John 4:4-30
Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
This is the penultimate reflection in our topical preaching series, and having worked through the initial list of suggestions that came from the congregation, I have chosen ‘What does Christianity say about women?’ as our theme for today, in part to tie in with the discussion about the Project Violet report on women in Baptist ministry which we have planned as part of the church meeting later. The reality is that Christianity has said quite a lot of things about women, and still says quite different things about women depending on which tradition you are listening to, so I'm not going to cover all of it, but I do want to try and pick up on what I think are a few significant threads.
First though, I want to say a little about why I think it is good that we reflect on this topic, even as an inclusive church with a female minister. We may feel pretty confident in our attitude and approach to women, but then I'd hope we were already pretty confident in our attitude and approach towards slavery before we tackled that last week. As I said then, even when it comes to issues we feel we have resolved, it is important that we understand both our history and its legacy. I also recognise that people arrive here from different places and bringing different understandings, so I don't want to take anything for granted. Perhaps you have previously belonged to or encountered churches that are less friendly to women, and perhaps you still have questions about that. Even for those of us who consider ourselves egalitarian or even feminist, there can be unconscious bias. It's so easy to absorb ideas and prejudices, and not be aware of them until we shine a light on them. We also say, as part of our commitment to being an inclusive church, that we will challenge the church where it continues to discriminate, and so we do need to keep looking at those places of discrimination. We will be better placed to confront misogyny in the wider church if we understand where it comes from, and if we can articulate clearly why we reject it. And looking more broadly, I am also aware that society has more than its share of problems with sexism and the news is as full as ever of stories about horrendous violence against women and girls, and that makes it so important that the church is speaking a good and true word.
With that groundwork in place, we can begin to answer the question ‘What does Christianity say about women?’ The sad truth is that our faith does not have an immaculate reputation when it comes to women. It has demonised us as being responsible for all the sin in the world, it has domesticated us as being created for the benefit of men, and it has infantilised us as being in need of male protection and authority. It is no wonder then that for a long time the church was a fundamentally patriarchal institution, insisting on subservient roles for women, not just in the church but in family and society too. Some people will try to soften the language of patriarchy and instead speak of complementarianism, saying that it is only that men and women have different roles and responsibilities, but different rarely means equal, and power has always been given to those roles and responsibilities designated as male. The way I see it, complementarian theology is just patriarchal theology with better branding. Clearly the church has made progress in many ways and in many places, but patriarchal and complementarian theology still holds sway across large parts of the church. There are entire denominations that still do not recognise the ministry of women, including the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States, which has recently doubled down on its position by ejecting churches which have appointed female pastors. And this is not just a question of women in ministry. There are also significant issues around the way purity culture objectifies and sexualises even young girls, and around the way the demand for female submission leaves women vulnerable to and trapped in abusive situations.
The strange thing is that the early church actually seems to have been very empowering for women, a place where they were afforded radical freedom and dignity. In Romans 16, Paul names at least nine women who in various ways work for the gospel. These include Phoebe, who some translations call a servant, but who is actually described with the word that everywhere else is translated as deacon, a formal position within the early church. It was Phoebe that delivered the letter to the Romans, and it is likely that she would have also read it and explained it, meaning it was a woman who Paul trusted to take his message to the heart of the Roman Empire. There is also Priscilla, a co-worker in Christ to whom Paul and the Gentile churches are grateful, who is named before her husband, although some translations will reverse that. And there is the Junia, called an apostle, which is the highest accolade Paul gives anyone, although some mediaeval mischief for a time rendered her name as the masculine Junias. And outside of scripture, there is artwork from the early centuries of the church which shows female figures presented as priests and bishops, some of which seem to have been hidden or defaced. Can you see a pattern here? The early church recognised women as leaders, and the later church tried to hide it. I can't say exactly how that came to be, but I suspect that as the church became established it tried to become respectable, and that meant knocking off its more radical edges. It may be that in the beginning there was an intentional suppression of female ministry, and then later generations were so bemused by the presence of Phoebe and Junia that they genuinely thought they were correcting mistranslations.
