Scripture: Matthew 15:21-28
In honor of Women’s History Month, I decided to read the four gospels with an eye to the way women are portrayed, or not portrayed, in what for Christians is the heart of the Bible. I wanted to try to do that with an open mind, setting aside as much as possible any assumptions or preconceptions, and just see where that led me. I figured if I did that, I would find myself being drawn to a passage or two that would speak to me particularly in some way. The whole idea was that I didn’t know what that passage would be or how it would speak to me, so that’s why where it says scripture reading in the bulletin there is nothing listed. I hadn’t finished my reading yet and didn’t know where it would lead me.
I’ve done this before. I’ve read at least one gospel straight through at one sitting quite often. I’ve read all four gospels straight through in just a few sittings on several occasions. I find it to be a good thing to do. I recommend it. Reading the Bible the way we typically do it in church—a few verses at a time—makes it seem like what the Bible is is this collection of sayings, some nuggets of wisdom or a bunch of moral lessons that we can pluck out and read on a Sunday morning or at a weekly Bible study. And that’s all right—sort of—if we’re careful how we handle the material. But what the gospels really are (and much of the rest of the Bible) is stories. The gospels are four different tellings of the story of Jesus, and we don’t get a sense of the story by reading a paragraph here and there, now and then. And Lent seems to be a good time to read the story of Jesus, so a number of times over the years, often during Lent, not always, I have read through one or more of the gospels the way I might read a story.
I have also on more than one occasion, maybe a handful of occasions over the years, read the gospels through with this concern on my mind as I read, the concern, that is, about the place of women in the story. But it’s been a while, and so I thought it’s time to do that again, not relying on my memory of what I felt or discovered when I did it before, and not assuming that I would react the same way now as I have in the past. But it’s hard to do that without at least a few preconceptions. I know going in that these are not going to be feminist documents. They bear the names of men—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were produced from cultures—Roman, Greek, Hebrew—where women had fewer rights, less power, and less voice than men, and they were written for people who lived in those cultures. There is going to be a certain bias built in here. We know that the twelve named disciples were all male and that this has been used by some people to justify the exclusion of women from the ministry or priesthood. Anyone who reads the gospels with even mildly feminist sympathies is probably going to find more than a few things to be troubled by.
On this level there are things in the gospels that are not very good news. I know this in general terms. I’ve run into it in all sorts of ways in the past. And certain small things stick in my mind that in one sense are sort of humorous and in another sense not at all. For instance, the story about Peter’s mother-in-law, that I know some of you have in your head too. It’s a story of a healing in one sentence. It says: “When Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever; he touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and she…began to serve him.” I don’t think I need to comment. Or how about at the end of the story where Jesus feeds a whole bunch of people beginning with just five loaves and two fish and it says at the end “and those who had eaten were about 5,000 men, besides women and children.” We continue to call this the story of the feeding of the 5,000 (that is many people do; I try not to), even though that does not include women and children who are mentioned as a kind of an afterthought and were not counted and seemingly didn’t count so much.
So I knew I couldn’t wipe out such things from my mind, but given all of that, I tried to read the gospels with as open a mind as I could, wondering whether what I would discover this time through the gospels would be better or worse than what I had come to expect. And the answer is…worse. Just a personal reaction, a very subjective, sort of gut level feeling I got this time through, and I’m not sure whether it was because I didn’t want to remember how bad things really were or because my expectations or my hopes have increased or my level of tolerance decreased, but I was frankly saddened by what I read, and didn’t read, even though I knew I was going to find a male bias.
Matthew is the first gospel and it begins with a genealogy, a listing of Jesus’ ancestors in which a few women are named, and then a brief story of about Jesus’ birth in which Mary is named as the mother but in which Joseph is the more central character, the one who makes decisions, decides to go ahead and marry Mary, take the family to Egypt and so on, and also the story about the wise men or magi, astrologers. Then there is a long draught. Few women make an appearance of any sort. Those who do mostly have no name and do not speak. Peter’s nameless mother-in-law as already noted got well and immediately started waiting on people. Herodias, the only woman who is named through the body of the gospel, is essentially an executioner, demanding the head of John the Baptist. The nameless mother of the disciples James and John speaks and asks for her sons to have positions of honor next to Jesus in the life to come. Finally, at the end two women named Mary are said to be present at the crucifixion, and are the ones to discover the empty tomb at Easter. The one instance where a woman, though not named, does speak and has the spotlight for more than a passing instant, is the story I decided to have as our scripture for this morning, partly just because it’s unusual and partly because it did speak to me. I’ll get back to that story in a few minutes.
