Readings: Luke 24:1-12 and 1 Timothy 2:8-15.

Saint Paul; a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, with a heart on fire for the love of God.

His life as Saul and subsequent transformation is a lesson to us, that people can hold so fast to a belief that they will persecute and participate in murder, believing themselves righteous, only to find out that actually they’d got it wrong. That somehow his thinking as Saul had become rigid and narrow with no openness to the ‘new thing’ that the prophet Isaiah had told them to be watchful for.

Saul could easily have replaced one of the Pharisees investigating the healing of the man born blind, to who Jesus said ‘If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. (John 9:41).

But in his conversion, Saul’s spiritual blindness was healed, and his eyes opened to newness. (Acts 9:18). As Paul, the continuity of the Hebrew Scriptures and the gospel message were now woven together in his thoughts, his seeing and in his teaching.

First Timothy is one of St Pauls pastoral letters that helped focus on leadership issues arising in the developing Christian churches, this one in Ephesus. The short section we’ve heard today is the most contentious part. Is St Paul prohibiting women from leadership and teaching in the Church? Or is he simply referring to these women in this particular church?

St Paul takes us back to the nature sin at the fall and the principle of difference.

What appears good and beautiful to the eyes is a desire to objectify and depersonalise the true depths of beauty hidden inside people, and making foolish the seeking of things not seen. To adorn ourselves outwardly is to appeal to these superficial and fleeting desires, not to the treasures of heaven that endure eternally and are found in wisdom and love. So, the women in this Church who have become false teachers and therefore false witnesses to the gospel message – these are the women who should not be leaders in the Church. The Church is not to belong to the daughters of Eve, but to those who will be transformed by the saving power of Christ crucified, and adopted into a new family with a new mother and new father.

Here we have another interesting point about biblical ideas of family that I seem to have been talking a lot about lately. That is the development of the whole person, Jesus talks about a son being like his father and a daughter like her mother, and a daughter-in-law would align herself with a mother-in-law. Through these associations, which were familial, social, and cultural – for all aspects are interconnected – character traits, traditions and teachings by nature, nurture, and the will, would be passed on from generation to generation. Jesus said He came to bring a sword (Matthew 10:34) – a sword that breaks the passing on of our sin from one generation to the next, we break the chain by becoming more like Him, who is the head of the new family.

So, what does Jesus teach us about women as ministers of the good news? Women were the first to receive messages of ‘new life’ – beginning with Mary, who received by the message of an angel that she would, by consent, give birth to Jesus. At the resurrection, women are the first to get the news and the first to pass on the news to men who did not believe them – for though the women prompted by the angels remembered the words of Jesus, to the disciples it seemed to them like nonsense. And St Peter, even after seeing the empty tomb for himself, still wondered what had happened.

God has no problem in giving messages to women, Jesus has no problem speaking to women or asking them to tell the disciples what to do next. But clearly, it is a man’s problem that he does not believe or he doubts the message through a woman.

So, does this make Paul wrong in not pointing this out? I say not. Clearly God is greater than His creation, therefore God is greater than any social or cultural prejudices established in the mind of humans – yet He is not unaware of our weaknesses and as our eternal self is greater than our flesh which is passing away, so then it is acceptable that we do not allow stumbling blocks to prevent the word of God reaching out in order to save. Leviticus 19:14 says ‘do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD.’ If anyone is deaf or blind to the truth of God, do not prevent them coming to Jesus. The Pharisees were blind guides, and ‘shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces’. They neither entered themselves nor allowed ‘those who would enter to go in,’ (Matthew 23:13).

For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer. (1 Timothy 4:4-5).

St Paul knows this. He does not put a stumbling block in front of women, but seeks to bring them into Christ’s likeness. The desert fathers and mothers would approve of quietness. Though they lived an ascetic life, the premise of these communities was not to leave their neighbour but to find them. In Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony he said ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ’.

From the sermon on the mount, the beatitudes are universal teachings for both men and women, lifting up the lowly, the meek, and the pure in heart to a closeness to God who is merciful and tender. St Paul has taken this community back to its foundations to restore an order which will foster new growth and development. This is a community reprimanded by the love of God like a parent reprimands a child. A community in its infancy, still wrestling with worldliness and what it means to be holy, still being refashioned for rebirth into newness and transformation. Other communities that St Paul worked alongside were not the same and had outstanding female helpers in the service of Christ (Romans 16:1-5). On this point Catholic scholar and author, Dr Phyllis Zagano, says “Nobody argues about the historical fact of women deacons – they existed in the early Church.”

Genesis 2:21-22, reminds us that men and women are made of the same substance, created by the same hands. So if a woman can hear the word of God and can spread the word of God to others, is she permitted to touch the word of God during the process of transubstantiation? Someone told me the early church divided the ministry of men and women where the touching of a woman by a man was not culturally acceptable or appropriate. But let us consider the healing of the woman with the issue of blood. Did her status under the law as ceremonially unclean prevent her from being healed, or for power to have gone from the garment of the Lord into her body? No, and furthermore, if His tunic not made of flesh was made Holy by contact, why would a man or woman made of the same substance not be equally holy through the ministering of the most holy Eucharist? Jesus, by saying ‘your faith has healed you’ (Matthew 9:22), has accepted a person into the kingdom that was culturally unacceptable.

