Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose.

I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

C: This episode, it's just me.

I have no exciting guests to introduce and I'm going to focus on an aspect of identity.

In certain Christian circles, there has been this idea that there is such a thing as "Biblical, in inverted commas, Womanhood".

I started my life as a Christian in churches which had a particularly strong cultural idea of womanhood, one church in particular, and the idea that men and women needed to fulfil particular roles.

I've been thinking and writing about some of this stuff for a while, so by the time you listen to this, my new book might well be out. It's called "Finding God's Feminine Side".
And amongst other things, one of the things that I have been thinking about and journeying with is what it is to be a Christian woman. Because there has been quite a lot of baggage around that, I would say.

A few years ago, there were a group of church leaders in the United States who were really concerned about the fact that the culture seemed to be going a bit feminist, and you might be aware that those people are still quite concerned about that.
They felt that there was a rise in feminism that was going to threaten the whole fabric of society and cause its collapse.

And there are still people who think that that is what's happening.

And they actually wrote a statement, it was called the Danvers Statement, on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

And what they wanted to do was to get back to a scriptural idea of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, and to encourage that as part of their church cultures.

Those ideas really, I think, came out of a fairly traditional idea of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.
And the churches that I was part of had that as part of their kind of zeitgeist.

And I remember very much being around people, being around women, who were doing their very best to sort of live up to that kind of ideal.

And there were particular little bits of the Bible that would be brought out as a way of supporting that.
I remember in particular, there is a verse in one of the letters which says that the biblical women of old did not rely on fancy clothes and makeup and jewelry for their beauty. Instead, they relied on a quiet and gentle spirit.
And that was kind of, I guess, the idea that shaped some of the thinking around what it meant to be a Christian Woman.

I have to say, I wasn't very good at conforming to the sort of cultural idea of Christian Womanhood that I saw around me.

I saw lots of women who were married, and I wasn't, who had quite a lot of focus on the home and on making the home nice and doing that on a budget. There were lots of people who were very good at making those kind of Roman blind type things. And that was something which I saw people do and think, "That looks very clever and I don't think I could."
Quite a lot of them made their own clothes and they were very much focused on looking after the home, and bringing up their children, and being submissive wives.

And there was quite a lot of talk about what that meant.

So I sort of absorbed this view of ideal Christian Womanhood that's marked mainly by quietness and submission and being good at crochet and needlework. None of which really are me, particularly not the needlework - So if you are after a quilt, I am not your woman.

So I might not have fit the model, but it was there all the same.
And sometimes I think it was looking at me with disappointment over a set of knitting needles and a pair of glasses. Somewhere in my subconscious, reminding me that I didn't quite measure up.

And I found myself quite often conflicted by my own internal sense that there should be equality and that who I was and who many of my friends, and the women around me, were and what we wanted to offer to the world. And what, kind of "the church", in inverted commas, seemed to be suggesting that we ought to be able to offer.

Now I think society has moved on quite a lot.

I was a child and a teenager in the 70s and the 80s.
And actually these images that I was hearing about and seeing within church were very much part of the culture.
So it was still the time when actually there were many of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges that still didn't admit women.
When my parents bought their first house they were only allowed to count my dad's wage. In that, despite the fact that my mum was earning more than my dad, which is interesting, when they were getting a mortgage that limited their borrowing capacity.
And you could say that it would be a good idea to only base that on the wage of one of the partners, but to stipulate that that needed to be the man was quite interesting.
There were still golf clubs that didn't admit women.
In fact, I think most golf clubs didn't admit women.
Most London clubs didn't admit women.

So I remember being around when some of those things were contested.

And we had our first female Prime Minister in 1979, which is relatively late, I would say, but she didn't have any women in her cabinet.

So I don't think it was just the churches, but it is still an idea which is fairly prominent, I would say.

So it has occurred to me recently that of all of the sources that were used to think about what does it mean to be a good Christian woman, none of them seem to be about Jesus and his interactions with women.

