God's Domination-Free Order

by Walter Wink

Women and Children

Until the rise of feminist exegesis, Jesus' treatment of women had been considered something of an anomaly. Only a few scholars sensed how unique it was. Through the lens of feminist exegesis, however, we can see that in every single encounter with women in the four Gospels, Jesus violated the mores of his time. If we disencumber him from images of Godhead and perfection, his behavior toward women, while not fully "modem" or feminist or all it might have been, is nevertheless astonishing, and, was without parallel in "civilized" societies since the rise of patriarchy roughly three thousand years before his birth.

Respectable Jewish women were not to speak to men in public; Jesus conversed freely with women. A woman was to touch no man but her spouse; Jesus was touched by women, and touched them. When a prostitute bursts into an all male banquet, kneels at Jesus' outstretched feet and begins to kiss them. washing them with tears of remorse and relief, wiping them with her hair, and anointing them with oil, Jesus, despite the stern censure of the other men, accepts her gift and its meaning, and takes her side, even though she has technically rendered him unclean and has scandalized the guests. Whether or not the concluding lines are original to the story, she was clearly behaving like one who knew her sins had been forgiven, whose faith had saved her. If Jesus did indeed say, "Your sins are forgiven," it was blasphemy, punishable by stoning (Luke 7:36-50).

Jesus calls a woman bent with a spinal disease for eighteen years out into the middle of the synagogue, lays his hands on her, and heals her from her "spirit of weakness!" In the ensuing controversy (he had healed her on a Sabbath), Jesus refers to her as a "daughter of Abraham," an expression I have been unable to find in all of ancient Jewish literature. Women were saved through their men; to call her a "daughter of Abraham" was to make her a full-fledged member of the covenant and of equal standing before God with men (Luke 13:10-17). To heal her on a Sabbath was to liberate the Sabbath to be a jubilee of release and restoration. To touch her was to revoke the holiness code with its male scruples about menstrual uncleanness and sexual advances. To speak to her in public was to jettison male restraints on women's freedoms, restraints born of sexual possessiveness and the caricature of women as seducers. To place her in the midst of the synagogue was to challenge the male monopoly on the means of grace and access to God. To assert that her illness was not divine punishment for sin, but satanic oppression, was to declare war on the entire Domination System, whose driving spirit is Satan.

This tiny drama thus assumes world-historic proportions. In freeing this woman from Satan's power, Jesus simultaneously releases her from the encompassing network of patriarchy, male religious elitism, and the taboos fashioned to disadvantage some in order to preserve the advantage of others. The Domination System is precarious. To succeed in shattering its hold at any single point threatens its stability all along the line.

In one of the most beautiful stories in Scripture, though its textual lineage is uncertain, Jesus saves the life of an adulteress. Though her accusers caught her in the act, they did not arrest the man, in clear violation of Deut. 22:22. Intending to entrap Jesus, they ask if she should be stoned, as the Law stipulates. The Domination System treats adultery as the ultimate sexual sin because it is the most egregious violation of male property rights over the woman. Perhaps to divert their attention from her bared breasts (adulteresses were thus shamed, M. Sota 1:5), Jesus writes on the ground, then invites whoever is without sin to cast the first stone. Writing again in the dirt so that her accusers can melt away without drawing attention to themselves, he then asks her: "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She says, "No one, sir." "Neither do I condemn you; go your way, and from now on do not sin again" (John 7:53‚11).

The Fourth Gospel also portrays Jesus not only speaking to a Samaritan woman, but taking a drink from her unclean hand. The disciples, when they see it, are "astonished that he was speaking with a woman-(John 4:27). Or again, when a woman who has had a hemorrhage for twelve years touches him in a crowd, rendering unclean, not only Jesus, but everyone else she touched while elbowing her way through the crowd to reach him, he includes her in the new family he is forming, calling her. "Daughter," and asserts that her faith, not his power, has healed her (Mark 5:24b-34 par).

The contagion of holiness overcomes the contagion of uncleanness. And that new family, he makes clear elsewhere, includes not only men but women: "Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:35 par.-no fathers; so also Mark 10:29-30 and Matt. 23:9).

Even children have a share in this new family, and exemplify the way to enter it (Mark 10:13-16 par.; 9:36-37 par.). This constituted a radically new view of children, says Jeremias, in a world where children, like women, were counted as having little value. "The saying is not an invitation to childlike innocence and naivete but a challenge to relinquish all claims of power and domination over others."

Some passages in the New Testament are an acute embarrassment and source of outrage for their attitudes toward women; none of them is based on the teaching of Jesus. Jewish texts from the period reflect similar patriarchal attitudes. One such is the following: "If any man gives his daughter a knowledge of the Law it is as though he taught her lechery." The logic is impeccable: to teach her Torah is to cause her alone to sin: to teach her Torah is to break down the division between male superiority and female inferiority, and to threaten the whole apparatus of male dominance, in which the male prerogative of interpreting the Law is central. (This issue very much survives today, in both Christianity and Judaism, in the question of the ordination of women.)

