He Told Me Everything I Ever Did
Blog Series #6: How Jesus Treats Women, Part 4b And ... He Commissions Her Anyway, John 4:1-42
I am continuing with the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well found in John 4: 1-42 (re-printed in full in my last post titled The First Evangelist: A Christmas Story).
So often when defending hierarchical power structures that benefit them, conservative evangelicals will say they use a “plain reading of Scripture” especially in regard to one verse they’ve taken out of context and read in a translation such as the King James version. If your Bible translation was created during the height of patriarchal political power in either the Catholic or the Protestant Church during the Middle Ages, your Bible will reflect the lens through which it was translated. If, however, your ‘plain reading’ is from a translation that skips over the heavily patriarchal Medieval Age all the way back to the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts, the lens is remarkably egalitarian. There is not just one page in Beth Allison Barr’s book The Making of Biblical Womanhood that explains this. It’s the WHOLE book! That is why I am definitely referencing this valuable resource here, in its entirety, along with her newest publication Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry. And … GUESS when marriage began to replace ordination as a woman’s path to ministry??
Yep.
The Medieval Era, particularly after Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation around 1517. Just 87 years later, King James of England commissioned that the Bible be translated through his heavily politicized, patriarchal, medieval lens.
A ‘plain reading of the Bible’ often refers to reading just the words on the page with no outside commentary — and the person saying these words usually refers to ‘a plain reading’ of the King James version of the Bible so that it fits the heavily politicized, patriarchal, medieval narrative they are promoting — even today. However, I’ve noticed that a ‘plain reading of Scripture’ in a translation such as the New International Version (2011 edition) — where linguists and translators went back to the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts to begin their work — yields some amazing and egalitarian insights.
Going back to John’s story in chapter 4, Jesus hangs out with a woman alone at a well; a woman who is sleeping with a man that she is not married to. According to the strict patriarchal rules of Jesus’ Hebrew world AND according to the strict patriarchal rules of our modern North American evangelical world: this is taboo. Knowing this, Jesus seems to seek out a conversation with this particular woman anyway.
Now, something many people fail to realize is true in ANY society in Jesus’ day or now is: babies are more likely to be a blessing to those who are
1. married and
2. financially stable enough to afford all the things necessary to keep a baby alive.
Most well-meaning evangelicals in North American churches don’t understand that for an unmarried woman caught in a cycle of poverty or abuse with no resources to care for a child (especially if she already has some children to feed and clothe), a pregnancy is a burden. This is especially true when a woman finds that providing sex for a man has valuable returns in the form of food, cash, clothing, and shelter — resources that only a man has access to in a patriarchal economy.
Women have less access to these resources the more patriarchal the power structures are that control the flow of resources.
Even today, when a person has difficulty accessing the resources needed to survive, selling one’s body becomes a feasible way to acquire those resources. When a woman begins to multiply the number of children dependent on those scarce resources, many men simply walk away from a pregnant sexual partner. For the man, providing for more people becomes a burden that he often feels inadequate to carry. This has always been true as long as patriarchal systems govern the distribution of resources necessary for human survival.
When John reveals in his gospel that Jesus knows that the woman has had five husbands — and likely a couple of children from at least one of those marriages — and now she is providing sex for a man she is not married to, John is telling his readers a LOT. It only takes a little bit of real life experience as an unmarried woman trapped in a cycle of abuse and/or poverty to understand how necessary it is for pregnant women to abort unwanted pregnancies so that the man will continue to provide food, cash, shelter, and clothing for the dependents that he currently has. This reality was just as true in Jesus’ day as it is now, in fact even MORE so as women in the first century had far fewer options for acquiring survival resources for themselves and their children than they do in North America today.
When I take a ‘plain reading’ of this story that John relays to us in chapter 4, the sentence “He told me everything I ever did” packs a punch! Logically, we can deduce that she is not wealthy enough to pay a servant to draw water for her. Jesus reveals that she is not married, we see that she is not wealthy, so we know that a pregnancy would be more of a burden than a blessing for this woman. A pregnancy would put her at risk of losing the one provider of material resources that she currently has: the man she is sleeping with. Anyone reading John’s gospel throughout the centuries since he wrote it would conclude that this woman was either barren or aborting fetuses in order to keep the man she currently has.
Jesus does not condemn her for ANY of that. He does not berate her for being infertile as many Jewish people did to one another in the Old Testament (see Hannah in 1 Samuel 1). She does not beg Jesus to perform a miracle on her barrenness so that she can conceive a pregnancy. She does not ask the Messiah to bring her a ‘good’ husband. Nor does Jesus accuse her of adultery or fornication for sleeping with a man outside of wedlock.
He simply states the reality of her existence more to convince her that He is the Messiah than to judge her for anything that she has done.
Finally, here is a woman who would have been highly motivated to have sex and abort fetuses just to survive in her world and we have the Messiah who can see everything that this woman has ever done and Jesus … does not utter a word about abortion.
I’ve saved this story as the last one in my ‘How Jesus Treats Women’ series because if there were EVER a perfect set-up for God or His Son to speak about aborting fetuses,
THIS would be the moment!
and …
* crickets *
There is nothing said on the topic.
This is where I will end for today. I’ll pick this up again in part 4c next week.
Please remember: God knows everything you’ve ever done and …
He stops to have a conversation with you anyway.
I love it. "He stops to have a conversation with you anyway."
🤗