Who She Was...and Who She Wasn't

The Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s Well, Day 2

A Video Blog

Enjoying this study?  Here's a link to articles in this series: The Women Who Knew Jesus

 

Bibliography:

John 4:1-42

Walt Disney World’s “Hall of Presidents”: http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/parks/magic-kingdom/attractions/hall-of-presidents/

John Piper, “God Seeks People to Worship Him in Spirit and Truth (John 4:16-26),” Bethlehem Baptist Church, April 8, 1984.  http://www.soundofgrace.com/piper84/040884m.htm.

Cohick, Lynn H.  Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life.  Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009.

Swidler, Leonard.  “Jesus in His Encounter with Women,” AFER.  13 (1971): 290-300. 

The gods of our own making

Dogma, origin

What happens when we stay tucked into our familiar comfort-zones, the places and people that look and sound and feel most like us? 

For one, we can stop growing; if we’re not being pushed outside what’s comfortable, we have a tendency towards stagnation.  We can also stop seeing the forest and only see the leafless and wilting branches, nit-picking the theology and practices of those whom we claim as spiritual family.  Or like an inverted nautilus, we can wind more tightly into our own ideas so that our theology begins to more closely resemble the body which developed it than God himself.  This final tendency being perhaps the most dangerous of all.

There is, within contemporary Western Christianity a fascination with Love. With Jesus as not so much as prophet or good-guy-who-had-some-radical-ideas, rather, with Jesus as the ultimate embodiment of Love.  And only Love.  As if the totality of the Divinity of Christ could be so succinctly summed up: Love, and nothing more. 

Yes, God is Love.[1]  Yes, Christ did die for Love.[2]  And, yes, it is by our Love that followers of Jesus will be known. 

Yet we mustn’t forget from whence that very Love comes.  This Love can only come from God: the God of the New and Old Testaments.  The God of Christians and the Israelites.  The God of Love and the God of the Law.  Glennon Melton’s assertion, in her most recent post at Momastery, that Love trumps the Law, due to Jesus’ seeming flouting thereof as “Sinny McSinnerton”[3], is a back-handed rejection of the God from whither the Law first came.  It is the repudiation of Christ’s assertion that He came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.  It is the narrow-minded, Western, one-quarter-world view that all we need is Love. 

What about Justice?  What about Righteousness?  What about Holiness?

Where do those fit in with the nothing-but-Love paradigm that is so flagrant and prolific and, frankly, seductive in our seeker-driven worship?  Because if Jesus (and thus by extension, God Himself) is only Love, then my sins are of no consequence.  My lifestyle, my choices, my actions are meaningless; because by golly, Jesus loves me.  And so long as I in turn love everybody else, all will be right with the world. 

But if my sins (and by extension, the sins of everyone else) are of no consequence, then why did Jesus have to die?  Why kill Love?

I maintain that Jesus had to die, because my sins (and yours and those of every other person ever to live) do matter.  Because my actions, my lifestyle, my human-ness and my very propensity towards sin twists and perverts everything about me and God’s creation, Jesus had to die to fix it.  To redeem it, to yank creation and me back from evil, and say, “Oh, no you don’t; this is mine!” 

Therefore, Christ wasn’t just a guy who loved people radically.  Yes, He did that.  But he was also the foretold Messiah, the Savior of the world.  He wasn’t merely a revolutionary who was also an outcast who loved other outcasts really well.  Yeah, he did that, too.  But the Divine-Incarnate Jesus, as Mrs. Melton posits in her article, could not have come today, or ever, as a black, lesbian teenager.  I do not say this because I agree with John Piper’s teaching that God is inherently masculine, and NOT because I believe Jesus hates anyone because their sexual orientation (I very, very firmly believe that God so loved the entire world—every person of every race and gender and age and worldview—that he gave his only Son not to condemn the world, but to save it; so that all who believe in Christ will not perish but have eternal life); but I say this because Jesus had to be who he was in order to fulfill the prophecies proclaimed about him in the centuries preceding his incarnation.  Jesus was exactly who he was supposed to be.  And he walked the earth at exactly the time he was supposed to walk it.

When we forgot or purposely neglect this, we have in essence forgotten the God who sent his Son to die in our place.  We make the Son greater than the Father.  We bend the Divine human to fit our worldly human desires.  We create a god who looks more like we want him to look than he actually does.

Had Jesus been anything else other than a 1^st century Palestinian Jew, his very existence would have made God a liar. 

And you can call me a stuffy, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy [or you can pick from other, more colorful pejoratives should you chose; trust me, I’ve both heard and used them before,] Christian.  But I have a knee-jerk reaction when anything we posit about God could be construed in such a way as to make him a liar.  Because doing so makes him not God.  And if he’s not God, then from whom was Jesus sent, and whose kingdom are we proclaiming?  A god of our own making?  

