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.
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