Most of these kind of cultural ideas of what it means to be a "good woman" in inverted commas, came from verses in the epistles. (The epistles are kind of the letters that were written in the New Testament).
There is what I think is a very-much-of-its-time kind of cultural passage around wives being submissive to husbands.
In fact, when Paul wrote that, he was writing into a culture where women were very much regarded as property.
And the verses that he wrote are much, much more revolutionary than we now give them credit for.

So he was telling wives to be submissive to their husbands, which is exactly what would have been expected.
But then he told husbands to love their wives sacrificially and to give themselves for them.

So he was doing a parody of what were called the household codes. And the Roman household codes told people how to organize their households. That's why they were called household codes.
And the focus was very much on the power of the man and the authority of the man in the house.

And Paul is kind of going along with his wanting to speak to people who are in that culture and for whom that was almost a legal requirement, that the man would be in charge.
But what he does actually is that he subverts that.
And his whole focus is on the sacrificial love and giving of the husband in that context, and treating the woman really well.
He says that the man should give himself for his wife in the same way that Christ gave his life for the church.

But actually in our context, those passages have often been taken as a way of codifying a level of hierarchy within the home, where the man is in charge and the woman should be submissive, which I don't think at all was what Paul was doing.

In fact, what he said was incredibly radical in terms of empowering the women in those relationships.

But anyway, that was the kind of the cultural idea in the churches that I was part of, of what women should be like and what it meant to be a "Christian Woman" or a "Biblical Woman" in quotes.

What I noticed recently as I was kind of beginning to think again about masculinity and femininity and what that means to me, and I think I've been on a bit of a journey in recent years.

As I was thinking about that, what I realized is that none of that thinking rooted itself in the question of, well, what was it like to be a woman around Jesus?

What were Jesus's relationships with women like?

And so what I did was that I went back to the Gospels and looked in some detail at encounters between Jesus and the women in his life.

I wanted to see what it was that he drew from them, what it was that he affirmed in them, and then by extension, what he might want to affirm in me.

There are a number of things that I noticed about the women around Jesus and what it was that he seemed to draw out of them.

And the first thing that I noticed was their emotional honesty and their boldness, particularly when you compare them to the men.

So in the Gospels, quite often there is this phrase that the men dare not ask Jesus things.

So there's an occasion when the disciples have gone to find food.
They are in Samaritan territory, so they go to a Samaritan village, and the Samaritans were kind of looked down upon by the Jews. And Jews and Samaritans didn't kind of eat together, and they come back from a trip to go and look for food, and they've left Jesus sort of sitting exhausted by a well.
And when they come back, they find Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman.
And we're told that they are perplexed by this - read for that possibly even scandalized - they're perplexed that he should be talking to a woman, particularly a Samaritan woman.
But what we're told is that none of them dared to challenge him about it. None of them dared to ask the question.

Interestingly, that is in direct contrast to the woman herself.

So Jesus is sitting by the well. He's after a drink, but he's got no way of getting one. And a woman comes to the well to draw water. Jesus asks her for a drink.
And the very first thing that she does is to ask him what on earth he's doing speaking to her, because she's a Samaritan and a woman, and he's a male and Jewish.
And she points out to him that this isn't allowed.
And then throughout their conversation, it's one of the longest conversations recorded between Jesus and somebody else, and it's a really frank conversation, she is not afraid to ask him challenging questions.
When he tells her about the water of life, she says she'd like some of that, please.
She raises issues of controversy between Jews and Samaritans without any embarrassment or hesitation.
And then she enthusiastically runs back to her village to passionately and honestly share the news of her encounter with Jesus. And that persuades all of the women in her village to come and meet Jesus.

So although the men don't want to ask questions of Jesus, the woman that he's met absolutely does.

So then there are Jesus's friends, Mary and Martha.

And you might remember Mary and Martha, they've got a famous brother called Lazarus, who Jesus raises from the dead.
Lazarus, interestingly, only gets a sort of a walk-on part.
We know that he's raised from the dead, and he turns up at a dinner a little bit later.
But he doesn't get a speaking part, interestingly.
It's his sisters who do, Mary and Martha.

