Vanderbilt’s Lectionary Page for 17 January 2010
Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36:5-10
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11
I’ve read some twentieth-century feminist Biblical scholarship, and some of it is quite helpful to keep me mindful of my own assumptions and sometimes my own ideology when I read the Bible. I don’t always come away from such commentaries and monographs convinced, but I always come back to the text of the Bible more mindful. I remember that reading especially when I’m in the prophets, those masters of metaphor, and I remember as I read them that I should not rest too easily in my own ability to “read past” the gendered-violence issues that are there, the threats against parabolic wives and the destruction of apocalyptic whores. My practiced ignorance makes the texts inspiring rather than troubling in the quiet of my study, yet I remain aware of the trouble, and I fear that I usually nod to and then walk past the hard questions when such passages demand answers.
The nice thing about that position, of course, is that it allows me to feel superior when people of all sorts (rightly) object to it. When the feminists tell me that I’m not taking such questions seriously enough, I can congratulate myself because no “ideology” has me pinned down. And when the Orthodox converts (it’s always the Orthodox converts–the evangelicals know by this point that I’m incorrigible) object to my bringing “modern” or “liberal” ethical questions to bear on the prophets’ allegories, I can congratulate myself for rising above the pervasive violence of past eras. I really can’t lose.
If you couldn’t tell I was joking at my own expense just now, you must be a new reader.
At any rate, all of the faithless wives, the public humiliation of those wives, the gendering of Israel as a wife who runs off looking for strange men with whom to couple, won’t leave me alone when I get to Jesus’ strange encounter with his mother and the invisible married couple in Cana. (If you don’t think they’re invisible, ask yourself how old they are. Ask who their parents were. Ask whether either of them had a good or a bad reputation in town. Can’t see them, can you?) On one hand I’ve heard enough people talk about this passage (it often gets brief mention in wedding homilies) that I’m always tempted to domesticate the encounter, to imagine the mother of Jesus as I would my college roommate’s mother, volunteering Slim to lift something heavy when Slim isn’t dressed for lifting. (I just made that scenario up–other than at his own wedding and at mine, I can’t remember seeing Slim dressed up.) “What a character that Mother-of-God is!” I tell myself, and I imagine the people in the room getting a good chuckle out of the moment, and I can walk away without much more thought. But then I think about the fact that, although I lack the rigorous research that I probably should do if I ever preach this text, I know that relations between men and women in the Semitic provinces of the Roman Empire were such that this scene must have been very tense, perhaps to the point of discomfort, that perhaps there might have been people in the audience wondering whether this latter-day prophet would get Gomer all over her. (If that reference slid past you, go read Hosea.) And when I think about just how different their reactions might have been from my own, too often I give up trying to imagine what this scene would have meant in the historical moment that Our Lord chose as the moment to become Incarnate.
And that, in microcosm, is one of my own grand difficulties dealing with the Bible all over but especially the gospels: I’m always warring with contrary tendencies, one to make the stories too familiar and to lose their ethical and existential edge, and the other to hold them at such a distance because I fear their strangeness that they can’t speak to me. Such a tension does not paralyze me (usually), but it does challenge me to work as hard as I can on the scholarly end of interpreting such things, especially when I teach those texts, and it reminds me that I always stand to learn something when somebody else interprets from faithfulness for my faithfulness. In the meantime, I think I’d do well to point to the text both in terms of ethical aspirations for how we treat women and give the text some credit for having something other than that violence as its main purpose, perhaps allowing some difference without becoming entirely relativistic about the difference. Again, I know that shields me from the valid criticisms of those who (rightly) could criticize, but sometimes I just prefer to live in that intellectual superiority.
So feminists and Orthodox converts, go ahead. Take your shots. I have it coming. 
