[Let Her Preach] Women will not be subordinate in God’s kingdom (Matthew 22:23-33)
Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a work in progress about the biblical support for women in ministry.
In Matthew 22:23-33, Jesus was in the middle of Holy Week. Between the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday and the crucifixion on Good Friday, the conflict between him and the religious elite escalated rapidly. On Tuesday, the chief priests and scribes challenged his authority. When he sidestepped their question and then criticized them with a series of parables, they retreated to regroup while their political and spiritual rivals, the Pharisees, took a turn trying to trap him in his words. When that failed, the Sadducees returned for round two.
To set up their question, they told a story about a woman whose husband died before she was able to have children. Under Mosaic law, the dead husband’s brother or next of kin was supposed to marry the widow in a tradition called levirate marriage. As bizarre as this may seem to modern, Western sensibilities, the purpose was to provide for the widow’s financial needs and ensure the dead man’s legacy by raising children for him. In this case, however, the brother also died before the woman had children, and in fact, the process repeated itself until she was married and widowed seven times and still had no kids. The Sadducees then asked, “In the resurrection, then, whose wife will she be of the seven? For they all had married her?”
The story was almost laughable, but probably not for the reason we expect. The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. They accepted only the Pentateuch (i.e., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) as authoritative for doctrine, and since the doctrine of resurrection was not fully developed until later in the Old Testament, they rejected it entirely. Their intention, then, was to goad Jesus into answering the question and then, no matter how he answered, ridicule him as an uneducated carpenter from Nazareth or worse.
Otherwise, between diseases and the hazards of everyday life in the Ancient Near East, the scenario they presented was not entirely unrealistic. In Genesis 38, Judah’s daughter-in-law, Tamar, was widowed twice and then waited for Judah’s third son to reach an appropriate age to marry. When that time came and went, and Judah did not arrange for the marriage, she took matters into her own hands and became pregnant by her father-in-law. Jesus himself encountered in John 4 the Samaritan woman at the well, who was married five times and living with someone who was not her husband, and in fact, the Sadducees’ hypothetical may have been inspired by the apocryphal Tobit 3:7ff. There, we read of a woman named Sarah who “had been married to seven husbands, but the wicked demon Asmodeus had slain each of them before the marriage had been consummated” (New Catholic Bible). Suddenly, the situation was not so unreasonable.
More important than the plausibility of the situation, then, is the reason why this woman was compelled to marry seven times. While first-century Jewish women were technically allowed to receive inheritances, own property, and hold jobs, such things were not normal. Generally, women were subordinate to men socially, legally, and financially. As we saw with Deborah in Chapter 4, a woman’s identity was defined by her husband. The biblical stories of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah, among others, show that a woman’s worth was determined by whether she bore children. Rabbinical teachings afforded a woman no standing in court, and her protection under the law hinged on the men in her life. Moreover, a woman typically had no way to legitimately provide for herself, and a woman without a husband or son to care for her was often relegated to prostitution or something equally disreputable. Thus, levirate marriage was necessary in that culture.
When Jesus pronounced that people in the resurrection will “neither marry nor [be] given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30), though, he proclaimed that life and relationships in the resurrection will be fundamentally different from life and relationships in this world. Indeed, people will be “like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30), he said. His Jewish listeners understood angels to have “a corporeal but spiritual existence.” That is, they would have an immortal spiritual body, and as a result, they would have no use for sexual activity, or reproduction, or marriage.
This suggested that, while people in the resurrection will still recognize friends and family (i.e., earthly relationships will not be eliminated entirely), the resurrected woman will have no need for a husband. She will not need a husband to financially support her because God will provide everything she needs. She will not need a husband to enjoy legal standing or protection because justice will be perfect. She will not need a husband to have children because her value will not be determined by having kids. Moreover, she will not need a husband because she will have her own identity, and her name – not just her husband’s – will be written in the book of life. Put another way, the reasons why levirate marriage were necessary for first-century Jewish women will be irrelevant in the resurrection.
Suddenly, Jesus’ response was about far more than domestic arrangements. It was a declaration that, in the resurrection, women will no longer be subordinate in any way to men. When the kingdom of God is fully realized in the new heaven and new earth, she will be able to be and do anything and everything he can, and those who earnestly pray for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven will be committed to realizing this same situation in this life.