We are observing the first Sunday of Lent today, having observed Shrove Tuesday on Tuesday and Ash Wednesday on Wednesday. Like every Lent, our language and customs point us towards our sinfulness, brokenness and weakness – both individually and corporately. This also happens to be the Sunday when Sandy from Koolkuna is joining us to remind us of the important work they do for women experiencing violence. By coincidence, perhaps, this is the end of a week in which Brittany Higgins, who worked in Parliament House, exposed her experience of violence and abuse at the hands of a male colleague. We have seen the political and systemic response, and it has been clearly lacking.
On the first Sunday of Lent, we always read an account of Jesus’ temptation or testing in the wilderness. This year, it is Mark’s very short version of the story, where there are no stones to turn into bread, or trips to the pinnacle of the temple that we might remember from Matthew’s and Luke’s version.
Throughout Lent this year, Year B, the scripture readings from the Hebrew scriptures are all built around a theme. They are all about the covenants between God and the chosen people. So this week we hear about Noah, then next week Abraham, then the ten commandments, then Moses with a snake on a stick, then Jeremiah’s prophecy about the new covenant.
I’ll be exploring some of these covenant themes in the next few weeks. But today, there is one thing in particular about the scripture reading from Genesis that I think merits some attention.
Today’s scripture is the end of the Noah’s ark story. It is, of course, one of many ancient flood myths, and it’s not science or journalism, it’s a formational narrative to help understand deep truths about the human and divine experience. You know the basics of the story, I imagine: God said to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody floody, and so Noah builds an arky arky, and it goes floaty floaty until it lands on Mt Ararat, and finally Noah builds an altar on dry land and burns animals on it, and God apparently finds the odour very pleasing.
God blesses Noah and his sons, and establishes a covenant with Noah and his sons. His son’s names are Shem, Ham and Japheth, and after today’s episode there is a bizarre little story about how Ham sees his Father in the nude, and how the other two sons don’t, because they walk backwards with a cloak to cover him. Honestly, Freud quite rightly has a field day with this stuff.
But the thing that really stands out to me today, of all days, is that we meet Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and we learn their names, and we learn about God blessing them and making a covenant, but their four wives are marginalised in the story, despite being an intrinsic part of it.
Later history tried to remedy this error in the text by coming up with names and stories for these women. Depending on where you look, Noah’s wife is named Emzara, Naamah, Amzurah, Percoba, Nuraita, or Nurea. According to the Sybilline oracles, the author of the oracles is Sambethe, who was married to one of Noah’s sons, lived a fantastically long life then moved to Greece and started writing the oracles. These are nice ways to recognise and honour these women in the myth, but they can’t replace the fact that the text treats them like an afterthought, prioritising the men, their narratives and their lineage.
The flood narrative is just one of hundreds of biblical narratives which reflect a patriarchal culture. And the Hebrew and Greek scriptures are just one of set of an infinite number of texts that reflect a patriarchal worldview in the ancient and modern worlds. Whenever we read one of these texts – which we do with unceasing regularity - we have to ask ourselves: do the scriptures reflect a patriarchal culture, or do they reflect a patriarchal God?
This week the guests for the annual Diocese of Perth Clergy School were announced. One of them is a person who appears regularly on The Drum as a social and religious commentator, and who is known to support a doctrine usually called ‘male headship’, that is, that men are the natural, God-ordained leaders of families, and thus of churches. A woman might be allowed, on occasion, to preach a sermon, but only under a man’s ultimate authority. Delightful stuff. To understand his perspective, I listened to a podcast of this (very polite) man in dialogue with a woman with a different view (or, one might say, the correct view). What stood out for me, and was very difficult to dispute, was the claim that when you read the scriptures as a whole, the picture that emerges is one in which men have a particular role of authority and headship, and women have a different but still important role in families, communities and ultimately churches.
Of course that’s the picture that emerges from the scriptures! It’s the same picture that emerges from reading any of the texts of Classical Antiquity, whether the Illiad or the Upanishads or The Art of War or the Gallic Wars – they are all patriarchal texts. Because the world then was a patriarchal place. Of course, it still is.
But while the scriptures are our foundational story, the story does not end with the scriptures. We believe that the Holy Spirit continues to teach and shape the church, and that the Spirit has taught us to break down systems of hierarchy and domination, to break down barriers of sex and gender, race and culture, wealth and status. The world of male headship and dominance in which the bible is set, is not the only version of the world, and certainly not the best version of the world.
It is incumbent upon us, as individual Christians and as the church, to work for a just and egalitarian world, in which women are safe and empowered. Not because of the feminist movement, despite the enormous good that feminism has done for the world, but because God calls us to that work. Men writing two and a half millennia ago imported their patriarchal and frankly misogynist perspectives into the biblical story, with Noah and his sons blessed and prioritised over their nameless, but we can, and we must, see through their distortion to a the truth of our God of radical equality.
The Lord be with you