In the chronicles of humanity, a broad spectrum of sacred practices has fleshed out in all major faith traditions. Withrestrained dosage of alacrity, it has been effortlessly cool for men to play up a well-meaningplacefor women in spiritual traditions. We live in an age of equality laws when legal definition of ‘woman’ has become a nebulous issue! The church has been dishonest and unfair withthe fairer gender for too long!In fact,any caringaffection or penchant to celebrate femininity is reprehensibly played down by the church. The life and work of the church generously benefit from women on all working groups from Christian Education, Youth Groups, Worship, Property, Stewardship, etc. As a rule of thumb, all cultures still deny women a life of self-esteem, justness, reverence and equal opportunity; women still endure injustice and discrimination frombasic healthcare issues,education toemployment opportunities.
While the Dreamtime, Wairuatanga, Mayan, Semitic, Vedic and Gnostic spiritualities acclaimed women, many Christian denominations constricted women from supervisory and professional rolesand abandonedon the periphery. Several competent women ingeniously stepped up to lead Sunday worship services in my absence.In Canada, New Zealand and Scotland, the Bible Study groups were led by competent women for decades albeit I was invited to elucidate certain issues when our denomination chose to ordain gay/lesbian candidates. Or discuss ambiguous metaphors such as ‘Christ’ and ‘anti-Christ’ which are glaringly absent in the Gospels! By and large Western church folks perhaps need the Greek savour and thought to figure out the Good News of Jesus. Such a bogus crutch is not mandatory for 21st century followers of Jesus.
There are more women in affluent nations; woefully, the worldwide male population is greater due to male preferential treatment in food, healthcare, education, professional opportunities. Over the past two millennia enthusiastic church women have imaginatively served the church and the wider community. “Are women participating in the life of the church as envisioned in the Bible?” To act on such a rhetorical $64,000 question might well be an unnerving chore! It is offbeat that archaic patriarchy, that stymies the role of women in the church, still insists on outrageous misconceptions about women’s leadership geniuses. The matter of ‘Men and the Gospel’ appears to be a non-issue as if the gratuitous domination of the elderly men in all faith traditions is downrightall right.
Good News or Gospel proclaims salvation offered the Risen Jesus. ‘euaggelion’ (eu-good and angelion – message)was a political word used to declare a military victory or birth of an emperor in the pagan Greco-Roman world.Those who emphasize ‘Full Gospel’ of salvation, sanctification, faith healing and the Second Coming of Jesus. While the Good News of Jesus is complete in itself, the Gospel narrative is incomplete as the very first narrative put together by Mark, who did not know Jesus in person, from the reports he learned from Peter. Mark 16:8 reads: ‘And having gone out, they fled from the tomb. Had seized for them trembling and amazement, and to none nothing they spoke; they were afraid for/because (γάρ) When a homily or a phone call precipitously concludes with ‘because’, a subordinating conjunction or subordinator, the congregation and recipient on the other sidemight well be shell-shocked. There is no such thing as ‘full gospel’; all being well, when the good news is ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’ (Shakespeare’s Hamlet) in our lives, it may become ‘full’.
Not to surpass the Hebrew backdrop, the movement of the Good News pioneered by Jesus got underway with the visitation of Mary and Elizabeth -two proleptic cousins in Ein Karem, southwest of Jerusalem. The church celebrates the Feast of the Visitation of these two pregnant women. While the lily-livered twelve disciples were biting nails, a group of intrepid women were, to borrow the words of Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane, 19th century hymnwriter of Edinburgh, “Beneath the cross of Jesus” and showed up on the third day to be acknowledged by the Risen Jesus. The Good News movement, not a moth-eaten institution, would never have been able to evolve and pick up the pace without these inconsolable and yet intrusive women and their curiosity-driven search for Jesus from the beginning.
From those seminal days of my theological frolicking, the consensus ad idem of Mary and Elizabeth prior to the births of their sons stoked positive vibes of joy and inspiration. The grim issue of the participation of women in the life and work of the church put a damper on my theological thought processes until I moved on to The United Church of Canada.
