Self awareness is a great asset when it comes to reading the Bible. Self awareness has opened up whole new ways of reading Scripture. As people come to question their hitherto accepted place in society so they look for support in asking those questions; and they also look to challenge what has given them that now questionable position in society. So as women began in the 19th century to be self aware in new ways that challenged their traditional roles, they looked to the Bible to see how it described women and to see how women in the Bible behaved. Are Biblical women good role models or examples of ill treatment and oppression? Does the Bible account for the way women have been poorly treated in the past? And above all would Jesus challenge or accept the way the church has treated women?
As a result of all this questioning we cannot now study the Bible without being particularly sensitive to the women we read about and so today the women waiting by the cross demand our attention. Who are they? What are they doing there? What is their relation with Jesus and with the better known disciples who seem to be so conspicuously absent?
The number and names of the women present vary; Matthew says the were many women, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him; all four gospel writers mention Mary Magdalene; only John refers to Jesus’ mother; otherwise we hear of Mary the mother of James and Joses, (who may in fact also be the mother of Jesus see Mark 6:3) and the mother of the sons of Zebedee, James and John, and Mary the wife of Clopas and Salome. Most of them are now unknown to us though they must have been well known in the communities in which the story was first told. The key words in the narrative are the verbs: the women follow, they serve and they watch. It is hard to avoid the comparison with the twelve. The women follow Jesus to the end but the men have run away; the women serve but the men have been arguing about who should be first in the kingdom; the women watch but the men in Gethsemane fell asleep. There is a strong sense that women can also provide models of discipleship and in some circumstances they are more satisfactory models than the men.
Is this a case of special pleading to make up for an otherwise peripheral appearance of women in the rest of Jesus’ ministry? What during his life time was Jesus relationship with the women he met? Of course the Jewish culture in which Jesus lived was entirely patriarchal women were written about from the male point of view. Women are married or given in marriage; they are coveted by men; a woman was the cause of the fall, women are a temptation to men, a son is to be wished for rather than a daughter. Outside the home it was improper for a man to be alone with a woman, especially if he were a rabbi or teacher. Women were not meant to be taught. There is a prayer in which the adult Jewish male gives thanks for not having been born a woman. Woman play little part in worship.
There are in the Old Testament some variations on this theme; women like Sarah, Rebecca and Miriam, Naomi and Ruth, Judith and Esther play a major role in their stories. Though their field of activity was restricted, most women were important and influential figures in the home. .Just occasionally maternal imagery is applied to God; the personified figure of wisdom is seen in feminine terms. And yet our normal picture of Jesus, is of a man surrounded by men, arguing with men, and choosing men as his disciples. Women are unlikely to have accompanied him on the road except on pilgrimage up to Jerusalem. It was unseemly for women to roam about. Women like Mary and Martha of Bethany provided him with hospitality the traditional woman’s role. And yet in spite of all this, it is still possible to detect something subversive in Jesus approach to women.
So, when looking at the events in Eden, Jesus sees Eve not as a source of sin but as a partner in holy matrimony, to whom the man is to remain faithful. He sees men and women who follow the word of God as his brothers and sisters. Patriarchal hierarchies are not to form a part of the community of his disciples. Status is something to be given up not clung onto. Jesus at least on one occasion ignored one of the fundamental rules of ritual purity and allowed the woman with a haemorrhage to touch him and to be healed. He conversed about serious theology with the Samaritan woman at the well who had had been married seven times, he forgave the woman taken in adultery, On one famous occasion his mind was changed by gentile women’s verbal cunning. And he commends Mary for sitting at his feet to learn rather than joining Martha for the traditional woman’s place in the kitchen. Mary has become a disciple in her own right not just the woman who feeds the rabbi however much Jesus may have depended on and appreciated many hospitable women. So Jesus can also use woman and women’s work in his parables (cf leaven and the lost coin), an exception in a male centred culture. With ironic humour he uses the story of the widow tenaciously contending for her rights with an unjust judge as an image for the life of prayer. And finally and most movingly the shocked and indignant disciples have to watch a woman who may even have been a prostitute, pour costly ointment over his head and be commended for doing so; Truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world what she has done will be told in memory of her.’
Jesus took women seriously, he attended to their needs and he challenged them to go beyond their ideas of themselves.’ (Jane Williams) But there is more to it than that. We are of course in studying scripture in this way in danger of setting women up in competition with men either by showing them in a better light or at least as equals to men. And to do so is to miss the point of Jesus’ essential message. And to see that point the best witness is Jesus own mother, Mary.
There is an extraordinary moment early on in the gospel when Mary and Jesus’ brothers come looking for him they are clearly anxious about him. When Jesus is told, he responds Who is my mother or my brother? my mother and my brother are those who hear the word of God and do it.’ It seems harsh. Throughout his ministry Jesus puts the claims of his mission above those of his family. On another occasion a woman in the crowd pays tribute to Mary. Blessed is the womb that bore you’ she says to Jesus and he replies, Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.’ There is nothing about being a woman even about being the mother of Jesus, which makes her distinct or special. First of all she must be a disciple she must listen she is called just as the men are called. She is to enter into faith in Jesus on exactly the same basis as the men. There are no special privileges for the so-called weaker sex.
It seems likely that Luke and not Mary wrote the Magnificat, which we say at Evensong My soul doth magnify the Lord ‘. And though Luke puts it on Mary’s lips before she gives birth to Jesus the message of the Magnificat is more appropriate to what Mary has had to learn by the end of Jesus’ life. What counts is to be the servant of God and to bear witness to the putting down of all hierarchy, wealth and power as God joins to himself the poor, the humble and the meek. And so Mary and her female companions are there at the foot of the cross, bearing witness to the end. This is the response, commitment and love that Jesus demands of those who magnify the Lord. And Jesus is the one who has enabled these women to find the freedom to make the response of true discipleship.
The women are there waiting upon Jesus in silence. And it is finally in the passivity of Jesus on the cross that we find our most powerful witness to the undoing of patriarchy in the gospels. On the cross God reveals what Paul calls the foolishness of God which is wiser than the wisdom of man, the weakness of God which is stronger than man’s strength. The crucified, marginal, powerless maleness of Jesus on the cross is a judgement on the world’s patterns of male dominance. It subverts, as so much of Jesus teaching subverted, patterns of power and hierarchy. And perhaps it needed a man a male representative of God to challenge the assumption that somehow divine power is a masculine power. The power of maleness and male dominance is emptied out on the cross. This is not of course to wish that God could be more like a woman. It is rather to pass judgement on a certain kind of power, whether it is wielded by men, or women. Jesus dies as the victim of such power and he dies in solidarity with the victims of that kind of power whether they be women or men.
If we are all made new in our Christian discipleship then Christ holds up to question all the established patterns of maleness and femaleness which we have inherited. We can never take our gender patterns and relationships for granted as somehow natural and God given. In Christ there is as Paul says neither male nor female. We are all to be remade in Christ in every aspect of ourselves. In John’s gospel we hear Jesus on the cross committing his mother and his beloved disciple into each other’s care, Woman, behold thy Son Behold thy mother.’ It is the start of the new community in which the family of Jesus is to forge new relationships of trust, equality, and mutual service, listening together to the word of God.