There Is Neither Male nor Female in Christ Jesus

   Well, you can bet the Vatican will throw a hissy fit over this one.
   On Monday, four roman catholic women were ordained as priests and five as deacons by three female bishops who were unofficially ordained in 2003. Two of those bishops have been excommunicated by the Vatican. The women - seven Americans, one Canadian, and one German - were joined by more than 250 supporters.
   The ceremony took place on the the boat, the Thousand Islander III, which was sailed out into the St. Lawrence River, to the international waters between the States and Canada, an area specially chosen because no diocese has jurisdiction there and so no-one could interfere. Although there has been no official response from the vatican yet, you just know there will be more excommunications declared by the backward, Dark Ages institution that is the roman catholic church.
   As I was saying in my post of yesterday, the bible was written by ordinary humans, often decades or even centuries after the events various passages sought to detail. The writing was done through the filter of cultural stereotypes and prejudices, likely with no understanding of the bias the cultural belief systems would superimpose on any story being reported. Therefore, to go to the bible as a source of authority for the banning of women from ordination is to err.
   I had a professor in the U of T who used to lecture at us about "apostolic tradition" as the justification for practices currently employed. Humbug. To look there is to make the same mistake, or even worse. The traditions of the earliest church communities have come to us through the same filters as the scripture have. Our consciousness of them consists of "snapshots" taken through lenses scratched and marred by the cultural context of their time and day. Anyway, why should historical practise be recognized as justification for something only when it suits the purpose of those thundering it from the pulpit to congregations threatening to escape their spiritual stranglehold? If the church is really big on following supposed apostolic tradition, then the next time Benny gets sick, let the vatican doctors dig up all the old medical texts they can find, (preferably ones written at least two thousand years ago), and follow them to the letter in their doctoring of the pontiff. If he knocks off for want of treatment that modern medicine could have given him, we can all interpret it as a sign that his death was part of god's plan.
   To attempt to base arguments in favour of banning women from the clergy on the scriptures is actually to wilfully ignore what is written there about the actions of the gentle Jesus that they claim to follow. Jesus went out of his way to include women in his ministry, in ways that set him dangerously apart from the accepted norms of his day. He flouted social and cultural conventions at every turn in his relating to women. He did so in defiance of those who viewed his every action as mounting evidence that he should be killed. He did so with a dignity that he extended to the women around him, at a time when a woman was no more than a chattel. How can today's church leaders do any less and still claim to be his followers?
   Understand a little about the cultural milieu in which the women of Jesus' day existed. One first-century rabbi, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, wrote: "Rather should the words of the Torah be burned than entrusted to a woman." Jesus directly flouted this injunction, as reported by Luke in the story of Martha and Mary. Martha complains that her sister is not helping with the woman's chores while she is sitting at the feet of Jesus. She is seated there listening to him teach. His response was to say that she had "chosen the better part". He did not forbear to begin his intellectual discussion with the men while she was there, nor did he send her away just because someone complained. If Jesus set the example of instructing women in the scriptures, why do today's prelates presume to do otherwise?
   In Mark 15 and Luke 8, mention is made of the women who travelled with Jesus. Shall we assume they were disciples? It seems to me a better assumption to make than to assume they were whores and camp followers. If they were the latter, would Jesus have turned a blind eye to the activities of his male followers and/or even partook himself? No, those women must have been people he treated with dignity, including them in every aspect of his travels. If he had female disciples, then what happens to the use of "apostolic tradition" as a justification for the exclusion of women from the clergy?
   Other rabbinic sayings state that "Even the most virtuous of women is a witch." , and "When a boy comes into the world, peace comes into the world: when a girl comes, nothing comes." In the daily prayers to be recited by the Jewish men, there was one of thanksgiving in which the man would thank his creator for not making him a gentile, a woman, or an ignorant man. A woman who lived at the time of Jesus lived her life out as the property of some man, nothing more than a chattel. A woman could not even bear witness in a court of law. Her word counted as nothing, and there was a belief at the time that if there was no other man available to give witness, it would be better to call on the 'village idiot' than to call on a woman. Women were little more than sex objects and house-cleaning possessions necessary to propogate the species. Jesus would have known all of this and yet, when he resurrected on Easter, when the central mystery of his divinity played itself out, whom did he appear to first and call to give witness, other than a woman? This must have been by divine intent, part of the Almighty's plan to show the way to his followers. Look in Matthew 28, John 20, and Mark 16 to see the story of Jesus appearing first to a woman. Because of the strictures of the time against a woman bearing witness to anything other than a meal being ready for the men to eat, the apostles refused to believe and had to check it out for themselves.
   The one time that Jesus is recorded in the Gospels as openly declaring himself to be the saviour is when he spoke to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life." The first time he publicly revealed himself to be the messiah, he was talking in public (oh, the horror) to a Samaritan woman. The Jews and Samaritans hated each other and would not use the same cup for drinking from at a well, yet Jesus asks the woman to give him a drink and seems to care not about it coming to his lips from "unclean hands". In fact, he chooses her to be the first one to whom he reveals his messianic mission. She says to him, (John 4), "I know that the messiah will come" and he responds with, "I am he, I who am talking with you."
   How much more plainly do the pope and his cronies need it to be spelled out? Jesus himself said to his followers, "One man plants, another man reaps." Jesus was going directly against the accepted practice of the time to plant the seeds of female inclusion in a life of equality, to show everyone who followed that women should be included in absolutely everything, including the clergy. Leonard Swidler, in his essay "Jesus Was A Feminist" says the failure of the male half of the church to see the message being given by Jesus is "an overwhelming tribute to man's intellectual myopia". You can not phrase it any more succinctly than that.