No matter where you travel, what you experience, who you encounter, how you were treated by others, it is impossible to return home unscathed sensitively, experientially, rationally, psychologically etc. It is mighty hard to figure out how humanity survives in spite of so much abuse, neglect, injustice and violence. In my twenties, I was enthralled by thecommunal lifestyle in Israel where children, women and men happily worked together with no gender issues. Quite an opportunity to live, work and improve my Hebrew at Kibbutz Sdot Yam!Yet, a xenophobic odiuminexorablyput up with in the native Palestinians and the new immigrants in Israel just about turned me into a holy sceptic.
During Lent the church reflects on the desert experiences of Jesus for forty days. The regions of Galilee, Judea, Samaria, Capernaum etc. where Jesus lived and ministered are bone-dry places with no Monsoon showers. It is rankling that the church has notfessed uphow it dithered to identify and investigate the desert Sunyata or emptiness of our mothers, sisters and daughters. Hitherto, scriptural scholarship has not helped us to fathom how deeply the Gospel was sculpted, for better, for worse, by the Hellenistic tunnel vision, the noxious control of the Roman Empire and the Hebrew Scriptures.
In terms of practical wisdom, it is a good thing to home in on ‘Women and the Gospel’ as opposed to ‘Women and the New Testament’ or ‘Women and the Church’. When we attempt to narrow down to one gender, it presupposes undeniablediscontent, opacity, indignity and mortification. In other words, if the church women (and men) were totally content with the cultural assumptions as well as social and literary fluctuations of the versions and our perceptions, we wouldn’t be losing our sleep on the first century theological presumptions and social experiencesreplicated in the Gospel.
Certainly it was a breath of fresh air to learn that women were not infantilized but appreciated asdecisively inspiring lifeforces in the Reformed denominations. Most men tussle with a morbid misassumption that they need to tower over and control 24/7 at home, work and on the highway. They lack a capacity to show mercy. Perhaps that’s why my mother trained me to be compassionate, thoughtful and generous. In Hebrew,(רֶחֶם) ‘rechem’, root word for mother and womb, means to pity, show mercy.
Forty years ago, over dinner I quizzedBishop Krister Stendahl what made him to construe that apostle Paul was the introspective conscience of the West. Thankfully, I received his straightforwardperspective on it. He had known that I would never be a sycophant of a man trained in ancient Greece. Paul’s sardonic postulations of low-grade role of women in the church are sodepressing that I took a break from using his obtuse credos that would eviscerate the dignity and self-esteem of our mothers, sisters, life-partners and daughters in my craft of preaching for decades.
Therefore, I would highlight how the life and witness of dedicated women of faith influenced me in my life.An unapologetic sharing of experiential highlights on my very first theological college were glaringly bristled withmanly presence.Ourexecutive chef who prepared luncheon for faculty and students on week days besides a few female secretaries who managed the logistics of the office were almost invisible. It was exclusively and outrageously a seminary or seed plot with its senate of ‘old men’, literally a ‘seed bed’!A genuinely inclusive church must phase out the age-old derisively misogynistic term, namely ‘seminary’.
Cultural patriarchy, a social system where aging men control influence and dictate social structures, towers above women as smarmyminions. No major religion is immune to this anomaly. However,it is never too late for the shamefaced church founded by Jesus to wipe out Paul’s hostility toward women.
The sustaining keys to my personal survival in my delightful but at times choppy ride as a minister in the turbulent thing called ‘church’ have been compassion, family, church community, a deep sense of risk-filled faith.The best theologian in my life was my mother who drummed in me thathumility works better than hubris.
In a large brood I was the only fluky one born between two girls! My mother took me to a dedication service led by the Metropolitan at her home parish. Two decades later when my parents alerted him of my pastoral ministry away from home, he instructed a bishop who was a student at Wycliffe College in Toronto to share his blessings. Such holy flashbacks are inscrutable; he breathed his last on the day I was ordained 13,353 km away in The United Church of Canada at Oxford Mills in the Ottawa Valley!
Perhaps, it was kind of tackyor better tactless when I had to repeat my mother’s words {‘Go and study;don’t bring home a foreign girl’} to a beautiful Dutch girl in Austria and another bubblyAmerican in Switzerland. No smart woman in my home turf would come near an un-ordained theological graduate! After a long wait, thankfully an amazinglygifted foreign student dared to be my soulmate! As a married man for forty-nine years, I would never say ‘I.’ It was always ‘we’ in referencing any success, detour, satisfaction or letdown we endured with gratitude. Our child, ourclunker, our Condo, our travel plans etc.
