Bible Books

050

Talking Back to the Bible

Knowing Her Place: Gender and the Gospels

Anne Thurston
(New York: Paulist, 1998) 147 pp., $12.95 (paperback)

Martha serves while Mary listens. As Jesus speaks to the crowd assembled in the home of the two sisters, Martha attends to her guests while Mary sits at the Lord’s feet and attends to what he is saying. When Martha complains that her sister has left her with all the work, Jesus (not Mary) reprimands her: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part” (Luke 10:38–42).

Today both sisters leave women uncomfortable and angry, argues Anne Thurston, because both sisters play traditional subordinate roles: One serves people, the other remains silent and receptive. Writes Thurston: “Women have, like Mary, listened; now, like Martha, they are talking back.”

In her study of women in the Gospels, Thurston, who has developed her interpretation of the story in women’s church and feminist discussion groups, suggests spiritually wise and humane ways for women and their church communities to understand 13 difficult biblical texts. She teaches readers to talk back to the Bible.

Try reading the story of Martha and Mary with male characters, Thurston recommends. “John” sat listening at Jesus’ feet while his brother “James” complained that John wasn’t helping with the work. Suddenly the narrative sounds different because we have different expectations of men and women. When the characters are seen as two men, they fit the role of pairs of disciples sent out earlier in the chapter (Luke 10). Further, the passage seems to pertain to the public sphere and to the ministry due to the male characters, not to the domestic sphere of women. So, how do we make progress from here? Thurston offers a number of suggestions: For example, the word for “serve (at table)” in Greek comes from diakonia, the same word used for discipleship, including teaching and service. Might Martha and Mary, Thurston speculates, actually be disciples?

According to Thurston, at an early point in the development of the church, women were taught to “know their place” (thus the book’s title). Having visited Jesus’ tomb and found it empty, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other female followers of Jesus return to the apostles to tell them what they had observed. But, Luke records, “these words seemed to [the male disciples] an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11). In the words of a friend whom Thurston quotes, “this moment of male disbelief of the witness of women is where the rot set in the early Church, a rot which has never been eradicated.” Because of their disbelief, the men in Luke require special instruction by Jesus on the road to Emmaus, an instruction that confirms what the women have said. Thus the men’s initial failure to understand and believe testifies to the women’s faith. The women’s knowledge of Jesus, in turn, helps the reader understand the lengthy instruction given the male disciples.

Thurston’s strategy requires her to ask if biblical stories “continue to be the words of life” for women. She counsels reading hopefully and suspiciously in order to liberate women from the false restrictions imposed on them by the cultural setting of the Bible and its later interpretation. A vigorous reader, Thurston does not sanitize texts that speak of women with offensive or scandalous language (for example, the story of the woman whom Jesus compares to a dog [Matthew 15:21–28]). The effective interpreter negotiates the pain and promise of the story in which the woman stands up to Jesus and gets the better of 051him in an argument. Searching questions about Jesus’ behavior lead to new paradigms for women; comforting rationalizations would stunt discussion.

Thurston’s short interpretations of gospel passages that speak of women are sharp and provocative as well as reflective and nourishing. Thurston recognizes that concentrating on women who are hidden or even unmentioned (but presumed) in the biblical text increases the danger of narrow interpretations that eke out some data on women but ignore the broad movements of the Gospels. Consequently, Thurston attends effectively to the context of the stories and their impact on each Gospel. Thurston hopes to release the neglected or misunderstood stories of women into the flow of the commonly remembered and retold Christian stories that have become part of communal memory. With this book, she begins the process.

Talking Back to the Bible

Knowing Her Place: Gender and the Gospels