repeat myself. For the purposes of these pieces, I am using the Revised Standard Version which is acknowledged to be about as good as it gets in reference to the original Greek. Just remember, though, that even the original Greek was itself a translation from the Aramaic, the language in which Jesus would have taught; probably the very first attempts at recording His teaching were in Aramaic too. One further language note: I am using the capital “H” for His pronouns for two reasons, one because I think it emphasizes the honour due and two, I have been in trouble at times for inconsistency in this regard so I have decided, against the grain of modern practice, to adopt the old-fashioned capital throughout. You will notice, also that I have Gospel and gospel. This is not poor proof reading! Gospel is the Good News, the reality that is summed up in the teaching, life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; gospel in lower casing refers to the various accounts of this contained in the New Testament.
There are barely a dozen or so stories involving women, leaving aside those relating to His mother and His close women friends. In His parables He often introduced women as the protagonists, which gives us some ideas of how He thought about women, but we will leave that aside for the time being.
One of the things we will observe throughout these stories is that the women Jesus encounters are frequently stroppy, don’t back down and challenge Him in very real ways. Rather than ‘putting them in their place’ He clearly enjoys them and accedes to their requests; the Gentile woman we encounter at Mark 7:24 is a good example. This is one of the lessons we can learn from the gospel that hasn’t been mentioned in sermons that I’ve heard or read. Jesus enjoyed strong women being true to themselves and He was quite up for being challenged by them.
The first healing miracle of a woman is Simon’s mother-in-law. It is interesting that Jesus does not speak to her but simply takes her by the hand. Once restored in health she gets back to her proper role of serving them! This is recorded in Mark, (1:29), the earliest of the gospel accounts, and copied by Matthew (8:14) and Luke (4:38). In the composition of the gospel accounts it is interesting to notice the ways in which Matthew and Luke used material from Mark; the material that they share, unavailable to Mark, and the exclusive stories each of them had, accessing teaching from their own particular sources. It is instructive, too, to study how they grouped or ‘re-aligned’ pieces to suit their specific purposes. However, that pursuit is following the fascinating line of biblical criticism which is not our purpose here, but we will have reason to observe the implications of some such divergencies as the nascent church developed. In the work that follows I will use the Markan account first, that being the closest we get to the original.