I’m not going to go through the rest of the gospels in any detail, try to give you the evidence why I felt the way I did. I’ll just say that Mark and John were, if anything, worse than Matthew in terms of the frequency and prominence of the appearance of women in the story. Luke was somewhat better. Mary and Elizabeth have speaking parts in the birth story. And throughout there are more women who have names and who have speaking parts, although some people think the way women are portrayed, that is in subservient roles, is no better and maybe even worse in Luke than in the other gospels. So when all was said and done, I was struck, even though I was prepared for a masculine bias in the gospels, I was struck as I read this week by the extent of it.
But, I thought to myself, maybe this is partly me, not all me for sure, but partly me. Maybe I was in a bad mood, or a particularly cynical mood, when I was reading. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for what I found and overlooked some things that I should have paid more attention to. Maybe there’s another way to look at this material.
Well, I know there’s another way to look at the material. Once before when I read the gospel with these questions in mind it was because a woman in the church I was serving at the time said to me that she had a hard time with the scriptures because of the attitude she felt they had toward women, and I had said that I thought there were some good things in the gospels about women and that I thought Jesus was pretty progressive in his attitudes toward women and she said, “I’d like to hear about it. Maybe you could preach on that.”
Which I did. And so I went through the gospels looking for things that would support my claim. And you can find them, although I admit you have to read carefully sometimes. I pointed out that there are several places where it clearly says not only that women were the people who were there when everyone else was not at the crucifixion and on Easter morning but also that women were among the group who traveled with Jesus from the earliest days, that his traveling band was a mixed-gender group and that may have been somewhat scandalous in that day, that some of Jesus’ teaching, for instance his teaching on divorce, was likely meant to protect women, that he intervened on behalf of the woman accused of adultery, that sometimes when he spoke with women or touched them he was going against social custom and maybe religious codes, to the extent that it says at one point in the fourth chapter of the gospel of John that “the disciples were astonished that he was speaking with a woman”, that Jesus compared himself to a mother hen who wanted to gather her children under her wings. I gathered together a collection of parts of the gospels where women were affirmed or where if you paid attention you could see an inclusive attitude toward women coming through in spite of the overall male bias in the writings.
I remember thinking at the time that I had made a pretty convincing argument. She thought, the church member I referred to thought, that I had made a valiant effort. “Good try,” she said, “but you didn’t convince me.” And I understand. I wasn’t so willing to understand then, but I understand now. Right at the moment I’m not sure my arguments then would be convincing to me either, the me who has just read the gospels. It’s not that there aren’t all those things to be said. It’s that there is so much else to deal with. And what I’ve already said is just the surface of it. There’s more.
For instance, after I read the gospels on my own, I decided to check my reactions with some sources I have of women scholars who have devoted themselves to these issues. Doing a very small amount of reading I found that there is a Greek word that appears both at the end of the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness and in the story about Peter’s mother-in-law. We’ve already noted that as soon as Peter’s mother-in-law is out of her sick bed, she begins to serve the men around her. That’s bad enough. But it also turns out that the same word appears at the end of the temptation story where it says that angels came and ministered to Jesus. Apparently if angels do it, it’s ministering. If a woman does it, it’s serving. A somewhat different connotation, I would say. Of course, this is a problem of translation, not a problem of the way the gospel was originally written, but it is a problem.
And here’s another thing one of the women scholars suggested was a problem, speaking of the temptations. The temptations Jesus experienced, she said, are really more male temptations, having to do with greed, and power and fame and control. Testosterone type temptations. Women, she suggested, are tempted not so much to gain the world, but to lose themselves, and the story of the temptation leaves them out in ways much deeper than just the fact that there is no woman character in the story.
