Jesus was a heretic in how he treated women. He was con­sid­ered hereti­cal for other things too — like claim­ing to be the Son of God — but I choose Jesus as my HERetic of the Week because of his counter-​​religious engage­ment with women in the tem­ple and women in the culture.

The church needs to treat women like Jesus did. Imag­ine the out­come if women through­out Chris­ten­dom began to live in the free­dom of who God made us to be?

My fave story of Jesus behav­ing like a heretic is the story of the woman who busted in on the party at Simon the Pharisee’s house.  A name­less woman, described only as one who had lived a sin­ful life, comes unin­vited and falls at Jesus’ feet. She cleans his feet with per­fume and tears, wip­ing them away with her hair (so her hair was down, which I believe was con­sid­ered unbe­com­ing a lady in that culture).

Simon of course judges Jesus in the scene for allow­ing this woman to touch him which was scan­dalous on sev­eral lev­els. Her rep­u­ta­tion was one issue, but so was her gen­der. It was improper for a holy man like a rabbi to have any kind of phys­i­cal con­tact with a woman, espe­cially in pub­lic. Jesus broke both cul­tural and reli­gious pro­pri­ety in one fell swoop. (This story can be found in Luke 7:36 – 50)

Another hereti­cal moment recorded about the life of Jesus was how he han­dled the Martha/​Mary con­flict.  After the scrip­ture below begins an excerpt from my book, Unla­dy­like. 

Now as they were trav­el­ing along, He entered a vil­lage; and a woman named Martha wel­comed Him into her home. She had a sis­ter called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, lis­ten­ing to His word. But Martha was dis­tracted with all her prepa­ra­tions; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sis­ter has left me to do all the serv­ing alone? Then tell her to help me.” But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are wor­ried and both­ered about so many things; but only one thing is nec­es­sary, for Mary has cho­sen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:38 – 42)

For much of my Chris­t­ian life, I sup­posed that Jesus affirmed Mary because of her sub­mis­sive pos­ture at his feet. I can­not count the times I’ve heard ser­mons on this story teach­ing about wor­ship and devo­tion, about how Mary’s good part was in being a sub­mis­sive fol­lower. But it is much more than that.

David Hamil­ton explains that the phrase, “seated at his feet,” was a com­mon expres­sion used “to show the for­mal men­tor­ing rela­tion­ship between a rabbi and his disciple.”124 Mary broke rank with her cul­ture by stay­ing with the men, by putting her­self in a place of learn­ing at the feet of Jesus, when women at that time were clearly meant to remain detached from the world of men and learn­ing. She had no author­ity in her reli­gious con­text or cul­tural con­text to be a rab­bini­cal stu­dent of Jesus.

Martha defended the tra­di­tional role that women were meant to occupy. She appeals to Jesus to com­pel Mary to remem­ber her place in serv­ing rather than learn­ing. But Jesus won’t hear of it. He affirms Mary’s choice to learn with and among men. Jesus hon­ored her per­son­hood as he did all women he encoun­tered. Jesus lacked the sex­ist atti­tude that pre­vailed against women.

Dorothy Say­ers writes this:

Per­haps it is no won­der that the women were first at the Cra­dle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man — there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never at them, never flat­tered or coxed or patron­ized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as, “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked with­out queru­lous­ness (com­plain­ing) and praised with­out con­de­scen­sion; who took their ques­tions and argu­ments seri­ously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be fem­i­nine or jeered at them for being female who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dig­nity to defend; who took them as he found them and was com­pletely unselfconscious.

There is no act, no ser­mon, no para­ble in the whole Gospel that bor­rows its pun­gency from female per­ver­sity; nobody could pos­si­bly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was any­thing “funny” about woman’s nature.

(end of excerpt)
Say it Dorothy!!  Love how she frames this and makes her point that Jesus treated women like human beings. Not as the sec­ond gender.

Jesus was a heretic. He spoke openly with women, invited women into friend­ship, he healed them and told sto­ries packed with spir­i­tual wis­dom that included metaphors com­mon in a woman’s world  (such as the yeast in the bread para­ble).  Jesus defied cul­tural and reli­gious social codes, drenched in patri­ar­chal injus­tice, to ele­vate women to human status.

We for­get that Jesus caused all kinds of trou­ble, agi­tat­ing the Jew­ish doc­trine police with his unortho­dox approach among females. Surely this was evi­dence enough to prove that he was a quack, for how could a holy man do such unholy things as speak with women and treat them as if they were men?

I’ve said it before, I ‘ll say it again : the way churches today treat women does not match how Jesus treated women.

If Christ were here today I like to imag­ine him caus­ing a ruckus by for­feit­ing his week on the preach­ing sched­ule to have a woman preach instead. Or by ask­ing a woman instead of her hus­band her thoughts on a pas­sage of scrip­ture. I’m cer­tain that if Jesus walked among us that he would once again be labeled a heretic for his defi­ance of reli­gious con­for­mity. He was not as polite as the blue-​​eyed Jesus pic­tures would sup­pose him to be.

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What kind of heresy do you sup­pose Jesus would get in trou­ble with were he walk­ing among us today?