The Gentle Savior

I loved this post by Cara Strickland on the Junia Project blog last month. She said it so well that I thought I would share an excerpt with you here:

Recently, I heard a sermon preached almost entirely on Jesus’ genealogy in the book of Matthew.

I was visiting a church I attended in my youth, a place where I learned a lot of what I’ve needed to unlearn about theology of women. I was delighted to see that the pastor immediately picked out the women in the narrative, a little disappointed to realize that he did so only to point out that they were all foreigners, with the exception of Mary. But this got me thinking in another direction, as sermons so often do. I began to think through these five women, to question what else they might have in common.

Right there, as the pastor continued with his sermon, I realized something I’d never noticed before. Each of the women in the genealogy was either single (in the case of Tamar, Ruth, andRahab), or sort of relationship adjacent (Bathsheba’s husband was away at war, leaving her vulnerable, Mary was betrothed, but easily sentenced to death for being pregnant at a word from Joseph).

The very things that made women safe in the cultures of their day: marriage and children, were missing from their lives.

This affected me especially because those things are also absent from my life. I don’t know what’s it like to be a widow. I can imagine that the process is made worse by unfair treatment from a frightened father-in-law, who watched two sons die after coupling with Tamar. Still, that doesn’t excuse the fact that he sent her home to her father’s house, making her present and future uncertain. Without children to carry on her husband’s line, there would potentially be no one to care for her. She might be worried about where her next meal would come from, or how she would continue to live. Read the rest of this post (originally titled “The Women of Advent” at The Junia Project.

Cara is a freelance writer and food critic based in the Pacific Northwest. She can often be found writing at carastrickland.com.