Pentecost: Women in the Bible

This weekend, I led a retreat that looked at the lives of 5 women of the Bible: Esther, Ruth, Mary Magdalene, Mary (Jesus’ mother), and Judith (from the Apocrypha). You can read a brief bio of each of these women.

These women are just a few of the many women in the Bible. Some have names, and many more are mentioned as the wife of…, or daughter of… Wikipedia has a list of women who are named in the. It’s a pretty impressive list, and doesn't even include the women without names. However, we rarely hear from or about these women in our Sunday morning lessons.

For many of these women, we don’t have anything more than a name. We don’t know much of their story or where they came from. For others, it takes some research through the Bible to learn about them. For instance, Miriam (Moses’ sister) is mentioned in Exodus and in Numbers. You have to tease out her story to learn that she was a dutiful daughter and later considered a prophet, and even later confronted Moses (and got leprosy as a result), and finally died.

As an author, that is what I do when I write a story about a Bible woman. I find all the bits of her story and then try to fill in the blanks. You can read how I told ‘the rest of the story’ of Miriam in my novel Miriam’s Healing. It is also what we do when we study a passage using lexio divino or other in depth method. We want to get into the story and learn who the woman is and what she can tell us.  

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the 5 women we discussed at the retreat this weekend; and see what we might learn about them. It may be that they are nothing like they are often portrayed in culture and even theology. We’ll see that they are brave and godly women, who acted for God. In some cases we might wonder if they made the best decisions. However, we have to also put them in the context of their time and place. We cannot impose 2018 values on a woman living a nomadic life in a patriarchal society 2000 years ago.

Come along and see what we might learn together on this adventure.

I’d like to share a thought-provoking, and moving poem I just recently heard. It is by Frances Croake Franke. I think the image by Jeremy Winborg catches the essence of the moments soon after Jesus birth (at least it was the best one I could find online that showed a human side of Mary). 

Did the Woman Say?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
brocaded robes belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

(Son of Man, Son of God by Jeremy Winborg)