Jesus is awesome. But there are so many annoying people in the world and for some reason a lot of these people end up in church leadership. They end up saying really dumb things sometimes and get angry at stuff that is ridiculous. They give the church a bad name and sometimes cause us to get labelled as bigots, misogynists, sexists, homophobes and worse. This is pretty sad when we see just how inclusive Jesus is with people on the fringes.
Jesus was just awesome with women. Jewish society had become
pretty patriarchal by the first century and women were essentially viewed as
the property of men (take a look at the ten commandments: ‘do not covet your
neighbours possessions, his livestock, his wife, his house’ – she’s not even
top of the list!). Jesus consistently acts in such a way as to break this
thinking down. And this was pretty radical for a rabbi. Jesus talked with,
taught, healed, travelled with, praised and discipled women. He took them
seriously, he wanted them to learn and he saw them as important. Luke’s gospel
is particularly big on this. You can’t really see it any other way.
However, when it comes to leadership, it doesn’t seem to
look like Jesus wants women involved. His 12 apostles were all men. On top of
this, Jesus never speaks against the culture of female inferiority, and some
see that as indirectly justifying it. Some have argued that he did this because
women wouldn’t have been taken seriously in that culture. Others have said that
it was because women would have known the scriptures well enough to be a
definitive teacher of Christian doctrine.
But in my experience, people like to jump from narrative to
what they like to call ‘a biblical model’. They read certain stories in the
bible, or certain actions of certain individuals and then decide that those are
moral codes, or examples to follow. They turn them into something that is
prescriptive. This is particularly common for the church described in the book
of Acts. They read about what went on at the beginning of the church’s story and
decide that what Luke is actually doing is outlining a blueprint for all of
church life from there on in. But there actually isn’t much saying that you
should be doing this. To look to the selection of the twelve as a prescriptive
model for leadership is to read into the text something that isn’t there.
In light of the story of Israel before Jesus, to understand
that the very structure of how the nation was understood, it is clear that what
Jesus is doing is a highly symbolic action: he is choosing a new twelve. It is
a subversive act, it is a statement to Israel that he is ushering a new
beginning. This is one of many re-enactments of the Israel story that Jesus
takes into himself and gives new meaning. To do anything else with this is to
treat the bible like a manual. Don’t do that. It’s not a Western book.