Women were subject to all the negative commandments of the Law, and to the whole force of civil and penal law, but "observance of all the positive ordinances that depend on the time of year is incumbent on men but not on women."" Only boys could go to schools. Rabbinical texts reveal, in a period later than Jesus', that some women persisted, nevertheless, in trying to learn the Law. One such in the Gospels is Mary, whose sister Martha complains to Jesus that Mary refuses to help serve the dinner, but is instead seated at Jesus' feet-the prerogative of a male disciple of a teacher. However much we might wish that Jesus had gotten up and helped to serve the meal and to clean up afterward-a role to which he seems not to have been averse (Luke 12:37; in John 21:9-14 the risen Jesus confirms his identity by cooking breakfast for the disciples, a task normally reserved for women and servants)ãthe fact remains that Jesus and Mary were transgressing a deep-seated prohibition from which even Martha could not free herself.

Keep women in their place! "Blessed is the womb that bore you," cries a woman in the -crowd, "and the breasts that nursed you!" Why not give his mother credit in the only way the culture allowed it? Jesus refuses: "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!" (Luke 11:27-28). This woman persists in believing that her value, like his mother Mary's, lies in bearing a male child and living out her ambitions through him. But Jesus retorts: You do not have to be "saved". any longer through bearing sons. You yourself, a woman, can hear the word of God and keep it. Indeed, if patriarchy is ever to be overturned, women will have to stop consenting to its expectations. (By the second century, women were again to be silent in worship and saved through childbearing-1 Tim. 2:11-15.)

Jesus institutionalizes the new domination-free order. His loose band of followers is scandalously mixed, including prostitutes like the one who washed his feet with her tears (what else could she do, if she had lost her livelihood, but join his band?), women freed from demons like Mary Magdalene, and aristocratic women like Joanna, wife of Herod's chamberlain, "and many other women, who provided for them out of their means" (Luke 8:1-3*). It was without known precedent for women to travel as disciples with a teacher, and some of them, like Joanna, left home, family, and husband to do so. When the rich young man asked to follow him, Jesus told him to sell all, give it to the poor-not to Jesus' group of followers-and follow him, destitute (Mark 10: 17-par.). The women, however, he puts in the role of patrons and benefactors.

The first shall be last, and the last first, as a necessary compensatory rectification on the path to full partnership in God.

Jesus also attempts to change a major structural cause of prostitution: the ease with which a man could divorce a woman. The severity of his pronouncementãhe allows no cause for divorce, not even adulteryãis intended to prevent the wholesale dumping of ex-wives onto the streets. Divorce is essential to male supremacist marriage; note, the androcratic form of the question the Pharisees put to Jesus: "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" (Mark 10:2). Jesus responds that God did not create or intend patriarchy but created male and female to become one flesh in a matrilocal marriage. Is Jesus suggesting that a man is to abandon his own patriarchal family and go live with his wife and her family (Mark 10:7)?

At the same time Jesus completely redefines adultery. A Jewish male could not commit adultery against his own wife, but only against the sexual property of other men. In that setting, lust did not refer to sexual desire or excitement, as we use the term today, but specifically to the envy of another man's sexual property. Jesus radicalizes the meaning of lust and adultery to include even the mental act of dehumanizing women. He does so, not in order to shower guilt on people, as the church has used this saying, but to counter the self-righteousness of men who are technically free of adultery under the Law but who continue to treat women as sexual objects.

There may be sex-role stereotyping in Mark 1:29-31 par., where Jesus heals Peter's mother-in-law's fever, almost, it appears, so she can get up and cook supper! But gender specialization may not always be humanly restrictive. Less ambiguously, Jesus features women in his parables as exemplary of the nature of the coming age. In that age to come, women will no longer be the property of men, to be "given in marriage," but equals (Mark 12:18-27 pan).

The passion narrative shows the men weak, vacillating, denying, betraying, hiding. It is a woman who anoints him beforehand for burial, a kindness that he asks to be remembered of her wherever the gospel is preached (Mark 14:3/Matt. 26:6-13). It is women who view his death, women who visit the tomb and find it empty, and women to whom he first appears.

1 have documented elsewhere the struggle in the early church over who were the valid witnesses to the resurrection, and hence the authentic leaders of the church. Women in that world had little veracity as witnesses. How odd of God, then, to choose women as witnesses of the resurrection! Paul, in his list of witnesses, mentions not a single woman, and gives the impression that the risen Jesus appeared first to Peter (1 Cor. 15:3-8); whereas three of the Gospels (counting Mark's longer ending), and many of the noncanonical Gospels as well, concur that the first witnesses of the resurrected Jesus were Mary Magdalene and the other women with her.