And you may well remember that there's a story where Jesus is at Mary and Martha's house, and Mary is sitting at his feet listening, and Martha is bustling around catering for everybody.
And then Martha gets a bit irked that Mary isn't taking part in the getting the sandwiches ready, or whatever it is that she's preparing, and tells Jesus to tell her sister off.

And Jesus refuses to do so, and says that what Mary is doing is perhaps the better choice, which is really interesting.

There's a couple of things about this.
One is that Martha has no hesitation in telling Jesus to tell her sister off.
So, Martha is pretty bold.
But Mary has taken the position of a disciple. She is sitting at the feet of Jesus listening with the blokes. That's why she's there.

And quite often, this passage is used to say to women, "You need to be quietly sitting at Jesus's feet, not rushing around doing things like Martha."
I don't know if you've ever heard that phrase, "Somebody's a bit of a Martha, and we all ought to be Marys."
But what's often kind of taken from that is this idea that we ought to be submissive, gentle, sitting quietly.
That that's the woman's thing to do.
But when we look at it culturally, what Mary is doing is that she is sitting and learning as a disciple.
She's sitting at Jesus's feet in the place where we might more often expect the blokes to be.

And Jesus tells Martha that Mary has made the better choice.
It's really an invitation to a high-class education, which as I was saying earlier, is the thing that was often denied to women.
And up until fairly recently, you know, going to university was much more of a male preserve than a female one, particularly in the top universities.

And yet, that is what Jesus is inviting Mary to do.
And I find that immensely encouraging.

I would also like to shout out for the Mathers in the world to get things done, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

But the fact that Mary has no qualms about taking up the position of a disciple, sitting at Jesus's feet, despite the fact that Jesus is in her house and there are hospitality-related duties to attend to, the sorts of things that we might expect women to be doing.
We don't know why.
Maybe she thought they could sort the dinner out later.
Maybe she was just so absorbed by what it was that Jesus was teaching, and she wanted to be part of that group of people who were listening.
But she's bold about it.
She doesn't have any qualms about leaving the housework to do the learning.

And Martha is equally bold in her willingness to challenge Jesus to tell her sister off, on the grounds that there's a lot to do, and Mary really ought to be helping out.
But it is really interesting that Jesus affirms Mary's choice, and effectively gives Martha the opportunity to join Mary, and leave the cooking and the domestic stuff till later if she wants to.

Then, as I alluded to earlier, there's the occasion when their brother Lazarus dies, and Jesus arrives too late to prevent his death, and both Mary and Martha tell him what they think.
They tell him that if he'd been there, if he hadn't waited, if he hadn't hung around in the place where he was before, if he'd got there earlier, Lazarus wouldn't have died.

They both trust that Jesus had the ability to heal him, and they are hurt that he didn't, and they say so.

So that thing which often happens in relation to the men, where we find out that they were reluctant to challenge Jesus or to ask questions, we really don't see that in the women around him.

I'm thinking now of the wedding in Cana, and if you remember that story, Jesus is at a wedding, and they've run out of wine, and his mother Mary, who sounds like quite a formidable woman, she's noticed that there is a lack of refreshment. She thinks that something ought to be done about it.

She tells Jesus that there is a problem.
He says, "I don't think this has anything to do with me. This is not my time. This is not something I want to sort out."
She takes no notice of that, and tells the servants to do whatever he suggests.
And they do, and they do it because they trust Mary, because they've got no idea that Jesus might be able to do something miraculous to sort their problem out.

So the fact that Jesus turns the water in Cana into wine after the servants have filled the water jars up is entirely down to the fact that they trust Mary.

And it's interesting that she is so willing to be bold.
She organizes for him to sort out the wine shortage without consulting him.

We don't know whether Jesus was actually planning to help out, how willing he was to do it or not, but I noticed that Mary got her way, and the wine got replenished.
And her strength of character, I think, is really interesting.

