Dumped women of the Bible

There have been many low points in Christian writing for women. Of books that have crossed my path (and that I have of course not read) were the booklet from the New Frontiers movement in the 1980s, ‘How to be a better leader’ s wife’; and from a parallel school, ‘Queen Take Your Throne, Becoming a Woman of Power and Authority.’ Thank goodness most books, presumably including these, disappear down history’s maw.

One book or Bible study I have never seen is ‘Dumped women of the Bible’. It is a surprise, because it is a ripe and rich area of study. How about Rizpah, descendant of King Saul, who spent one summer keeping the crows off the strung-up and rotting bodies of her two sons? Or the seven concubines of King David with whom Absalom slept and who were kept in secluded isolation for long years after David regained the throne? Or Abishag the Shunamite, carer for King David in his years of enfeeblement, then treated as a pawn in subsequent power struggles? Did these women, and hundreds like them, within and without the pages of scripture, have thoughts, feelings, lives, sufferings, laughter, endurance and perhaps also faith? Not many queens taking thrones here but an awful lot of battered and bruised people having to find a way through.

How refreshing Jesus was, taking delight in lifting women up and doing down the male disciples. Look at some of the things he said to them or to the disciples about them: ‘She has done a beautiful thing for me’; ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go in peace’; and best of all, to the tear-stained Magdalene, the simple, ‘Mary!’

(Compare this with another divine voice in a garden, asking: ‘Adam, where are you? )

History’s motor powers along, leaving battered and bruised women in its tyre-tracks, but Jesus follows, picking up the casualties, and perhaps together Jesus and the women watch history’s motor chug over the horizon, belching smoke.

Or rather, it looks like history’s motor, as men, mostly men, with spanners and oily rags, tune the machine up, squeeze efficiencies out of it, reducing God’s purpose to checklists and the replacement of defective parts.

But in Jesus we see that God moves at the speed of the women and children.