Reprinted from the Theology of Work Project, lead contributor Alice Matthews.
People everywhere have always worked. And when we turn to the New Testament we find women engaged in all kinds of employment. For some it was the work of bearing and rearing children. For others it was bringing aid to folks in need. And for still others it was as businesswomen engaged in profitable enterprises. For many it was some form of ministry for Christ and his kingdom.
Women Happily Accept Significant Work (Luke 1)
When we open the Gospel according to Luke, we immediately meet an elderly woman named Elizabeth, the wife of a Jewish priest, and a young girl named Mary, engaged to marry a carpenter. Barren Elizabeth is now six months pregnant in her old age and will later give birth to John the Baptist. Mary, likely in her early teens, is also pregnant, but uniquely by God’s Spirit, not by sex with any man. After her encounter with God’s angel and her agreement to become the mother of God’s Messiah, Mary journeys on foot the seventy miles from the province of Galilee in the north to the highlands of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth. For both women their pregnancies were supernatural.
We may not think of bearing and rearing children as “work” and wonder why an article on women in the workplace should begin with two pregnant women. But in both cases, these women were partnering in God’s work to invade a broken and sinful world and reverse the grip of evil on people’s lives. This partnership required real work. There would be physical work in bearing and rearing these special boys, to be sure. But Mary and Elizabeth embraced the prospect of this work joyfully. Mary captured the significance God intended for her work in her song that we call the Magnificat:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant…He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
Luke 1:46-53
Giving birth was not the only meaningful work Mary did in her lifetime. She also played a role in Jesus’ adult ministry. Yet the part of her story that inspires us today is how she trusted God’s purposes despite the difficult work it would mean for her.
Women Make Jesus’ Work Possible (Luke 4:14-19)
Jesus, now in his thirties, “filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone” (Luke 4:14-15). Going throughout Galilee’s cities and villages proclaiming God’s Good News (Luke 4:18-19), “the twelve [male disciples] were with him as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources” (Luke 8:1-3).
These women, healed in some way by Jesus, were part of that traveling band following the Lord around Galilee. The women’s self-appointed work was to care for Jesus’ physical needs in his travels. Given the patriarchal society of first-century Palestine in which women were most often sequestered, have you ever wondered how these women could travel with Jesus and his followers without creating any hint of scandal? The fact that they had wealth made them benefactors with the freedom to come and go in public without being censured. If you’ve ever wondered how Jesus and his followers could survive for three years without an obvious source of income, look no further than to these wealthy women.
Jesus’ Teachings Include Women
The four gospel accounts of Jesus’ earthly ministry contain the mention of more women than virtually any other secular writing of that era. In them we hear Jesus praise women for their faith (the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:28; Martha in John 11:26-27) or for their generosity (a poor widow’s gift, Mark 12:43-44). He included them in his teachings (about a woman baking bread, Matthew 13:33; or a woman hunting for a lost coin, Luke 15:8-10). Contrary to custom, he spoke freely to women in public (John 8:10-11) and taught theology to them (Luke 10:39). He entrusted them with the message of the resurrection while the male disciples hid in fear of the Jewish authorities.
In contrast to some of the disciples, no woman deserted him, betrayed him, or failed to believe his words. Because of their faith, their understanding, and their fidelity, women were often examples to the men. And after his ascension to God’s heaven, these same faithful women were with the men in prayer in an upper room in Jerusalem, waiting for the promise of God’s Spirit to prepare them for ongoing ministry.
Some folks suggest that because we don’t hear of these women later in the New Testament, they were never more than benefactors to Jesus in his earthly ministry. But neither do we hear of all but two of the disciples in the rest of the New Testament. Yet we know the strong tradition that Thomas went to India as an evangelist and church-planter. We assume that all of them (except the suicide Judas) scattered in every direction, carrying the Gospel of Jesus to the ends of the known earth.
The book of Acts carries, initially, the work of Peter as leader of the early church in Jerusalem (with the baton soon passed to James, the brother of Jesus, not James the disciple). Then the story picks up with the apostle Paul, working sometimes with Barnabas, sometimes with Silas. And it is here that we find the fascinating stories of women in a variety of professions who became followers of Jesus and ardent workers in the new churches scattered around the Roman Empire.
This is the true story of five working women, whose original professions were totally diverse, but who ended up in the same surprising position. Our authority for their stories is the apostle Paul. We find their stories in two places: in Luke’s account of the early Christian churches, in particular as he traveled with the apostle Paul, then in the letters of the apostle.
Read the full article at the Theology of Work Project.
The Green Room 