The fact that the servants are willing to listen to her suggests that she's got a real air of authority about her, and she's got a level of trust within her community, which means that even though they are being asked to do something a bit odd, they will go along with it.

There is a really odd story about Jesus and a Syrophoenician woman, and I've always been a bit perplexed and unsettled by the conversation between Jesus and this Gentile woman.

He's in someone's house, and she gatecrashes because she has a daughter who needs healing, and she's desperate.
So she walks into this Jewish house and begs him to heal her daughter.
He says to her that he hasn't come for people like her, he's come for the Jews.
But he does it in a way that is somewhat less tactful.

The food, he says, is meant for the children and shouldn't be thrown to the dogs, implying that she is one of the dogs.

And that is so rude and insulting. I mean, it really is rude and nasty and racist, and I've always kind of wondered, like, why?
I think he's needling her.

She doesn't take it lying down. She comes back at him immediately.
"Even the dogs, she says, get the crumbs from under the table."
So she is both bold and quick-witted and not put off.

And interestingly, Jesus compliments her on her reply and says that she can go because her daughter is healed.

He compliments her faith.

And I don't know what the subtext was, but I don't for one moment believe that Jesus was intending to insult or belittle this woman.
I think it's much, much more likely that he wants her to be bold, that he is pushing her to be outspoken, because it would have been absolutely utterly out of character for him to want to be racist or to belittle her.

He spends almost the entirety of his ministry spending time with those that society would look down upon, those who are excluded.

He has a huge focus on raising up the people without the power and without the status in society and bringing them back in and bringing healing very often, not only to people's physical bodies and their mental health, but also to their relationships with those around them.

So whatever it is that he's up to, he is not up to racism and exclusion, and we know that by the end of the story.
So there is something about his encounter with this woman which is intended to get her to talk back to him, and she does, and he compliments her for it, and what happens is really rather beautiful.

So looking at all of these encounters between Jesus and the women around him, there are a number of things that I notice.

One is that there is a boldness and an emotional honesty in these encounters that is in interesting contrast to quite a lot of the conversations between Jesus and men in the Bible.

The women seem to be willing to ask difficult questions because they want to know the answers.

The men are often avoiding difficult questions unless they're Pharisees who are trying to trap him or they're trying to make a point.

We don't get any examples of women who were afraid to ask Jesus something despite the fact that that's quite often happening with the men.

So there is something for women about being around Jesus that means that they are able to be themselves, they are able to be bold and unapologetic, they are often quite passionate in a way that feels counter-cultural given the position and the status of women within that culture.

There are a number of women who are with Jesus in the way that the male disciples were.
They only get a little verse in the Gospel of Luke. We find out that there's a number of them. Some of them are quite rich and powerful and some of them are actually funding the mission.

There are some incredibly beautiful stories of women who offer their adoration in very intimate ways in public.

So there's a guy called Simon who's a Pharisee and at his house a woman sort of gatecrashes and comes and anoints Jesus feet with tears and dries his feet with her hair and cries all over them.

And when Simon is really questioning of that and dismissive of it and dismissive of the fact that Jesus has allowed her to do this, Jesus looks at her and speaks to Simon and says, "Do you see this woman?
And do you see the beautiful thing that she's done for me?
You were not a good host.
You didn't offer me water for my feet but she has come and anointed my feet with tears."

And then later his friend Mary near the end of his life comes and pours a jar of very expensive perfume over his feet.
And that is absolutely not approved of by the men who are present.
But Jesus has no problem with the emotional intensity or the intimacy of that.
And he not only accepts what she's doing but he stands up for her in front of the men.

So there is a real pattern here.

And then interestingly there's a really beautiful example of a woman who is being less than bold. So she's basically got periods that were not stopping and she'd had that for a very long time. She's desperate for healing.

Jesus is in a crowd of people and she finds a way of coming and touching his cloak quietly, unobtrusively, believing that if she can do that she will find healing.