Women received the Holy Spirit at the founding event of the church (Acts 1: 14; 2: 1) and were coequal with men in receiving prophetic gifts. They headed house churches, opened new fields for evangelism (Phil. 4:2-3), and were Paul's coworkers. They were persecuted and jailed just like the men, were named apostles, disciples, deacons, led churches (Philem. 1-2), and even, in one case, had authority over Paul himself (Rom. 16:1-2-"for she [Phoebe] has been a ruler over many, indeed over me").

The right of women to equality in church leadership and witness continued to be fought out through elaborations of the resurrection story. Thus in the Epistula Apostolorum (early second century), the women are still depicted as the first to see Jesus, with additional stress laid on their being sent to witness to the male disciples. So reluctant were the men that the risen Jesus had to send a second woman, and finally, when the men still did not believe, Jesus went along with all the women to convince the men himself.

In the Gospel of Mani (second or third century), Magdalene is commanded by the risen Christ to "do this service: be a messenger for me to these wandering orphans. Make haste rejoicing, and go unto the Eleven." Here again their unbelief is anticipated. Mary is even made a "pastor" of Christ to the Eleven, sent to bring "the sheep to the shepherd."

Hippolytus of Rome (second or third century) echoed the theme of Mary Magdalene and the other women as apostles and evangelists, a note carried over in Gnostic literature as well. The apocryphal Gospel of Mary Magdalene reverses the usual gender roles of the culture and depicts the men crying and helpless, and Mary as confident, strong, and encouraging. Her very success in consoling the disciples causes them to turn on her in jealousy-particularly Andrew and Peter, who attack her for thinking that she, a woman, might have better access to the truth of Christ-than they did. Peter is made to admit, "We know that the Saviour loved you above all other women," but this also leads him to ask irritably, "Has he preferred her over against us?" But Levi chastises him: "But if the Saviour hath made her worthy, who then art thou, that thou reject her? Certainly the Saviour knows her surely enough. Therefore did he love her more than us." Thus persuaded, they all went off to preach the gospel.

The tide, however, had already turned. The vast majority of churches were soon dominated by male hierarchies, and women had been reduced to the roles of deaconesses and enrolled widows. Women who exercised authority were marginalized, accused of heresy, or silenced.

Paul, often criticized for his attitudes toward women, is not responsible for silencing women in the churches (1 Cor. 14:33b-36). This editorial insertion interrupts the flow of Paul's discussion of spiritual gifts, which resumes after the interpolation. It has no relation to the context, and is utterly contradictory to 1 Cor. 11: 5, which asserts that women do prophesy in church Whatever his defects, it is Paul who articulates the Christian charter of freedom in Gal. 3:28-" there is . . . no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." It is Paul who calls for reciprocal rights in marriage, an attitude far in advance of his time (1 Cor. 7:3-5). But old habits die hard; in 1 Cor. 11:2-3 Paul defends hierarchical patriarchy, and 1 Cor. 11:14-16 shows him fumbling to find reasons for a custom (head covering) that he should have rather abandoned, as he himself seems to sense (1 Cor. 11: 11-12).

Paul did not write Eph. 5:21-33; 1 Tim. 2:8-15; 5:3-16; or Titus 2:3-5, though they are ascribed to him. But someone in the early church did. With 1 Pet. 3: 1 -7 and Rev. 14:4, these and other passages document the church's inability to sustain Jesus' radical antipatriarchal perspective. Over time, men gained a monopoly on leadership in the church, and patriarchy demonstrated once more its resiliency under attack.

The church's apostasy from the new order inaugurated for women must not blind us to the significance of what Jesus accomplished. Humanity has scarcely begun to take the measure of his message. Biblical feminism is not only an authentic extension of Jesus' concerns, but has made it possible for us to understand significant aspects of his message for the first time. Now it becomes clear that Jesus treated women as he did, not because he was "gallant" or "nice," but because the restoration of women to their full humanity in partnership with men is integral to the coming of God's egalitarian order.

Healing and Exorcism

Compassion is the hallmark of Jesus' God. Consequently, Jesus' healings and exorcisms, which play such a major role in his ministry, are not simply patches on a body destined for death regardless; they are manifestations of God's Reign on earth now, an inbreaking of eternity into time, a revelation of God's merciful nature, a promise of the restitution of all things in the heart of the loving Author of the universe. "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you" (Luke 11:20//Matt. 12:28). God's nonviolent reign is the overcoming of demonic powers through nonviolent means.

Exorcism especially preoccupied the early church. Baptism itself was an entry-exorcism, freeing the initiates from the delusional system that had previously held them in bondage. Exorcism was not, then, a rare and extreme intervention. It was the indispensable prerequisite for getting a "new mind" (metanoia). Jesus' teaching itself is a kind of exorcism, a cleansing of the mind of the misinformation that enslaves people to the Powers (Mark 1:21-28). And faith is a heating of blindness, humanity's trained inability to perceive God's presence and deeds even when they are happening before our very eyes (Mark 6:30-10:52).

Reprinted with permission from Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink, Fortress Press, 1992