While modern humans are busy rebuilding the tower of Babel, building a kind of equality that erases diversity, there remains a principle of difference, made visible by the law that is applicable to a temporal order, and law of nature. Diversity has a purpose, and interdependence gives it meaning, that is the relationship of one to the another. We are not all outwardly the same, and each person has a unique purpose to realise on the journey of life, not for their own good – we were created to be relational, not for what we do for ourselves, but others – not to merely exist as objects or as individuals, but as persons – human, created and loved. Life is what we have for the other, it is a movement away from the subjective to a truth which is found at the point where we truly meet and know our neighbour and God.
Personal ‘action’ is the meeting point between what is internal in us and the external world, therefore speech is clearly an action, a place of being known, or misunderstood. Do we meet others to seek them or validate ourselves?

The beliefs that become illusions about our neighbours, the prejudices, are the gaps we fill in for ourselves, the assumptions we make and have learned to make through experience because they bring a sense comfort in ‘certainty’ yet go beyond available data, therefore becoming what we think we know i.e., probable or potentially true, rather than what we actually know is true. These beliefs are an internal ‘gossip’ that become a reality which separates us from our neighbour.

When we ask for forgiveness of the sins committed in ‘thought, word and deed’ knowing that everything, we do is visible to God as it is not fully visible to ourselves or each other (1 Samuel 16:7). Then imagine that everything about us and who we become – our nature, nurture, choices – our personhood in its entirety – is written on our soul – life’s journey is then a process of ‘soul formation’ complete only when arriving at the gate of heaven, where all is revealed, being clearly seen and known. This means that all our thoughts, speaking and other bodily actions we perceive as done to others are actually done to ourselves.

The family is a place of soul formation. A place where in safety, we uncover the roots of our nature, and experience nurture alongside the developing sense of personhood with a free will. Our freedom, by reason steers the direction of our personhood through life, which is the journey of our soul until death. The body therefore is a sacred space, the family a sacred space – the community a collection of souls on their journey home – each an integral part of nature – with a body rooted in the dust of the earth, but an immortal soul that at its end soars like an eagle beyond its former bounds.

If soul formation is life journey, then what about the modern ethics of procreation? To my mind, any deliberate choice to create a life that will have no or very little knowledge of their biological relations or heritage, resulting in a high probability that the child will struggle with identity formation and sense of self – is not of God. I’m speaking of a deliberate choosing, let us separate this from the changes and chances of life that go beyond our control, circumstances that we could not foresee. The biblical definition of family is broad, and on the cross Jesus consecrates adoption. We ourselves are adopted into a new family by faith and belong by obedience to the will of God. Adoptees taken into care because of family trauma, make when they’re old enough their own decisions – knowing that adults removed them from an environment that wasn’t safe, some resolve to discover more about that birth family and others not. Lastly, let us be clear surrogacy is not a gift of God.

So much of the narrative around women today chops us up into little pieces, yet neither men nor women are fragments stuck together with glue. Language can reduce our bodies to atoms, does that mean we can identify ourselves to be like the stars in the sky? Clearly language enables us to express what a thing is so that we can relate to it and to each other. A woman has the potential and the actual ability to give birth to new life. Law exists for the common good, this should not mean that natural processes which produce infertile offspring are subject to judgement.

St Paul writes that a woman will be saved by her childbearing, so is this excluding salvation for the barren? I say not, for St Paul writes (Romans 3:31) ‘do we nullify the law by faith? No, rather we uphold it’. For the law was created to make visible what was invisible, and the purpose of that law was the love of God for humanity and for humanity to choose that love by faith. Therefore, love is the overarching principle of all things visible and invisible, and relationship is that place of love.

But the principle of difference does not uphold the reasoning that says; if this is your nature and you are this ‘kind’ of person, then you should desire or want this or that. This is stereotyping. It can be said that certain traits lead to certain characteristics, but what is, what exists, is not the same as filling in the gaps from our own ideas and experiences about what a, or any person desires.

Men and women are equally involved in the process of soul formation, and St Anselm for one, recognised that Jesus and the apostles were both mothers and fathers to us. In one of St Anselm’s prayers to St Paul he writes:

O St Paul, where is he that was called
The nurse of the faithful, caressing his sons?
Who is that affectionate mother who declares everywhere
That she is in labour for her sons?
Sweet nurse, sweet mother,
Who are the sons you are in labour with, and nurse,
But those whom by teaching the faith of Christ you bear and instruct?

To close, let us reflect upon the universal nature of the soul, and the wisdom of the beatitudes. In them may we remember that God is closest to us in our fragility and blesses those outcast and vulnerable. Let us remember the fruits of the spirit, including love, joy, patience, and gentleness that are available in God’s kingdom to all.

Amen