I think the mistake was theirs however, and that it was the elevation of women that was the gospel truth, because that is absolutely what we see in the gospels. Throughout his ministry, Jesus respected and commissioned women, and I believe he was setting us on another trajectory to affirm the equality of women. Much has been made of the fact that the twelve named disciples were all male, but it is clear that there were also women who travelled with and supported Jesus. These of course included Mary Magdalen, who was among the women who were the first witnesses to the resurrection, and therefore the first to declare the fullness of the gospel. There are other important women too. The woman at the well, who we met in our reading today, who was the only person in any of the gospels that Jesus revealed himself to as the Messiah, and one of the first evangelists, leading many of her neighbours to believe in Christ. And then there are my personal favourites, Mary and Martha, sisters whom Jesus loved dearly and seems to have visited often. For years I was told that Martha did not sit at Jesus’ feet because she was too busy with the housework, but the Greek says she was busy with much diakonia, a word which everywhere else is translated as ministry. It is my belief that Martha was not only an important worker in Jesus’ earthly ministry, but also a leader in the early church, and that was being reflected back into the story through the use of the word diakonia. And she expected Mary to help her, so I think she was engaged in ministry too, the sisters perhaps leading an early house church. I'm hypothesising, but I don't think it's too wild a suggestion, and I certainly think that the word diakonia is meant to signify an active participation in Jesus' ministry.
So where did the misogyny we have seen in the historical and modern church come from? Beth Allison Barr argues that patriarchy is older and wider than the scriptures, and is built and maintained by human labour. In other words, it might be in the Bible, but it does not come from the Bible, and it certainly does not come from God. I agree with her, and I think a lot of what Christianity has said about women has been culturally conditioned, but I think we also have to recognise that Christian misogyny has been justified with reference to scripture, and it wouldn't have gained the hold that it has without it. In looking at the role scripture has played, we have to start at the very beginning with Genesis. Patriarchal theology will point to the fact that Eve was made after Adam to be his helper, that she ate the forbidden fruit and tempted him to sin, and that God said her desire would be for her husband and he would rule over her. However I think it is a really poor reading of the text that uses this creation story to justify patriarchy, even taking it at face value and ignoring the earlier creation account which clearly has both male and female made in the image of God. First, the Hebrew word translated as helper is used elsewhere to describe God, so it can't imply inferiority. Second, the narrative reads as if Adam was right there for the conversation with the serpent, so he should take just as much blame. And third, what God says to Eve about submission is not a command but a consequence of sin, so if anything it should tell us that it is male domination that is sinful.
Complementarians will also point to the Pauline epistles, particularly the passage in 1 Corinthians 11 about a woman needing to wear a head covering because a man is the head of a woman, and the passage in 1 Corinthians 14 in which he says women should keep silent in churches. But again, I think there has been some really poor exegesis of these passages. The argument about head coverings is tricky to follow, but what stands out to me is that it focuses on what a woman should wear when she prays or prophesies, the implication being that women are expected to be praying and prophesying, and I can only assume that this means in public worship or it would be of no concern to the church. That then leads us to question the bit about keeping silent in churches. It has variously been proposed that Paul is referring to women who had been disturbing meetings by asking questions because they had been given less teaching in the scriptures, or that he is quoting and then refuting the Corinthians. Likewise, the list of women in Romans 16 suggests that there is rather more nuance to the suggestion in 1 Timothy 2 that women should not teach or have authority. There is some suggestion that this was for a specific time or a specific place for a specific reason, perhaps because the women he had in mind were less educated and needed more time to catch up before they could take on leadership roles, or that this was not in fact written by Paul and instead reflected a later prohibition. However we handle these passages, it seems very unlikely that Paul ever intended them to be universal rules or eternal decrees against women in ministry, especially when we balance them against passages like Galatians 3 which declare that in Christ there is no longer male and female.
That is quite a broad overview, but hopefully we have begun to reckon with the history and legacy of what Christianity has said about women, and have opened up new aspects of scripture for those who have encountered it primarily as toxic and oppressive to women. That leaves two points from what I said about why we are looking at this, addressing unconscious bias and challenging discrimination in the church and world. The first is tricky, because it is deeply personal, and perhaps the best I can do is encourage deep reflection on how you view women, where those ideas have come from, and how they work themselves out in practice. And that is for us as women too, as we can internalise a lot of prejudice and discrimination. As for the second, I hope we will do something towards that together as part of the church meeting, as we look at the requests that have come out of the Project Violet study. As a woman and as a minister, I think we do well, but we can always do better.
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