Elizabeth | Luke's Take on Women | Part 1 (Courtney Clark)
Transcript: Elizabeth
It’s no secret that women have had to fight for their rights. We’ve come a long way as a society, but we still have lots of room to move toward equality for not just women but all marginalized communities. Women have from the beginning, in most cultures, been seen as inferior. Feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir (who is recognized as a philosopher but is self claimed to not be one) in her work titled The Second Sex claims that Christian ethics have contributed to this oppression of women; that the New Testament is a primary tool of patriarchy as we see it today. Author Sandra Schneider made two points in her essay titled Freeing Theology. First saying that scripture presents male privilege as the norm and women as subject to males as divine order. And secondly presents God as male and equates all males to god because of their masculinity. There are definitely plenty of arguments that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament are pro-patriarchy and oppression of women. I’ve experienced my fair share of people who believe this. But, it depends on who you’re talking to and how you view the text. Other theologians argue that the New Testament is very much pro-woman especially for the time period in which it was being written. There are many issues when it comes to viewing the Bible as pro-woman or pro-patriarchy. Language, power, economics, gender-role expectations just to name a few. The Bible was written and later translated in a time period that was very much consumed in culture that was dominated by the male experience (i.e the important) and so it’s language largely ignores the experiences of women. Positions of power and economic status of women were largely seen as unimportant because women’s ‘work’ wasn’t generally something that generated income. They took care of the cooking, cleaning, child care, and subsistence agriculture (i.e. working the garden that supplies just your kitchen not full scale farming). And most translations describe God through predominantly male pronouns (even in spaces when the original language might not be, but that’s an entirely different topic) leaving the assumption that God is male. Because of these arguments women have a hard time finding their place in the church. And often have to fight for it.
My story has not been a secret. Most of you probably know, I was fired from a church just because I asked to preach. I worked in churches for years prior to this one, but was never paid. My contribution as a woman was to be considered volunteer because women couldn’t have positions of leadership. This isn’t exclusive to just a handful of churches I know several of you have similar stories from different churches. I think there is movement to be more inclusive, churches definitely have women on staff, but you scan still see some of the prejudice in that women are called minister or director never pastor and they generally only work in the office or with children. Again this is not ALL churches, but a lot of them. This all stems from patriarchal interpretations of the bible. Often using scriptures form Paul’s work to support those arguments. However, I think if we take a step back and look at the text as a whole, we see that Jesus and the gospels don’t support the oppression of anyone, not even women. Our intention with this series on Luke is to take a different look at the text and see how women WERE included in detail throughout the gospel of Luke and Jesus’s life and ministry.
For many years the texts attributed to Luke, Luke and Acts, have been seen as allies to Christian feminism and feminism as a whole. Charles Erdman in his commentary: The Gospel of Luke: An Exposition even calls Luke the “gospel of Women.” There have been more modern feminists who claim this is not the case arguing that Luke is still steeped in patriarchy and though it includes women more than any other texts in the Bible, it doesn’t mean its pro-women.
History
Luke and Acts, the works we attribute to Luke (though we don’t know for sure who the author is, Luke is an educated guess) are written in a way they’re intended to be read together. Luke is written about the life of Jesus and Acts is written as a way to show what the church did in response to the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and how that ‘good news’ spread throughout Rome. We attribute
these two books to the same author because of parallels in the texts. The two texts echo each other and follow a similar outline.
Luke depicts the Roman Empire as sympathetic to the Christian movement, as a means to rectify and show the legitimacy of the new religion. He’s trying to influence Rome positively to this religion that was started by a revolutionary who was crucified. His primary audience is gentiles, or people who are not Jews. And he writes in the style of a Roman Historian. The work we attribute to him is beautifully and artistically written, and includes a lot of detail. However, Luke does not claim to have actually seen the events of Jesus’s life. It’s believed the writer produced this work through research, interviews with eyewitness accounts, and by reading texts written at the time of Jesus’s life and ministry. In other words the writer did a lot of investigative journalism.
