Simon's mother-in-law
Another (very) draft extract from my book on Mark...
Simon's mother-in-law
There is a movement from the centre of the synagogue to the home, from the holy place to the common place.1 Simon's mother-in-law is placed at the centre of Jesus' first acts of ministry,2 with the events in the synagogue on one side, and the later gathering of the city on the other. A man has been healed, and now it will be so for a woman. This pairing is repeated in Chapter 5 (the demoniac, and the bleeding woman and the girl) and reversed in Chapter 8 with the Syrophoenician woman and her daughter, and the deaf man. (In Chapter 6 a man and a woman and her daughter are consumed by the violence of empire.) In each healing, a person is healed through restoration to the community.
Women are neither invisible in Mark, nor relegated to being second class, yet the text is also of its time. Despite the word serve, derived from diakoneō, which is used of the deacons in Acts 6,
she is healed to do what women stereotypically did: look after the men. It is spinning a yarn to make too much out of the word, ‘serve’, here, as if she is the first deacon. We can espouse such values without fiddling the text.3
Indeed, in Acts 6, the first deacons are all men, and they are chosen so the twelve don't have to wait on table (diakonein). (Acts 6:1-7)
Despite this, Loader notes, with many others, that in Mark 15:40-41 that a group of women from Galilee followed Jesus and they were there at the end when the men fled. His unstated point is that those women who were there, were described as following Jesus and diēkonoun autō (providing for him. NRSV) It is the same word (diēkonei) as the word used of Simon's mother-in-law when she provided for him and his disciples, not as a deacon, but as a valued person. Mark, without the help of our feminism holds women in a greater esteem than Jesus' male followers. Not only are they there at the end, but they are the ones given the news of his resurrection.
Taboos
We live in a world riddled with misogyny which is often expressed with physical and sexual violence. As such, we have nothing to say about misogyny to Judaism. If we make Jesus and Mark into exemplary CE21 feminists, we not only do violence to the text. We will inevitably exaggerate the misogyny and violence of life in Jesus' society, and make a scapegoat of Jewish people by ignoring our own misogyny. Misogyny this is a human problem, not a Jewish problem. We cannot "invent a bad Judaism...and then explain how Jesus abrogates this bad system."4 Amy Jill Levine quotes Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's critique of much exegesis which,
taking select … material5 out of context for apologetic purposes "often justifies Christian at the cost of Jewish tradition, has engendered anti-Jewish attitudes and interpretations, although its apologetic intent is to reclaim the Bible as a positive support for wo/men’s emancipation."6
Rather than manufacture taboos about the touching of women, we would do better to note Jesus' respect for women which is shown in his healing of them, and for Mark's respect for the humanity of women. After all, he tells us that Jesus raised her up. The word is ēgeiren, related to the ēgerthē / he has been raised of Jesus in Mark 16. She is a sign of our promised future.
Andrea Prior (Nov 2024)
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For the details of the references below, see A Bibliography for Mark.
1 Corrigan, "Everywhere All at Once.'
2 Although it is tempting to say with Moloney (See 1:29-32) that she is at the centre of the day, this cannot quite be Mark's imagery. The healings after sunset are in the next day. The day begins at dusk.
3 Loader, "Year B, Epiphany 5
4 Levine, Misunderstood Jew, pp176
5 Schüssler Fiorenza in this case was taking of Pauline material, but the same is true of our interpretation of the Gospels.
6 Levine, Misunderstood Jew, pp178
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