Strong Woman? Good Answer
This is a format I’ve used the past. We’ve already established that my head is a wild place; sometimes, I have two very different ideas that connect in my head, and I want to share those ideas and how they connect.
Thought 1
Some in the conservative right like to denigrate strong women. It makes it very hard to be a conservative woman who is strong.
How do they define strong? I can’t begin to tell you. Sometimes, it seems to do with education. Other times it has to do with choices and response to the consequences of choice. Still others seem to label a woman strong if she is able to participate in heated discussions or respond to ideas or criticisms cogently and logically (even if they try to label her emotional and illogical).
Thought 2
There is a story in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has been teaching and healing, but it’s quite tiring. So he’s trying to hide out in Tyre, a place where there are many non-Jewish people so the Jews were less likely to find him.
A woman who is not Jewish finds him and falls at his feet; most versions have her as a foreigner. Others say she is a Gentile from Syrian Phoenicia.
In this interchange, she is begging him to heal her daughter. The Gospel author believed that the daughter’s issue stemmed from a demon (and Jesus did agree). Let’s look at their discussion from Mark 7:27–29, New Living Translation:
Jesus told her, “First I should feed the children — my own family, the Jews. It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.”
She replied, “That’s true, Lord, but even the dogs under the table are allowed to eat the scraps from the children’s plates.”
“Good answer!”he said. “Now go home, for the demon has left your daughter.”
Synthesis
Jesus was always building up strong women. In this story, He praised the woman for her faith and intellect; then He healed her daughter without leaving the place where He was staying.
In other stories, He healed a woman of some kind of bleeding (probably related to her menstrual cycle). He resurrected a son from the dead so that the mother who was a widow wouldn’t be alone. He cited a woman of ill-repute for an act of faith in washing his feet with her tears and an expensive perfume (probably for a wedding that would never happen).
If Jesus, in the midst of a culture that clearly treated women as property and was worse for them than it is today, could build women up and cite them for strength and intellect and faith, should not Christians male and female be doing the same for each other?
Should we not be encouraging our daughters to learn, to think, to reason, to debate? Should we not be exploring the traditional roles and expanding them within reason?
Good answer.