We see through the works of Luke and Acts that the care for the poor and oppressed were important to the author. This is where the inclusion of women comes in. Nearly 1/3 of the book of Luke deals with women, there are 15 texts with women as the primary character, 19 texts where women or the traditional work of women are the focal point. Luke writes in parallels meaning that when a story appears its paired with a similar story. Often times these story pairs are done with a male character in one and a female character in another. For example in chapter 1 we see a messenger appear to Zachariah to announce the pregnancy of his wife, with John the Baptist, and then the same messenger appears to Mary to announce the pregnancy of Jesus. Luke is the only text that includes the announcement to Mary, the other gospels have the messenger appear to Joseph her fiancé.
It’s obvious that Luke includes more stories of women than the other gospels and cares deeply about them. But this isn’t necessarily arguments enough for Pro-women in the text. Scholars argue that Luke only included women because of his Hellenistic heritage, a culture in which women had more rights and legal freedoms than they did in Jewish or Palestinian cultures. So women were just more naturally included because of his cultural lens. In comparison there are 10 named women in the book of Luke but 39 named men. Still quite a large discrepancy. Then there are other stories of women that we find in the book of Mark, which it’s believed that Luke relied heavily on the information in Mark to shape this gospel, that are not included in the book of Luke. However, luke includes stories of women found nowhere else in the bible.
The first two chapters of Luke in particular paint women in a positive light. They provide a view of the birth story of Jesus not found in the other gospels and include beautiful detail. There are female characters introduced here that are found nowhere else in scripture. One of which is Elizabeth who we will be talking about today. The other is a widow named Anna which we will talk about in more detail in the third part of this series.
Beginning the text with stories that have women as the focal point is making a statement. Laying claim to the way Jesus came and reversed the values of the world. The story of Jesus, who is the most important person in the book of Luke (since its about his life) begins with the story of three of the most forgotten people in society. A barren woman, an unmarried (some would say peasant, I think she was likely more middle class) girl, and a widow. Despite how you may view Luke’s stance on feminism, this is revolutionary.
Elizabeth
Elizabeth is one of the characters that is only mentioned in the book of Luke. She isn’t spoken of often and if she is, it’s usually in reference to her position as a mother. She isn’t given a lot of textural space but in what we are given we learn quite a bit about her. Let’s look at Luke 1:5-7, summarize what happens to Zachariah, Luke 1:23-25
Wife of Zachariah
Her and her husband are Levites of the house of Aaron
Malachi 2:7 Levites were called to special responsibilities regarding teaching “for the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the lord of hosts.
Grew up with a wealth of knowledge of scripture and was exposed to even more teaching as the wife of a priest
She conceives who we will come to know as John the Baptist when she’s much older in age. We see similarities here to Sarah in the Old Testament.
Then the text switches gears a bit and goes into the story of Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will have a baby. After the announcement of Mary’s pregnancy she goes and visits Elizabeth. And we pick up the story here in Luke 1:39-45.
This interaction is often referred to as the Visitation. Which is written in four parts. We’re going to dig into the first two today. The first portion is the set-up of the conversation between the two women. We learn from the messenger when he speaks to Mary, that Elizabeth and Mary are related, likely cousins. So they come together not just because they’re family, but because they’re in a similar circumstance. Pregnant outside of what’s considered the norm. Mary as an unmarried woman, and Elizabeth as and older barren woman.
The second portion is Elizabeth’s speech to Mary in which she highly praises the young woman and her baby and offers her a blessing. Elizabeth essentially humbles herself before Mary, which is a foreshadowing of the relationship between the two babies, John the Baptist and Jesus. When John humbles himself before Jesus (in Matthew 3:13-15.) However something happens in verse 41 I want to take a closer look at. The text says she was ‘filled with the Holy Spirit.’ This is something we see spoken of throughout the books of Luke and Acts. Prior to Jesus the ‘presence of God’ was only experienced in certain places, namely the temple where Zachariah has his vision, and under specific circumstances. For example Moses has to go up on a mountain away from the people to experience the glory of God.Priests had very specific cleansing rituals they had to follow to enter into the temple. Where God’s presence was said to be. This being filled with the Holy Spirit is Luke’s way of saying something new is being brought in. A life where we can experience God in all areas at all times, not just inside the temple. Elizabeth is the first person in the gospel of Luke to experience this. Which is significant.
