Women and Jesus

At the beginning of chapter eight, Luke describes a “Good News” tour taken by Jesus and His followers. It is in this description that you can find the veracity of the bible. If this account was written by a person who was trying to make Jesus politically correct or in some way was trying to “clean” up the storyline of Christ, they would have done it here.

Luke says that Jesus brought with Him, on this trip, the twelve apostles and some women that He had healed and had cast out evil spirits from. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod’s business manager and a group of other women who used their own resources to support the ministry of Jesus.

It is with this passage that idiots like the guy who wrote “The Da Vinci Code” seem to want to bring Jesus down to a human level and fantasize that He was fooling around with these women or married to one of them and had children by her. When this is done, it challenges the written word of God and undermines the ministry of Jesus, who according to that word and that ministry, was a sinless human being and the perfect sacrifice for the sins of man. If you can get people to be sidetracked to believe that Jesus was involved in little sins or shenanigans (after all, everybody does them), then you can launch a discussion that He was a good guy who fooled around just like every other guy, and not God who became man. Once you manufacture a crack in the foundational belief that Jesus Christ was and is, God, who became man and lived a sinless perfect life and at the end of that human life was murdered on a cross for our sins, we start to lose the essence of God’s plan for our salvation.

There is a lot at stake here. Movie directors and writers may have no idea the role that they play in the spiritual war that, according to God’s word, goes on around us. When politicians and public figures twist bible verses to prove their worldly points on sinful behavior, they are unwittingly or consciously aiding evil in the aforementioned war for the spiritual well being of mankind.

It is believed by some biblical historians that Joanna was the wife of a man named Chuza who was the steward of Herod and it is also believed that he was the officer with the dying son in Capernaum. (John 4:46) It is probably as a result of this event that Chuza allowed his wife to travel with Jesus as this action was highly unusual from a societal standpoint.

The roll that the women like Joanna played was probably that of an organizer, in charge of meals and expenses, much of which they paid out of their own pocket. With this thought in mind, the antiseptic view of who Jesus was, is challenged. If you are traveling with a large group of dedicated friends, you are going to meet your obligations and do your collective job and you are going to have down time together. In those periods of relaxation, around the camp fire, these friends probably gave each other a bad time, pulled a few jokes on each other, told stories and planned the next day activities over a meal. It is likely that they all helped clean up the campsite, hit the sack and got up the next day starting the whole routine over again. I bring this up because we sometimes have such an austere view of our Redeemer as He lived His life among people. He certainly prayed a lot by himself and with His friends, He was certainly pious and respectful in worship but a great deal of this time was spent being with those that He enjoyed being with, in friendship.

In regards to Chuza, who was a man of substance and position who managed the wealth of the royal court and household, to allow his wife to travel the countryside with Jesus was really something worth mentioning. The culture of that time not only discouraged this type of action but undoubtably put this man and his family at risk, at the very least from a social and societal standpoint. He worked for the man who’s father (Herod the Great) attempted to have Christ killed as an infant and he himself (the son, Herod Antipas) lived to see the deaths of both Jesus and John the Baptist. Chuza risked much to support Jesus in His ministry.

Women were legally held just slightly higher than farm animals during this period of time and yet they played a pivotal role in the ministry of Jesus. In the case of Joanna, she not only supported the ministry of Jesus with time and money, she was with Mary Magdalene and Mary (the mother of James) when they discovered the empty tomb on the morning of Christ’s resurrection.

In the early days of Christianity women were allowed more freedom and played these important roles in Christ’s ministry because they were allowed to and because they were needed. Later on in the second century when the church became a more formal institution, women were limited in their leadership rolls and if a Christian group advocated female leadership they were regarded as heretics. It is ironic that the “church” seems to have constantly made changes to the original message of Jesus Christ so as to accommodate its current sociological and societal beliefs.

In the Jewish culture women were not allowed to testify in court trials, Jesus empowered them to testify on His behalf. Women were also given limitations concerning their going out in public and talking to strangers. In their roles within the ministry of Jesus they were very involved in going out to meet strangers and traveling to distant places to share the “Good News”. Lastly, Jewish law placed women under the direct authority of men and were largely confined to the homes of their fathers and husbands. If Luke wanted to clean up his written accounts and edit them so as to appeal to his current audience, he would have been wise to keep the fact that the women in the ministry of Jesus played important leadership roles in that ministry.