Women and Girls and Jesus

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Women and Girls and Jesus

Scripture: Matthew 9:18-26

Today’s lesson is a sandwich made out of two incidents: the healing (or raising) of a little girl with the healing of a woman inserted into the middle.

This is an invitation from the gospel writer for us to wonder about the connections between the two events.

One of the most obvious connections is that both of the healings happen to females. Men had more status and rights than women. It was almost impossible for women to inherit property, and girls and women were generally considered under the authority of the men in their lives: fathers, brothers, husbands, even sons of widows. The sort of thing we hear about now with horror from some countries of the world is a modern reflection of a very sexist shared history.

Children were loved and valued, of course, but boys were given extra status and everyone took that for granted.

The healings of a girl and a woman should tell us that Jesus made a point of welcoming and reaching out to women and that his followers knew it should be recorded. Jesus was deliberately treating women much more even-handedly than any Mediterranean cultures permitted.

A second cultural connection is that in both cases these second-class citizens reached out for help in a way that would have been shocking. The woman was having “women’s issues” and she was supposed to suffer in silence at home, with only other trusted women knowing of her situation. To reach out to a man for healing was highly improper.

Obviously, the dead girl couldn’t reach out herself but her father reached out for her. That might have been expected for a son, but this man insisted that Jesus drop whatever he was doing and come running to save his daughter AND JESUS DID IT without hesitation!

There was a religious and legal connection too: both of the people Jesus helped that day would make him ritually unclean just by virtue of touching or being touched by either one. The law of Moses declared that women who were menstruating were ritually unclean until after their period was over and after a ritual bath and being declared clean by the priest. It is pretty obvious that the laws of ritual cleanliness were written by uncomfortable men.

In a similar way, touching a dead body also made a person unclean with similar rituals being needed to become purified again.

Of course, there are fiddly legalistic points that could be made: Does touching the fringe of Jesus’ robe really count?; If the girl really was just sleeping there’s no issue, right? Although that doesn’t explain the mourners . . .

Together, all these facts tell us that Jesus was prepared to go the extra mile for these people who were on the fringes. Ignoring the ritual purity laws was a big deal, practically blasphemy, but Jesus did it. Dropping everything to rush to the side of a dead girl was unheard of, but Jesus did it. Encouraging this pushy woman and this desperate father went against all social correctness but Jesus encouraged them to get past the social and legal niceties to seek the help they needed.

It is remarkable the way this single passage sums up so much of Jesus’ ministry. He reached out to women and girls, some of the most vulnerable people of his day, and he let his love for them carry him past all the rules and regulations that got in the way so that he could make a real difference.

Jesus made children and women an important part of his ministry, enough that the gospel writers make a point of mentioning it. The early church backed away from that position, so that while Jesus let women exercise leadership in his own ministry, Luke starts to claw that back in Acts, where he declares that women could not be apostles.

It has taken millennia for us to start ordaining women. Those gains were hard fought and hard won and we still have to make a point of encouraging girls to consider jobs, like ministry, like jobs in STEM, that have been traditionally closed to them.

The gains we have in the United Church are not reflected in some denominations yet and there are still countries where it is remarkable when women are simply given the right to drive. Jesus was so far ahead of his time that we are still catching up.

I think it’s important that we don’t take these advances for granted. It is possible to lose ground and it is foolish for any of us to rest on our laurels. We need to encourage our women and girls to claim their space to become leaders, to get past the social barriers that still exist and to tear those barriers down.

We are encouraging that same kind of progress for members of the LGBTQ+ community and this Pride month is an important reminder of that. Back in the early 1990s I was a minister of the Presbyterian Church. It was was debating (and rejecting) the ordination of gays, although it has recently reversed that decision. In those days, I heard a rather conservative female colleague point out that the struggle women had gone through for ordination was exactly the same struggle that the gay community was facing then. I was surprised, and impressed.

Her words stuck in my memory and are reminding me today of just how recent are the gains women have made and how easily we could back-slide.

I believe that Jesus, in his ministry, set us an example of going out of his way to lift marginalized people up.

If we follow his example, we, too will defy social and legal obstacles and work to ensure that anyone: women, the queer community, anyone should be regarded as equals and treated with love and respect.

Amen.