Throughout Lent, we are looking at women who can help us live more deeply into lives of Faith, Hope, and Love. We saw over the past couple weeks that Mary of Magdala and Mary of Nazareth had great faith, although it was expressed differently in their lives. Now we turn to Joanna and Salome who show us that lives of Hope can take us outside our comfort zones.
Joanna is listed by Luke as
one of the … women who had been healed of
evil spirits and infirmities…[including] Joanna the wife of Herod’s household
manager Chuza... (Luke 8:3) It seems interesting and intriguing at first
glance that the wife of Herod Antipas’ steward/manager would be a follower of
Jesus, esp. to the extent of travelling with him. This Herod is not Herod the
Great, who was ruler when Jesus was born. This is one of his sons: Antipater or
Antipas as he is better known. Antipas was appointed by Caesar Augustus as
tetrarch of Galilee and Perea after the death of his father.
We do not know which palace
Chuza was steward of. Or he may have been a household steward who traveled with
the Tetrarch. After all Antipas had several residences in Judah and Galilee. In
fact, I was surprised to learn that he had 7 that you can see on the map, plus
3 ‘winter palaces’.
Historians believe that it
was Machaerus near the Dead Sea where John the Baptist was imprisoned and
killed. One might imagine how Joanna was impacted by the death of John the
Baptist at Herod’s behest. Perhaps it was that event that led her to have
dis-ease of some sort. One might postulate that she developed some sort of
psychological break that made her sick physically or mentally. She probably
heard of Jesus power to heal and sought him out. (We don’t really know.)
Clearly her
healing changed her priorities. Joanna found hope for her life. Jesus healed
her. Even so, it must have taken great courage to leave her husband to follow
the itinerant rabbi. In following Jesus, she discovered who she was-a beloved
daughter of God. She no longer had to be crippled by the dis-ease that troubled
her, whether it was a result of John the Baptist’s death or something else. Joanna
was able to stand up against the ‘norms’ of her life because she had Hope in
something better. I imagine her as rather like the women described by David
Whyte in his 2007 poem Arrivals.
Imagine the confines of a long grey
corridor
just before immigration at Washington Dulles
airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid
a sea of familiar international plastic blandness,
entering America for the first time. Think of
their undulating multi-colored turbans raised
atop graceful heads, transforming us,
a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers
and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed
and perplexed attendants to their bright,
excited, chattered arrival.
Imagine a sharp plexi-gass turn left
and suddenly
before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical
red sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from
The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before the ladder,
a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,
a way to go up they'd never seen before, its steel grey
interlocking invitation on and up to who knows what,
bringing them and everyone behind them, to a bemused,
complete, and utter standstill.
So that you saw it for the first time
as they saw it
and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,
an involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.
An incredible surprise. And you knew, even through
your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands
to their mouths, why it made them give low breathy
screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it
as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking
beckoning hands asking them to rise up
independent of their history, their legs or their wills.
And we stopped as we knew we had to now
and watched the first delighted be-turbaned
woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey
plain at the foot of the moving stair and sure
enough quickly withdraw it with a strangled scream,
leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her
into heaven, into America, into her new life.
Then, holding her friend away, who
tried to grab
her, to save her, to hold her back, who pointed
and shouted, telling her not to risk herself,
not to be foolish, she silently watched her shoe,
that willful child, running ahead, its sole intent
to enter the country oblivious to visas and immigration,
above the need for a job, uncaring of healthcare,
pointing toward some horizon she had never dreamt,
intent on leaving only its winged footprint
for her to follow, like a comet's tail, like an omen
of necessity, like a signaled courage, like an uncaring
invitation, to make her entrance with sould and style.
Because she looked up at this
orphaned, onward
messenger with her eyes ablaze, threw off the panicked
clamboring arms of her friend, raised her chin
in noble profile, and with all that other hurrying
clamor of the world behind her, with a busy,
unknowing, corporate crowd at her back and questions
beginning to be asked out loud, she lifted her arms,
clapped her hands, threw back her head and with
a queenly unbidden grace, strode on to the ascending
heaven bound steel like a newly struck film star,
singing the old, high pitched song her children
would hear when she told the story again.
And as her friend below sang,
applauded, danced on the spot
and ululated her companion's arrival,
we stood there behind her,
transfixed, travel weary,
and crammed into the corridor
like extras from some
miraculous scene in the Bible.
While she ascended,
her arms straight out,
wide eyed and singing.
Into America.
JoAnna was entering a new
way of life, just like the Ethiopian women. Following Jesus gives us the Hope
that we can find our real selves. As Whyte suggests, we, the Princesses of the
Kingdom, can like the Ethiopian woman “lift
our arms, clap our hands, throw back our heads and …sing the song her children
would hear when we tell the story again…”
It can be easy to allow what
we ‘think’ others expect of us to dictate what we do or do not do. We can allow
society or family or friends to put us in a box. Joanna was able to step out in
Hope and follow Jesus, even to the cross and grave. She made the decision to
follow God’s whisper in her life-she stepped onto the escalator and rose to new
hope.
While it is true that she is
not listed by name in the Gospels as being at the Cross and Grave, in Eastern
Orthodox tradition she is venerated as one of the 8 Myrrhbearers-the women who
came to the grave on Sunday morning to complete the burial rites for Jesus. We
might even infer, as some scholars do, that she could have been present in the
upper room at Pentecost. Or possibly she returned home to Chuza, a changed
woman, to proclaim the Good News of the Resurrection in the court of Herod.
As the Children of Israel are preparing to enter
the Promised Land, God, through Moses says, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that
I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so
that you and your children may live” Deut. 30:19. Joanna chose life, in
defiance of the societal ‘norms’. Next time, we’ll see that Salome (wife of
Zebedee) did too.
How would you define ‘hope’?
Do you find yourself conforming to what is
‘expected’ of you?