Or, how about the rather well known parable of Jesus usually called the story of the prodigal son about a son who went off and spent all his inheritance in wild living and finally came home where he was reunited with a father who had been loving him and waiting for him all the time he was away. The story suggests that God is like the father whose love for his wayward son never stops, and so some people have said it should be called the parable of the waiting father, rather than the parable of the prodigal son. But one of the women among my sources suggests that the parable might also be called the parable of the missing mother. A story about family life and family love and about the relations between human beings and God, and in all that not a woman to be found. I don’t say any of this to suggest that it proves some sort of point, other than that so far as how women are treated in the gospel stories, the picture is a complicated one with lots of layers and lots of things to sort through.
Which brings me finally to the passage that we heard earlier, itself a somewhat complicated and somewhat troubling passage. It’s a troubling passage because in it Jesus acts so un-Jesus-like. At least according to my view of Jesus and what he was about. In his travels Jesus has this encounter with a woman who is described as Canaanite. She was not Jewish. She belonged to a group that had tense relations with the Jewish people. She was Palestinian. Not only was she an unaccompanied woman and a Palestinian, but when she approached Jesus, she started out by shouting at him. All of that would be enough to make other people back away, but not Jesus surely. He received everyone, met everyone where they were. He wouldn’t have cared whether the woman was a woman or a Palestinian or whether she shouted at him. Lots of people shouted at him. The story says, however, “He answered her not a word.” He ignored her.
The disciples see all this and decide to brief Jesus. Better get rid of her, they say, she’s been shouting at us too, making a pest of herself. And amazingly, Jesus seems to agree with them. Other places he takes the opportunity to give a teaching to the disciples. No, don’t get rid of these people here or those people there. We’re all about not turning people away. But here he says, yes, I’ve really only come to deal with the house of Israel. He even says that it’s not fair to give the food intended for the children to the dogs, not exactly calling her a dog, but not exactly not either.
Through all this the woman doesn’t give up. She refuses to let Jesus or the disciples get rid of her. My daughter is sick. You can’t just send me away. Besides, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table. Finally, almost as if he had just been testing her all along, Jesus changes his attitude: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
I don’t know whether Jesus was just sort of playing a role with the woman to see what she would do, or whether he was just really tired and didn’t want to deal with one more person, or whether there is some other reason Jesus didn’t act like himself at first. We’ll never know. What is clear to me is that this is a story that honors a woman who had guts and persistence and who refused to let Jesus dismiss her because she was a woman or because she was Palestinian or because she didn’t know her place, and who was doing two things really, speaking up for her daughter, but also at the same time speaking out for what Dr. King called the Beloved Community, which is not all that different in my mind from what Jesus called the kingdom of God, the reign of God. The story says to me: Thank God for pesky women. Thank God for strong women. Thank God for women who are willing to be strong on behalf of their daughters and sons and on behalf of the beloved community. Thank God for men who are willing to be strong on behalf of their daughters and sons and sisters and brothers and on behalf of the beloved community.
The question in all of this is not only how do we acknowledge Women’s History Month in the church, or even what the role of women is in the gospels and women are portrayed. There is another question which underlies all the rest. The underlying question is: Are we as followers of Jesus to be about the building of a beloved community little by little among ourselves and even more little by little in the world around us? Are we called by our faith, and by the scriptures, to live toward the reign of God, which could not be other than a beloved community? The answer to that question is sometimes clouded by, among other things, the masculine bias that can certainly be found in the scriptures, but the answer to me is also clear, and it is a resounding yes. And the particular story about Jesus and the Canaanite woman affirms that, in spite of what Jesus himself says at first and in spite of whatever interesting questions there may be to discuss about the story. Are we called by our faith, and by the scriptures to live toward the reign of God and toward a beloved community? I can’t demonstrate for you in a single Sunday morning that the four gospels all together answer yes to that question, though I believe the answer is yes to that question. I am willing to say that this one story answers yes to that question. Thank God for the pesky Palestinian woman. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 11, 2007