Opened Doors for Women: What DID Jesus DO?
I was in fifth grade and knew everything about everything.
Growing up in the church, I was confident I had all the answers to every theological question you could ask or theological dilemma you could find yourself in.
Being the type of family who attended church every time the doors were open, I didn’t spend Saturday nights at sleepovers with friends because that would mean I would miss church on Sunday morning. During this time of my life, I saw missing church as a grievous error and unforgivable sin.
Occasionally, though, my friends would sleep over at my house on Saturday nights and go to church with me on Sunday mornings. During one of these weekends, my friend, Embrey, spent the night with me and went to church with me on Sunday morning. I can’t remember what the topics of the Sunday School Class or Junior Church lessons were on this particular morning, but I do know that whatever the topics were sparked a heated discussion about the role of women in the church.
If I had to guess, I’m sure something in one of those lessons mentioned the roles of men and women in the church and in life because this was common Sunday morning material. The resulting discussion ended in my decision to put my friend on our prayer list the next week. Throughout our discussion about this controversial topic, I learned that she attended a Presbyterian church with a female pastor.
My legalistic 5th-grade brain couldn’t even begin to wrap itself around these two depressing facts. I couldn’t believe that my best friend who I thought loved Jesus was surely going to hell because she didn’t attend the same type of church as me, and, maybe worse yet, she went to a church with a woman pastor. The blasphemy.
I’d love to tell you when I put her on the prayer list the next week my Sunday School teacher laughed a little and told me I had nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead, I was met with agreement, sympathy, and a commitment to praying for the salvation of my friend.
After many heated discussions related to the roles of men and women in the church, we finally agreed to disagree. While I was hotheaded, arrogant, and stubborn, my friend was calm, humble, and loving. Despite my refusal to listen to anything she was saying and my constant cherry-picking of scriptures to throw in her face, she just smiled, listened, and responded lovingly. Ultimately, she ended up writing me a letter and placing it in my Bible in the hopes that I would find it one day and read it with an open mind.
In the letter, she explained to me how Jesus had female disciples, how men and women have been called to teach and prophesy, and how she had worshipped in a church with multiple female pastors–all of whom had clearly been ordained and appointed to their positions by a loving and liberating God.
It was many, many, many years later when I was finally liberated enough to reread her note and understand precisely what she was trying to teach me all those years earlier.
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Jesus and His Female Disciples
We’re in the middle of this series based on Luke where we’re looking at what Jesus did when He was on Earth. I have to be completely honest with you here–the scripture we’re looking at today is one of my favorite parts of the story of Jesus’s ministry. You can find it in Luke 8:
Soon afterward, Jesus began a ministry tour throughout the country, visiting cities and villages to announce the wonderful news of God’s kingdom. His twelve disciples traveled with him as did a number of women who had been healed of many illnesses and set free from demonic power. One of the women was Mary who was from the village of Magdala, from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons.
Among the women were Susanna and Joanna, the wife of Chusa, who managed King Herod’s household. Many other women who supported Jesus’ ministry from their own personal finances also traveled with him. Luke 8:1-3 TPT
I’ve said this so many times before, and I’m sure I’ll say it a million times more, but culture and context are so important here. For those of us who have grown up in evangelical, legalistic, or fundamentalist churches, we’ve been trained to look at this record and explain it away. After all, Luke doesn’t say these women are disciples or leaders, right? They were just giving Jesus money–probably their male relatives’ money… We’ve been taught to believe these women traveling with Christ and his disciples don’t really matter. They aren’t important. They were probably just cooking dinner, after all. These are all excuses I’m sure I would have heard in my church growing up if this scripture was ever referenced…which it wasn’t…
The culture of Jesus’s day says differently, though.
At this time, women were not permitted to be disciples of a Rabbi. They weren’t permitted to abandon their “womanly duties” in favor of becoming a student of a Rabbi. There was no place for them at the feet of Jesus the Rabbi according to their cultural norms, but Jesus broke that norm. He allowed these women whom Luke names and those he doesn’t to travel with him and be his students and disciples.
Another countercultural point here, too, was the fact they were traveling with Christ and His disciples during his ministry. They weren’t just present in the crowd for a few of His teachings. They were on this ministry tour with Him. This means these women were traveling to different towns, villages, and cities, and spending the night there. We don’t see this as an issue because today, in our world, this isn’t a red flag to us.
The culture of Jesus’s day was different, though.
Even in some contemporary Middle Eastern cultures, there are still social expectations that women must travel with a male relative. Here’s Jesus, in the first century, allowing and inviting these women to travel with Him and his male disciples. Then, there was the cultural issue of where women would stay in the towns and cities they were ministering in. When women traveled with men, they were expected to always stay with relatives. It’s unrealistic to think these women had relatives in every town they visited. Not only were these women not traveling with male relatives, but they were also not staying with relatives.
I’m just as guilty as the next person of missing the nuance of how countercultural Jesus was due to my lack of understanding of the mores and norms of His day. Understanding these things allows us to see how revolutionary Christ’s actions, acceptance, grace, and compassion were. They also allow us to understand how Jesus was quietly dismantling the previously unopened doors available to women.
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Focusing on Jesus
I’ve talked before about Jesus’s teaching and how it centered around a series of questions and storytelling. I think if we’re being honest, some of us would rather Jesus just spelled it out for us. Instead of making us think critically, we’d rather Jesus send us an email detailing everything specifically.
Frankly, I think this is one of the reasons why so many churches default to Paul’s letters instead of thinking through the teachings, life, and actions of Christ. Even though they were meant for specific churches dealing with their specific situations and scenarios, it’s easier to apply them universally to our churches, lives, and gender roles than it is to think critically about the life and love of Christ.
I don’t want to get on a giant soapbox here, but I want to be clear:
Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted.
Jesus came to break the chains of oppression.
Jesus came to free the captives.
Jesus came to offer hope to the hopeless.
Jesus came to offer salvation to everyone.
Jew and Gentile.
Man and Woman.
Slave and Free.
Even though it might not seem like a big deal to us in our world today, his acceptance of Mary Magdalene, Susanna, Joanna, and these other females as disciples quietly shifted the paradigm and began to change the narrative for women.
If we want to be like Jesus, we need to be in churches, faith communities, and relationships that mirror Jesus’s treatment of women. We have to quit supporting theologies and relationships that subvert, marginalize, diminish, erase, and lessen women.
Too often in our churches and faith communities, we break women’s hearts, force them into oppression, and make them captives of the patriarchy instead of offering them the hope and freedom Jesus came to offer everyone. We unwittingly accept these theologies as gospel without considering the example of Christ.
I’d love to see this change today.
For every woman reading this today who has been told she can’t do something in a church because of her biology, I see you.
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Reflections:
How does it affect your perception of gender to know Jesus had disciples who were women despite the cultural expectations of His day?
How inclusive are your faith communities?
What can you do to ensure women aren’t oppressed, marginalized, diminished, and erased from your faith community?