Or the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that seen and unseen, whose thoughts are not human thoughts, and whose ways are not humanity’s ways? 

Then ask yourself: Upon which would you stake eternity?   

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

A. W. Tozer

 

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[1] 1 John 4:8

[2] John 3:14-18

[3] Glennon Melton, “I Think Jesus’d be gay…Or No She Didn’t,” Momastery, http://momastery.com/blog/2012/05/28/i-think-jesusd-be-gay-orno-she-didnt/ 

A Less-than Human Silence

John Henry Fuseli, Silence

To begin with, Silent Mondays weren’t my idea.  But there has been something weighing heavily on my heart in recent semesters, and particularly in the past few weeks: the silencing of women’s voices in the greater body of Christ.  Though, even with the most cursory glance at my life, I readily admit: I don’t have it that bad.  I am pursuing a Masters of Divinity at a seminary that is ‘liberal’ enough to not only allow women to do so, but encourages them in this endeavor.  This education a dream of mine, but also the Officer’s for me; which makes it depreciating to only say that he supports me in it.  My church permits women to teach, has women on the leadership team, and in guiding the church, places as much value on the opinion of women as men.[1]  I can teach my children what and how I like.  I can call up my pastor, or any other pastor for that matter, whenever and about whatever I chose.  I can voice my opinion about practices or scriptural interpretation or spiritual development whenever I please.[2]  So, no; I don’t have it bad at all.

Which may raise the question: what’s the problem?

The problem is that, the closest church to my residence forbids its female congregants to seek pastoral counsel without the express permission of their husbands/fathers.  The problem is that at the 2012 Desiring God Pastor’s Conference hosted by John Piper, he claims that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.  And being God, a God of love, he has done that for our maximum flourishing both male and female.”[3]  The problem is that the head pastor of the Mars Hill brand of churches, Marc Driscoll, explains that “[the Apostle] Paul is simply stating that when it comes to leading in the church, women are unfit because they are more gullible and easier to deceive than men.”[4]  Mr. Driscoll uses the covers of secular magazines in grocery store checkout lines as evidence to his point. One has to wonder if Mr. Driscoll considers Playboy, Maxim, or GQ covers as adequate frames of reference for the qualifications of men in church leadership.  The problem is that even in 2012, women are being told that they have nothing to offer outside of submission to male headship, thus alienating a generation of American and European women.  The problem is that we’ve tacked “submission to males” onto the gospel for women. 

A “Jesus and…” proposition for women.           

Of course, that’s just in the western church.  There’s an entire world of women who are considered less than human by their governments, their religions, their families.  Women who cannot leave the house without a male escort, girls who cannot attend school, brides who are burned, girls sold into prostitution, woman as slaves in the sex trade.  Women as chattle.  Women as property.  Women as less.  The first step in dehumanization is establishing inferiority.  When women and girls become less in any manner to their male counterparts, the way is made clear for subjugation and abuse.  Less intelligent, less abled, less worthy.

My voluntary silence will do nothing for the women trapped in these circumstances.  Subjugation, abuse, dehumanization won’t be stopped with the stilling of my voice.  Not talking will do nothing for the women attending Driscoll's or Piper’s churches.  It will not benefit the women in the pews up the street, nor allow women into leadership in my denominational organization.  My silence will do nothing.

But in the silence, I will pray. And I will listen.  With my muteness, I will teach my children that no voice should be quieted because of gender or ethnicity, that God created every single person as worthy and equal.  I will stand in silent solidarity with daughters of the King of Kings who wonder if they are ever heard; women outside the faith who have never known their worth to the Creator of the Universe.             

I will be quiet, be still, remain mute, in anticipation of the day when the restoration of creation is realized; and every person who has so chosen, may lift his or her voice to worship the Savior of humanity.    

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[1] Though, our parent organization does not recognize women’s leadership, nor will it permit them to hold the title “elder.”

[2] Granted, though these are technically “allowed” me, there are scriptural parameters about when/how any believer should speak in services; and one must exhibit the maturity of self-control delineated therein for the benefit of the body and those outside the faith who have come to hear the word of God.  1 Cor 14:26-40

[3] The Christian Post online: http://www.christianpost.com/news/john-piper-god-gave-christianity-a-masculine-feel-68385/  [accessed 2/27/2012 at 11:23am]

[4] Mark Driscoll, Church Leadership: Explaining the Roles of Jesus, Elders, Deacons, and Members at Mars Hill, Mars Hill Theology Series (Seattle, WA: Mars Hill Church, 2004).   Go here for an extended quote.