I walked into my kitchen the other day, and from my radio, I heard Michael Bublé belting out the statement, “This is a man’s world!” With International Women’s Day in mind, I couldn’t help but agree!
If you are like me and have grown up within the Church of Scotland, you may think from the predominance of men in the pages of our bible and historically in our pulpits and session rooms that, indeed, it is a man’s world. In that moment, it seemed to me very apt that Integrity (The Church of Scotland’s task group on tackling violence towards women and girls) have worked with Scottish feminist folk trio Siskin Green to celebrate International Women’s Day with a song;
“There is a line of women
extending back to Eve
whose role in shaping history
God only could conceive…”
Have you ever considered that you are one in a long line of women valued and used by God to bless the world?
Have you ever considered the long line of women mentioned or unmentioned in our faith tradition?
I am so thankful to these singers and songwriters for writing something which celebrates and names some of the women who made it into the pages of our Bible…Hallelujah!
For me, however, the celebration is tinged with sadness, as I can’t help thinking of all the other women who are not named…ones who surely loved God and were loved by God but whose stories we have not heard. One such woman can be found in the account of the woman at the well.
My guess is her encounter with Jesus was the last thing this woman expected as she went about her daily tasks. And when I read the gospels, and of this story in particular, I read of how Jesus turns up in unexpected places and times and starts a conversation that invites newness of life and blessing to both the one he is talking to within the moment and the reader now. For the woman at the well – it was a game changer. In the beginning, when she first met Jesus, she was living a less-than-free life, constrained by the cultural mores of her time, all of which Jesus chose to cut across to bring her freedom.
The conversation between Jesus and the woman pivots when he tells her what he knows about her life: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” Of course, this is the “sordid” revelation commentators often point to when they try to make a case for the woman’s sexual wantonness. But as Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz Weber usefully points out, there are any number of reasons why the Samaritan woman might have the past she has.
Perhaps she was married off as a teen bride, then widowed and passed along among her dead husband’s brothers, as per the “Levirate marriage” practice of the day. Maybe she’s infertile. Maybe she’s a victim of abuse. Maybe she has a disability.
Whatever the case, we know for sure that in the first century, women didn’t have the legal power to end their own marriages — the authority to file for divorce rested with men alone.
Instead of seeing a woman hemmed in and bound by cultural limits, which dictated that a woman’s worth be measured in her ability to bear and raise children and look after the home for the benefit of men – Jesus saw her as a person in her own right. And probably for the very first time – this woman at the well – was beginning to realise the true sense of her own inherent value. Moreover, she is the first person to whom Jesus reveals his own identity in John’s gospel. And she is the first believer in any of the Gospels to straightaway become an evangelist and bring her entire city to a saving knowledge of Jesus.
The time Jesus chose to invest in this conversation, the longest conversation between Jesus and any other person in the gospels, paid dividends for this woman and for her community as well.
We don’t know her name. I yearn to know it. Don’t you? I don’t want her to remain nameless. As I imagine her standing there at the well, I sense my own thirst. I feel the rough edges of my parched condition, and I know my need for refreshment in ways I hadn’t imagined before.
Not knowing somehow makes the yearning deeper.
On this International Women’s Day, our attention is drawn to the need for more action to tackle misogyny, inequality and violence against women and girls. In the yearning, we are drawn into the company of the woman at the well as she reminds us of those whose names we most need to remember as we work to affirm that everyone is worthy as God’s beloved.
The feminist theologian Professor Elizabeth Johnson offers these reflections, writing in Global Sisters Report,
‘Women, who form half of the world’s population, work three-fourths of the world’s working hours; receive one-tenth of the world’s salary; own one percent of the world’s land; form two-thirds of illiterate adults; and together with the dependent children form three-fourths of the world’s starving people.
To make a bleak picture worse, women are subject to domestic violence at home and are raped, prostituted, trafficked into sexual slavery and murdered by men to a degree that is not reciprocal.
Regarding education, employment and other social goods, men have advantages simply by being born male. Racial and ethnic prejudices add further disadvantages to women, as does class privilege that disrespects women who are poor.’
‘Every culture has different dynamics. But it is always women who are regarded as of least value…..in no country on earth are women and men yet treated in an equal manner befitting their human dignity.’
I am parched. Are you? Do you, like me, need to drink deeply from the water the woman at the well draws for us?
Please, God, help us remember her and remember them. Amen
By Moira Taylor Wintersgill based on Karen Hendry’s writing
