New translations of the Bible can sometimes produce surprises. So, for example, in our psalm this evening, the choir sang, ‘The Lord gave the word: great was the company of the preachers.’ The verse is familiar because Handel set it as a chorus in his ‘Messiah’. When, however, we come to read this psalm in a modern version we find; ‘The Lord gave the word; great was the company of women who bore the tidings.’ And the tidings they give is news of victory and the flight of Israel’s enemies. It was it seems one of the more heroic roles of women in the Old Testament.
This theme of triumph is continued in our Ephesians reading with another quote from this same psalm. ‘When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men.’ The verse is applied to Jesus, triumphant over death, ascended to the right hand of the Father and distributing the gifts of the Spirit; and the gifts are the gifts of ministry in the church to lead, preach, teach, and so build up the body of Christ.
All this might just remind us, if we were at this service last week, of Fr Jim’s sermon about women and their place in the ministry of the church, more especially as bishops. When Handel’s choir sang, ‘Great was the company of the preachers, ‘ they must have assumed they were singing about men, for they had never seen a woman in a pulpit. When the author of Ephesians talks about apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, did he only have men in mind? And if he did, how authoritative should that assumption be for the church today? What should direct us in discerning whether change in the church is authorised by the Spirit? Our reading from Ephesians speaks of people being ‘blown here and there by every wind of teaching.’ Nowadays we might talk in the same way about the church being too much influenced by passing fads, in thrall to the contemporary rather than recognising the authority of tradition and scripture. And people have used that argument in relation to women’s ministry. But if they are wrong how should we demonstrate that they are wrong on this and on other matters where there is a movement for change in the church. How is change to be validated?
I want to suggest two approaches which might supplement what Fr Jim said last week. The first is to think of Scripture setting up trajectories, powerful ideas like seeds being sown which lie a long time in the earth and produce later unexpected fruits. So in Galatians 3;28 Paul famously says, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ This is not to be interpreted as implying a simple equality; rather it suggests that as a result of baptism, ‘all the existing social distinctions are being abolished; religious, social and sexual opposites are being forged into a new unity.’ Paul’s attitude to women within the community is hard to describe. In one place he seems to forbid women to speak in church though that may have to do with a situation where women are interrupting to ask questions; in another place he implies that women do pray and prophesy within worship. Again Paul teaches that women should submit to their husbands in everything; on the other hand he instructs husbands to love and respect their wives, and he equates the whole church male and female with the bride for whom Christ sacrifices himself. Paul also describes women contending at his side and working with him.
To understand the earliest stages of this trajectory we need to set it in context. Jewish rabbinic sources seem to have regarded women as to a degree unteachable and to be excluded from religious debate though their practical participation was important. In Jesus’ ministry women are taught, Mary of Bethany is commended for her eagerness to learn rather than staying in the kitchen. Paul continues the practice and we are told that among his earliest converts were ‘a good many influential women.’ Such women brought their households with them and their houses became the homes of the early churches.
Of course we can’t build too much on this; women are much more invisible than men in the history of the early church – they are only flushed out as it were by martyrdom or heresy hunts. There were some heroic and influential female martyrs and there were also some who were condemned for propagating heresy, even though such heresies were usually originated by men. But overall it’s probably true to say that Christianity did set going a trajectory that it’s earliest teachers barely understood. For though the New Testament says a lot about the family and the place of women in the family it is also very disruptive of the family. Because of that element in Jesus teaching which emphasised the uncertainty of the future, and the radical overturning of all culture in the coming of the kingdom, there was something profoundly subversive in Christianity for all social norms and cultural patterns. Many of the earliest women saints were famous either for their resistance to marriage to a pagan husband or for their abandoning of family life altogether as a hermit or consecrated virgin in a monastic community. And in such communities women developed new patterns of authority.
Now none of these things in themselves argue for women’s consecration to the episcopate, but they do show what I’ve called a historical trajectory which opens up the radical possibility of such consecrations as a new way of breaking down barriers between male and female within the body of Christ.
So much for Scripture pointing towards new practice which is nevertheless rooted in Scripture. What of the doctrinal tradition – is there a way in which women’s ministry can be similarly rooted in traditional beliefs? And here perhaps oddly I think we might focus on our understanding of redemption. The argument for the episcopate of women has included a case for a new, more feminine model of leadership, which might counterbalance the inadequacies of purely male leadership. Now though such a case could be made, the danger is that when women become bishops they might feel they have to prove themselves over against their male colleagues by doing things both differently and better than the men – and if that were to be the case it could be dangerous for them and for the church. Any kind of leadership which sets out to prove itself in a competitive sense is unchristian.
And yet perhaps in our world such leadership is unavoidable – leadership whether exercised by men or women needs redeeming – and now that almost all forms of leadership are open to women in secular society – it needs to be brought into the church too if it is to be redeemed.
Elsewhere in Ephesians we hear how God sums up all things in Christ – or recapitulates them in Christ. Some of the Fathers took this idea of recapitulation to mean that Christ in some sense lives through or takes up in himself, all aspects of our humanity, whether male or female, in order to redeem all human experience. If leadership has become now an aspect of our humanity which men and women can share then we might say that it should be brought into the church and submitted to that slow and painful redemptive process which Christ initiated for us in his recapitulation of our humanity. In the past when only men have led, so the church has been the place for such slow and painful attempts to redeem each kind of male leadership in each culture and age. And now the time has come for female leadership to join that process – and no doubt the sins and failures will be as great as they have been for men, just as the miracles of grace will also be as great.
It was once said that whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. But luckily that wasn’t difficult. But if both scripture and tradition might be seen to validate the idea of women’s full ministry in the church, perhaps it may with great difficulty and much grace be possible for us all to be half as good as each other. Amen.