By describing her as being filled with the Holy Spirit Luke is giving her credibility and including her as important to the story. Presenting her as educated, religious or spiritual, and intentionally involved in the story. Remember, it’s not the baby that’s filled its her, and this filling causes the baby to begin to move, presumably for the first time. This is important because the responsibility of barrenness falls solely on the woman, and is often believed to be caused by disfavor from God. Other words, the people around Elizabeth likely believed she did something to deserve being barren. Despite the fact that the text continually describes her and her husband as pious or righteous. So naming her as the first to receive the Holy Spirit in the story, is a powerful change of plans. A radical move toward inclusivity.
Meanwhile, While Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and begins to offer praise, Zachariah her husband is silenced after interacting with the spirit in the temple (Luke 1:11-13, 19-20) He’s mute until after the birth. This is an interesting juxtaposition that is again flipping the script of the norm. We hear ‘prophetic’ speech from the woman while the man remains silent. This prophetic speech confesses Mary’s unborn baby is the expected Messiah, “The Lord”. It’s important to notice Mary hasn’t said a word to Elizabeth, and likely isn’t yet showing. There’s no indication that Elizabeth knew of Mary’s situation. The implication here being that Elizabeth being filled with the Holy Spirit helped her to see what was going on around her. Which goes back to again, giving credibility and importance to Elizabeth. Taking step by step to level the playing field, to give power to the powerless.
Elizabeth has lived most of her life as the person who was whispered about, judged, blamed, and ridiculed. She’s now pregnant and is no longer seen as the woman who’s disfavored by God. Elizabeth is in a unique position to help Mary in her situation. Mary is walking into a season of her life
where she will now be the one whispered about, judged, blamed, and ridiculed. So not only are they both pregnant with miracle babies, but they could relate to each other in a way no one else could. They’re walking this season together, being the village for one another when their village has or is becoming very small because they don’t fit the bill of ‘normal’.
Then the story says Mary stayed with Elizabeth for 3 months, likely until John was born. Then immediately goes into the birth of John. Luke 1:57-60
Again Zechariah is mute, and remains so for it says 8 days after John’s birth. So Elizabeth is given power and is the one to name the child and announce his birth. Which breaks from tradition. Luke continues to paint Elizabeth as a faithful, prophetic character important in the story of the birth of Jesus. Worthy of our attention.
In Elizabeth’s story we see that God cares for the forgotten. The women who are barren and forgotten about in their society. He cares for her by providing her a baby, the one thing she’s waited for, begged for, for a long time. He cares for Mary, a young pregnant woman in a society that will shun her, by giving her an educated, kind, experienced woman to walk through it with her. That Luke includes Elizabeth when none of the other gospel writers do indicates Luke finds her important. Likely as an example of what it means to be faithful when it’s hard, when you’ve waited what feels like life times. To believe when no one else does, not even your family. As an example of what it means to be the village for someone, as an example of what it means to love unconditionally. She doesn’t shun Mary, she loves Mary, praises her, and sees not the ‘mistake’ that everyone else sees but the miracle, the goodness that will come with Mary and the life of Jesus. But more than anything, I think Luke is using the story of Elizabeth to foreshadow the work of Jesus, in which Jesus comes and not just flips the script of power but eliminates power imbalance and welcomes EVERYONE to the table. Despite their social, economic, or political status. As we see in Matthew 20:16 when jesus himself says “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” And by using a woman, he’s driving home the point before the story even get’s started. That Jesus uses ALL of us, we are ALL important to the story. Women, children, the poor, the powerless, the oppressed.