But she is intending to be lost in the crowd and never be seen. She will have had good reasons for not wanting to be seen because her bleeding makes her unclean. She's in a crowd and she's not supposed to be touching people. So she's kind of breaking some religious rules really, and she would have felt huge shame because of her disorder, because of the culture that she's part of.

So she's going to sneak into the crowd, quietly touch the edge of his cloak, get the healing and sneak away again.

Jesus senses in his spirit that something has happened, so he stops and he demands to know who it is who has touched him.

And finally, when she realises that she's not going to be able to sneak away, that he knows what has happened, she senses in her body that there has been healing, and she admits, she kind of comes forward and says "What has happened".

And Jesus ensures that she doesn't just get healed, but she also gets heard.
We are told that she tells her story. And this is really, really significant because in the middle of that crowd, this woman who would have been shunned, who would have been excluded from society because her bleeding wasn't stopping. So unlike the women who would be unclean for a few days in the month, she would have been unclean all of the time. So women were always regarded as unclean during their period.

And we're told that she tells her story.
And we know that it wouldn't have been quick because she's been suffering for many years.
And the little bits of summary that we get from the Gospel tell us that she talks about having suffered under many doctors.
So they are there for a while.

He creates space for this woman who would have been shunned, who would have been marginalised really severely from society.

She didn't want to stand out.
She was unclean, she was an outcast, she thought that she shouldn't be seen.
But Jesus disagreed vehemently.

He took time to create space for proper conversation with this woman in the middle of this enormous crowd of people.

And what is really interesting is the timing of this.

So He is on his way to an urgent mission to heal the child of a prominent and powerful citizen, the leader of the synagogue. But he stops and he listens. He gives her space to tell her whole story.

This is the only time that a healing in the Gospels is accompanied by a lengthy conversation.

But there is something about giving her a voice that is so important to Jesus that he's willing to delay going with Jairus, the synagogue leader, to heal his critically ill daughter. And because he takes so much time with this woman, he has to raise Jairus' daughter from the dead.

And I think that is incredible, that allowing of space, that giving of space, giving of dignity to women, giving women opportunity to speak, to learn, to be bold, never, never ever telling them that they should be less, that they should be submissive, that they should be quiet.

So although this image of the quiet submissive woman was very much part of what I was told it meant to be a 'Christian Woman', that is not what is happening with Jesus and the women in his life.

And that relationship between women in the Gospels and Jesus continues after his death, actually.

The emotional strength of his female friends means that they are the main players during and after the crucifixion.
They are the ones who stuck around, whilst most of the men have run away in fear.

Their devotion continues after his death because they haven't had the opportunity to properly give Jesus the burial that they'd wanted to.
So he died very shortly before the Sabbath would have started.
So they had to do a bit of a hurried job, but they were the ones who were around doing that.
So they get up very early in the morning, after the Sabbath, to take spices to make sure that his body is treated with the love and the respect that it deserves, despite their grief, or perhaps as part of their grief.

They are going to go and do for their friend the best that they can, but they go knowing that they are going to face an enormous stone and a contingent of guards outside the tomb.
But they have still got up early in the morning to go as soon as they can.

What on earth they thought they were going to do when they got there, we don't know.
Presumably they are planning to persuade the guards to open the tomb so that they can get in and offer Jesus' body the adoration that they wanted to.

So they are passionate, and they are determined, and they are bold, and they believe that if they go with the spices and they have the right kind of conversation with the guards that they will be able to sort this out.

They are the first people to witness his resurrection.

The order of events makes it very clear that that is a definite choice, that it is women who see Jesus risen from the dead first.

So having kind of read and thought about this stuff, there are a number of interesting things that occurred to me.

Primarily, when I think back to the sermons and the articles that I have read and the stuff that I have heard about the roles of men and women, all of the views that I have seen expressed about what it means to be a woman and a follower of Jesus have been through the lens of those culturally loaded passages in the letters about husbands and wives and women being quiet and submissive.

