A Woman Anoints the King of Kings

 I was recently discussing with our provincial contributor to the Canadian Mennonite, my first novel, a biblical-historical fiction of the journey Mary, the mother of Jesus made with your very special son, called a sword, shall pierce your soul. She saw that I had an interest in the role of women in God's plans for the world.

She was right, but I really could not answer her as to how this came about. I would like to say it was at least in large part due to the strength and respect my mother had as the wife of a missionary and pastor. She had also trained as a teacher. This was still not a common thing in the early 1940s among rural Manitoba Mennonites.

I suspect it also had a lot to do with the climate of the times, when I attended Canadian Mennonite Bible College (CMBC) immediately on graduation from high school. I was a voracious reader of news and feminism in the 1960s was a relatively new societal phenomenon. It probably played into the fact that my first sermon, preached in our home church in the spring of my graduation from CMBC, was on the role of women in the Easter story. I know I chose that topic in part to help sway a vote that was happening in our congregation at the time as to whether women should be given the privilege of being full fledged members of what was still called the brotherhood, including their enfranchise meant in that institution.

In the decades since then, I have read and heard much about the place of women in the church. It really dawned on me after really reading Alan Kreider's The patient ferment of the early church, how the elevated status Jesus had given women during his ministry, death and resurrection, was held through New Testament times. We have significant references to members of the church, such as Sapphira, who, unfortunately died for her deception in the community, but more positively, the apostle Paul writes of people like Priscilla, who even taught the missionary Apollos when he came to Ephesus, and Phoebe, who is listed as a deacon at Cenchreae, a believers’ community near Corinth. However, it appears that by the early 4th century, when Constantine made Christianity the official state religion, those gains in the status of women had been long forgotten. Indeed, by and large, the place of women in the church remained static, and certainly outside the realm of leadership, until the 20th century.

One new aspect of the place of the women in the unfolding story of the life of Jesus was just made clear to me today. I'm reading Timothy Geddert's Believers Church Bible Commentary on Mark, and today I was at chapter 14. We know this is the story of an unnamed woman in Bethany, who comes to a banquet hosted by Simon, the leper, for Jesus. She causes quite a stir at the meal by breaking open a bottle of expensive perfume and anointing Jesus with it. At least, that is what Jesus said she was doing, for his burial.

Geddert makes the point that Jesus burial would follow the crucifixion, which, together with the resurrection, would be the two stage event that was Jesus/God's victory over Satan, and the powers of evil, and the dawning of the new Kingdom of God, with Jesus as the king. In that context then, we have an unnamed woman who could be said to be anointing the King of Kings. It is then perhaps fitting that she is unnamed, and so can represent more easily the whole body of believers - and especially women? - in anointing Christ as King.

In the face of all this, it is truly disconcerting to see how women in our society, but especially in the church, are still not treated as equals. I find it even more sad that in our Anabaptist and Mennonite tradition, a couple of our major denominations have backtracked on women in leadership. They now apparently no longer accept women as pastors, even though they had been filling that role for more than 25 years. We still have a lot to learn from our Lord.

Jesus the Imposter?

Do you know, or have you ever wondered what Jews think of Jesus? I got one answer to that question recently when I read a contribution to an online post where a Jew referred to Jesus as an imposter. Some readers might be surprised at that, but if you are familiar with the Easter story, as we refer to it, this is what the Jewish leaders referred to Jesus as when they asked the Roman governor at the time, Pontius Pilate, to seal the tomb of Jesus after his crucifixion so no one could steal his body and claim he had been resurrected. This is just one of a number of inadvertent admissions by the Jewish leaders that they were hearing what Jesus was saying, in some instances quite clearly. He had, indeed been predicting his resurrection. At the same time, it is ironic that the Jewish leaders had this concern, when it had not even really sunk into Jesus' followers, the disciples' minds, that Jesus was going to be resurrected, even though he had clearly told them that a number of times.

I would put it to you that the Jewish leaders stated this to Pilate, because, in their own minds, they had made up who Jesus was, and who he was not. To them, Jesus was something who was threatening their popularity, and therefore their power and privilege.. They did not believe his ultimate claims or admissions that he was the Messiah, the Son of God, and so, of course, he had to be an imposter. They could not see that he might be the actual promised Messiah.

Let me take this in a little different direction. In the days preceding Jesus’ crucifixion, he told his disciples that the temple in Jerusalem, at which they were marvelling, would be torn down, so that one stone was not left upon another. Indeed, this is precisely what the Roman armies under general Titus did in CE/AD 70. To this day, I am not sure how the Jews fit this event into their understanding of God's plan. They simply totally discounted it. When they had been exiled in 722 BCE, from the northern kingdom, and then finally in BCE 587 from the southern kingdom, a number of them had returned after 70 years as God indeed had promised they would. They established themselves in the land and were still living there as a nation of sorts, when Jesus came on to the scene. I said, ‘of sorts’, because they had never been free from the yoke of the Persians, then the Greeks, and finally the Romans.

