Liturgy: “Some Women of Our Group Astounded Us”

What is the King’s Liturgy? King’s Liturgy defines our experience together as a Christian community. It outlines the rhythms we celebrate with the Church at large: Scripture readings, Sabbath habits, and celebration of Holy Days and historical events.

This Week’s Lectionary Readings:
Acts 2:14a, 36-41
1 Peter 1:17-23
Luke 24:13-35
Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17

This week’s liturgy is contributed by Dr. David Tubbs, Associate Professor of Politics:

Easter gives us many opportunities to reflect on the earthly journey of Jesus—from humble birth to death and resurrection. Today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke should also provoke reflection about the women in his life and their fealty to him. In view of their faithfulness, it seems altogether fitting that a group of women discovered that his body was missing from the tomb, after which angels informed them that he was still alive (Luke 24:22-23).

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In American higher education today, Christianity has more than a few detractors. Among the critics are secular feminists, both female and male. I do not wish to make sweeping generalizations about this group, but they routinely reprise some of their criticisms of the faith. In their eyes, being a Christian means accepting a lot of arcane and outdated rules about personal conduct, with those rules ensuring the intellectual and social subordination of women. This critique allegedly rests on their reading of the Bible, and that reading often leads them to ask how an educated woman could ever embrace Christianity.

In my experience, those who pose this question (or some variant of it) typically pride themselves on their open-mindedness. But in view of what we actually find in the Gospels, the question seems to suggest a closed-mindedness. A less prejudicial assessment of the women in Jesus’ life reveals remarkable phenomena, broadly related to the intellectual abilities of these women and their capacity for both moral judgment and adherence to moral principle.

In a sermon given on Easter Day in 1630, John Donne noted that we do not read of a single woman in the Gospels “that assisted the persecutors of Christ, or furthered his afflictions,” with even Pilate’s wife opposing his persecution. Based on these accounts, Donne concluded that Christian women could indeed be “examples to others.”

In his sermon, Donne implied that the moral steadfastness of women was connected to their innate intellectual abilities and their capacity to learn. The Gospels support Donne’s interpretation. Consider just two examples. In his conversation with a Samaritan woman (John 4), Jesus has full confidence in her ability to grasp that he is the Christ, even while using the figurative language of “living waters” with her. Later in the same gospel (John 8:11), Jesus spares a woman caught in adultery from being stoned and departs from her with the words “do not sin again”—an unmistakable acknowledgment of her ability to understand and practice the virtue of fidelity.

The familiarity of these stories to Christians may lead us to underestimate how radical they were in the context of the Greco-Roman world. Perhaps the most instructive comparison comes from reading Aristotle, who asserted that women were significantly less rational than men and less capable than men of practicing moral virtue. Aristotle also believed that men are the biological archetype in our species, with every woman being “a misbegotten male.”

As Donne recognized, the Gospels tell a very different story. He is part of a long tradition of Christian thinkers, going back to at least Augustine, who maintained that a woman’s sex is in no sense a defect or liability. Donne also saw that the fidelity shown to Jesus by the women in his life was heroic and worthy of Christian emulation. Perhaps that fidelity explains why the angels disclosed Jesus’ resurrection to a group of women even before his apostles learned of it, who initially—and incredibly—dismissed the women’s story as an “idle tale” (Luke 24:11, 23).