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Written by jill schaeffer
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Sunday, 10 January 2010 16:40 |
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I’m fourteen and, playing my first game on the girls’ basketball team in high school, caught the ball and dribbled down court to the basket. Made the basket. Expected cheers, received dead silence. I looked back to the other side of the court and saw all the girls standing there watching me. The lady coach sauntered down: “We play by woman’s rules, here.” On Brooklyn streets I played by “boy’s rules.”
The God of Torah doesn’t ordain “half a court is better than none,” for either sex. Full court for both. The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) hints at a time when women and men played multiple roles. (We’d call it “multi-tasking.”) Yet there seems to be a clear tendency for Biblical women to obey God rather than men and chat it up with heaven: “You laughed, Sarah!” “Did not!” “Did!” And so it goes.
As Scripture tents with human nature, migrating through various economic and political terrains over the ages, it catches cultures in its net and, holding each up to the light of salvation, asks “what about the stranger?” The Canon notes that every social order bears the mark of Cain and justifies the murder of “others.” Women, however, run counter-culture to illuminate the spirit of Torah. They are not politically correct. Biblical texts often deploy women in guerilla warfare, such as the peasant revolt in Judges, breaking the rules of closed societies that create victims. In Exodus 1:15, for instance, Ramses II drops by personally to tell midwives Shiprah and Puah to kill newborn Hebrew boys. Lovely ladies, welcome to ethnic cleansing. But the ladies obey God rather than Pharaoh. No newborn boy is killed, not only Moses. Then in Luke 1, an unmarried girl named Mary gets pregnant rather unexpectedly and, like her foremother Hannah, sings a song about oppression’s end, with the poor getting fat and sassy and the rich going away empty.
Yet, some churches to this day don’t want to ordain women who obey God’s cry for justice rather than cater to today’s equivalent priests, warlords, and Pharaohs. They cry only for themselves in the boardrooms and saunas. Jesus was crucified by such arrangements of convenience.
We are living in the endgame of the Indo-European mythos: Males, yes. Females, no. It’s a dangerous time, too. Reduced to homicidal hysteria, the Taliban circle the wagons and kill women in order to feel good about being boys. Yet, the Bible had sensed the weak spots in patriarchal rule way back when. Schussler-Fiorenza notwithstanding, the Bible used women to point to another way of being a social being. Justice and life become interdependent priorities, transcending gender altogether. Cultures must give way to life, and life needs to breathe a tomorrow different from today.
At best, churches that prevent women from being ordained bask in ecclesiastical narcissism and call it divine law, hankering for a Biblical time that never was or was meant to be. At worst, these churches paint an unfaithful portrait of women with God. The women of Scripture, their tragedy and triumph proclaimed God’s struggle by their songs and deeds, a struggle that began with the Word. Way back as far as the heart can reach, the Bible had taken another track, when Yahweh sewed some fig leaves for Adam and Eve and chose to live in exile with the beloved idiots. The angels locked the gate against God, too, who never looked back. That is not an Indo-European masculine game of dominance and control but rather God “tying his hands to the universe” (Barth) or falling love with creation (Athanasius). Much more Moses speaking Plato’s discourse on the beloved in the Symposium, much more the incarnate Christ, the living Torah, roasting marshmallows with us in the wilderness.
Did someone say, “Gender bias?” Funny, I heard “the love that will not let me go.”
JILL SCHAEFFER is designated pastor, Cincinnatus United Presbyterian Church, Cincinnatus, N.Y.
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