Now, we know that many Jews, as well as many Christians, view the return of Jews to Israel in the 20th century, culminating in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, as part of God's plan preceding the appearance of their long – awaited Messiah. However, and I think there are some Jews who will agree with me, as they do not view the events just described as fitting God's plan, because there were no newly recognized prophets to predict this as there were a number of prophets to predict the return from exile in the fifth century BC. Furthermore, they look for a specific prophet, sometimes referred to as Elijah, to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah, and no one has been excepted as fitting that description prior to 1948.

Now, if Jesus was an imposter, how could he have been such a clearly lone predictor of the fall of Jerusalem around CE/AD 30 when it happened for forty years later.

Jesus explanation of why this happened is at this time for Jews, as well as many Christians, unacceptable. Jesus indicated to those, as he often said, that had eyes to see and ears to hear, that this was going to be a punishment of the Jewish leaders for the rejection of the Messiah, himself. This parallels the prophetic railings of the Old Testament against the Jewish leaders, mostly political and religious, pronouncing judgment and predicting their downfall and punishment for repeatedly leading God's people of the Old Testament era astray. Neither the prophets nor Jesus indicated that these punishments were really deserved or would fall on every Jew. We know that it was largely the more able and wealthy, the leading Jews that were taken into exile in the eighth and sixth century BC/BCE. Likewise, it was mainly these classes of people that were driven out of Israel during the first century CE Diaspora caused by the Romans.

Putting this into context adds even more to the veracity of what Jesus said about the temple, and what was going to happen to the religious leaders. Just prior to making this prediction about the destruction of the temple, he had told one of his most cutting parables in the presence of some of these leaders. This is the story, which Jesus borrowed and adapted from Isaiah, where vineyard owner plants a  new vineyard, doing everything to make it successful. In Isaiah's story that does not happen, and the vineyard is a failure. Jesus' expansion of the story reports how the owner of the vineyard, after planting it in the same way, as described in Isaiah, went away, leaving it to tenants. When he sent agents to collect the rent, the tenants mistreated them, beat them up, and eventually killed some of them. As a last resort, the vineyard owner sent his beloved son thinking, surely the tenants of the vineyard would respect him and give him the owners’ due. But that didn't happen? They also killed the son. We know from the recorded reaction of the Jewish leaders who heard this parable that they knew it was directed at them, even though they may not have fully understood it. In a way, it was the last straw that sealed Jesus’ fate, the reason they, once again, retreated to plan Jesus demise, determined to succeed this time.

Now, it is important to note in this parable that it is the tenants whom the owner, obviously God, then comes and expels. He does not destroy the vineyard. In other words, it is those to whom he has rented the vineyard, those who were to look after it, who are punished, the religious leaders. The vineyard corresponds to all of God's people. There are not scattered, but the new arrangements are made for the vineyard, the care of the vineyard, of God's people. That was what Jesus and his followers were beginning, and have been about ever since.

The fall of Jerusalem was clearly not the fault of all the Jews, or the Jews who had become Christians would also have fallen under this punishment, but they did not. They continued to spread the good news, the gospel of the true Messiah, Jesus Christ, and that branch of Judaism, if you will, continued to grow after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension back to heaven. In spite of all odds, it has never died out, and remains the faith in the world with the most adherents, and its scripture, the Bible, has continued to be, a world bestseller as well.

Again, in spite of their regarding Jesus as an imposter, the Jewish leaders of his day had heard Jesus talk of demolishing the temple and rebuilding it in three days, as  their witnesses stated against him in the courts prior to his crucifixion. However, they have not credited him with the prediction he made as we know it above, let alone that it was a punishment against their religious establishment with their temple and its rituals,a punishment of those who were to lead the Jews in true faith.

Many, or possibly most Jews, know very little of Jesus and the story we have recorded in the New Testament. This is in part because of a concerted effort by their religious leaders to totally disregard this in their own internal teaching of their people. I have read of Jewish Christians who have talked to Jews and they don't even know how the prophecies of the Old Testament are so amazingly and completely fulfilled in all that happened up to the time of Jesus and thereafter. Yet, Christians have been given the eyes and ears to understand this and have benefitted from that for the last 2000 years and see no end to that. So, I ask you, who is the imposter? The Jewish leaders, who heard enough to use it successfully, to their way of thinking, against Jesus, when they tried him, and had him crucified, yet never acknowledged how Jesus appearance, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension are all there in advance in the scripture? Or Jesus, who faithfully fulfilled all that was called for. Jesus did not make anything up.

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