The Good News of Jesus promises ‘mansions’ for all.We are invited to construct on our spiritual landscapes, the church we belong to might well simply be a scaffold to stand at a preferred height on a secure and steady surface. We have been busy with the scaffolding for two millennia – installing, maintaining, repairing it according to the manufacturer’s guidelines.
Jesus was a feminist whoapplauded, treasured and empowered women in the Gospel narratives including one from the margins who helped him expand his healing ministry out of his blinkered boundaries.21st century disciples of Jesus need to stop being the victims of gaslighting by foreigners and their quick-fix answers regarding the rubrics of our journeys of faith.
Both Mark and Matthew tell us the story ofaSyrophoenician woman who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Her child needed healing; her tenacity healed both her daughter and Jesus from his blinkered ministry to transcend beyond his clan.Susan Lee Sontag, an American writer who protested and disobeyed the conventions of society’s double standard, reminds us: “Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children.”
Theodore Schwartz, a brain surgeon, reminds us that a surgical procedure is like a performance. The piece that you’re playing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has crescendos, it has denouements. It has moments where you move fast and moments where you move slow. You often have an audience. Any organization, except Boys Scouts, that chops up women must reexamine its raison d’etrewhich is to reflect the presence of the Holy One in the world. It is hard to imagine an allegory of the church and its normal daily activities. There is no one denomination that is totally devoid of dysfunction. Would George Orwell’s novella ‘Aimal Farm’ with its uncaring farmer and his rebellious animals be an appropriate allegory? The farmer owns his animals. The leaders and members of a church are both happy and disillusioned disciples of Jesus – children of the Almighty.
In the four Gospel narratives, unlike the Epistles where women were unreasonably forgotten and marginalized, Jesus valued, welcomed, treasured and included women as his daring disciples. How would the 21st Century Church lead and succeed in shaping our theological imagination to do the same and much more? Many men, including Archbishop Justin Welby, have been forced to walk away from leadership. Isn’t time to learn from our mothers, sisters and daughters to how to lead, not manage, with humility, compassion, inner strength and renewed chutzpah? There are always clearer ways ahead of us to create spaces for God where community of faith may align with God’s will and experience a refreshing landscape of nurture and growth.In the colossalscuffle between our consumingmemory and abidingdream the former eclipses the latter. However, there are prospects to find a path to breakthrough. The United Church of Canada began ordaining women in 1936 – not because it was the chicest thing to do during the “Dirty Thirties” in Canada!
Brazenly St. Anselm affirmed his feminist convictions:
‘And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?
Are you not the mother who, like a hen,
gathers her chickens under her wings?
Truly, Lord, you are a mother;
For both they who are in labour
And they who are brought forth
Are accepted by you”
No matter how urgently the Good News of Jesus expounds to cheer on to embolden women andupgradetheir hands-onleadership in the church, grosslypatriarchal behemoth might still be glacially slow to awaken anytime soon.It is hard to ignore a stark absence of theological underpinnings;the church is severely weighed down by a spiritual-theological bankruptcy to propose a solution to the malaise. The church has been pussyfooting around the issue of meaningful leadership of women in the church for over two millennia. Whether misogynous naysayers like it or not, it is long overdue for striving women to be tough as nails, chin up and take up the challenge sluggishly impervious faith traditions in order to navigate towards new landscapes of spirituality. When the exegetes miss the mark to impart and induce, church women with a bit of luckought to find no-nonsense words of Maya Angelouinsightful: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
The Rev. Dr. John T. Mathew is an ordained minister in The United Church of Canada who served several urban and rural congregations in Ontario, Canada since 1974 and taught in the Department of Religious Studies, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario. Mathew was awarded the Merrill Fellowship at Harvard Divinity School and served as Pastor-Theologian at the Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry. He was the Ecumenical Guest Minister at St. Machar’s Cathedral, Aberdeen (Church of Scotland) and Interim Minister with the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand.