Sometimes those sermons and writings have been arguing that women should be submissive, and sometimes they are arguing that actually all of that is, and I would take this view actually, that all of that is written from a particular cultural context, and it's not helpful to try and bring that cultural context directly into our cultural context without questioning.
And when you do look a bit more deeply, then it all looks a bit different.

But all of those conversations that I have heard have been about submission and power, either arguing for it or arguing against it.

And I think when we do that, we are missing something.

Surely the place to start is with Jesus.

But almost none of the thinking that I have been exposed to about what it means to be a "Biblical, in quotes, Woman" or a "Christian Woman" has started by thinking about Jesus and the women around him.

It's all been about kind of power and submission.

But when you actually look at these encounters with women, the idea of submission as an issue just disappears completely.

So what do we see instead?

Well, this is a personal view. You might have noticed other things as I've been talking about this. But here are some of the things that stand out to me.

Firstly, there is authenticity.

There is a complete lack of posturing in the encounters between Jesus and the women that we meet in the Gospels.

They are not interested in power play.
They are not interested in making points.
They just are who they are, wanting to be with Jesus.
They are very straight talking and Jesus seems to really appreciate that about them.
They're confident and they are bold.
They say what they think.
They ask for what they want.

And Jesus isn't just comfortable with that level of boldness and confidence. He actually seems to welcome it, to enjoy it and encourage it.
Sometimes he's actually egging them on.

You know the story that I talked about with the Syrophoenician woman?
He goads her into being blunt and bold, possibly blunter and bolder than she was perhaps planning to be.
When she matches his insult with confidence and wit, he congratulates her on it.

The woman who was planning to be invisible, the one with the problem with the bleeding, he actively draws her out so that her voice is heard.

And then there is the devotion and the passion from those who anointed his feet, those who stood around the cross, those who rushed to the tomb to anoint his body.

These are expressions of emotion and physical adoration that Jesus is completely comfortable with.

There must have been something about being around Jesus that made it not just possible to show that kind of physical adoration, to have that kind of boldness, but it kind of drew it out of the people around him.

It drew it out of these women. That it was somehow natural and authentic to be like that.

I can't think of many people I would feel okay about displaying emotion in front of in the way that these women did.
You really have to know that it's going to be okay before you go crying over someone's feet in public.

So what do I think we can draw about being a follower of Jesus and a woman if we actually look at the encounters between women and Jesus in the Gospels?

I think that we see that you can be yourself, that you can be bold, that you can say what you think, that Jesus is a safe person around whom you can express and share your deepest feelings, your deepest needs, your deepest emotions in whatever way is comfortable for you.

So you can be Martha and you can make sandwiches.
You can be Mary and you can sit and you can learn.
You can ask for what you need, for what you want.
You can anoint his feet with tears and you can know that he loves you and that he loves that you love him.

If you are not quite ready to express yourself and have your voice heard in public you might find Jesus gently helping you to make that possible.

And I have certainly found that in the context of this podcast when I started doing this.
It felt like a really bold step and when I do it just by myself it still does actually.

I started off knowing that this was something that I wanted to do. I had an inkling that it was something that God was calling me to do.

But it felt a bit much to think that I could have a podcast and sort of say my thing and expect people to want to listen to it.

I'm still a bit on that journey.

But I have found elements of my voice, people who know me probably don't think that I've ever lacked that confidence, but I have actually.
And I have found that it has been safe to express myself and to be myself with Jesus.
To have my voice heard in public in new ways.
And I have found Jesus gently helping me to make that possible.

So if you have been told that being a Christian, having a friendship with Jesus, is all about being submissive and gentle and quiet, then I would suggest that you might like to go back to these stories of Jesus and the women around him and think again.

So I hope that has been of interest to you.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I explore this a bit more in my book, 'Finding God's Feminine Side', which is due to come out in February 2025.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, it would be brilliant if you would feel able to recommend it to others.

And if you'd like to connect with us via the Love Call Gifted Facebook page, then feel free to do that.

Thank you for listening.

[Music]
Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

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Thank you for listening.