Happy Evil Woman Sunday, everybody!

It’s not an official feast of the church; just my name for this day in the lectionary, our cycle of Sunday scripture readings.

Every three years, we get Michal getting the ick about King David, and these two women getting John the Baptist summarily beheaded. Let’s look at both stories briefly, and try to understand what’s going on…  

We’ll start with Michal. Poor Michal! She loved David, once. She is the daughter of Saul, Israel’s first king. Saul gives Michal to David as a wife, to bind David to him. When Saul and David’s relationship breaks down, Michal tricks her father to help David escape.

With David gone, she’s given to another man in marriage, who actually loves her. There’s no hint that David ever cares about Michal beyond her usefulness to him as a sign of Saul’s favor. 

Next comes that long, grueling, tragic civil war between Saul and David that we read about together a couple of weeks ago. Later, with Saul gone, David demands his wife back – as a source of legitimacy for his new kingship. Michal’s new husband, Palti, follows her the whole journey, weeping as he walks. 

Today’s lesson is the last we hear of Michal in the Bible. Michal has been through a lot. David has several other wives by this time. I doubt that she feels that her standing as the daughter of one king and first wife of another is being rightly honored. And she looks out the window and sees David dancing.

Among the many things you can say about David, I think we are to understand that he really really loves God. And here he is fully caught up in ecstatic dance to honor God. This isn’t something he has to do. He’s just caught up in the moment and this is how his devotion and awe are pouring out of him. 

Let’s be clear, though: he is not dancing naked, but he is not wearing a lot of clothing. And Michal looks at him and suddenly it’s the last straw. Partly it’s the lack of modesty; partly I suspect he just looks ridiculous to her. Whatever feelings had lingered: Gone. 

Later, they exchange harsh words. And then they’re done. 

The text says that Michal bore no children from that day forward. I don’t think we’re meant to read that as a punishment from God. I think maybe Michal and David just never chose to be in the same room together again. She probably lived out her life confined to the residence for the king’s wives and concubines, bitter and bored. And I wonder if the Biblical text, which can sound judgmental, actually wants us to feel some pity for Michal. 

Then there are Herodias and Salome. That’s a hair-raising story to read out of the Gospel book on a Sunday morning!

John the Baptist was a prophet who proclaimed that God’s chosen One was coming – and then named Jesus as that One. John precedes Jesus in teaching and preaching; he also precedes Jesus in arrest and execution. That’s our story today. 

There’s some confusion of names, here. Mark calls both mother and daughter Herodias. People do get named after their parents, but a historian of the time, Josephus, says that Herodias had a daughter named Salome who was about the right age for this story. So tradition uses that name for the younger woman, here. 

Salome is probably just a teenager – old enough to be asked to dance for her father and his guests; young enough to ask her mom for advice and to do what her mom tells her. 

Herodias, the mother, is the one primarily responsible for John the Baptist’s death. Although Salome does add the macabre detail of asking for the head on a platter!… 

So who was Herodias? 

Well, she was the sister of two different Herods, and probably married two other Herods. One of whom – this one – was the son of yet another Herod, the Herod who was king when Jesus was born. Reading this family’s history makes your eyes cross, truly. 

The Herodians were the royal family in a fairly limited sense. Under Roman imperial rule the various Kings Herod were pretty limited in what they could do. So they spent their time on scheming and dissipation. 

Josephus, the historian, tells us that Herodias had divorced her previous husband to marry this particular Herod, and he had likewise divorced his first wife.

That’s why John the Baptist has been telling Herod that this situation is a violation of Jewish teachings about marital fidelity.

It seems possible that Herodias and Herod actually loved each other. However, let’s not get mushy: Herodians killed each other all the time. In this extended family, people often protected themselves – or made opportunities for themselves – by offing somebody. 

Herodias probably isn’t worried about another divorce. Rather, she has a reasonable fear that if John gets to Herod, she and her children may just… disappear. 

Herodias didn’t plot to have John killed; this isn’t why she sent Salome to all those dance lessons.

But this opportunity drops into her lap – an opportunity to neutralize a threat, and to get her royal husband to prove his commitment to her – and she seizes it. 

Despite the horror and tragedy here, I can find it in me to feel sorry for Herodias… and for Salome, for whom it may have all seemed like a joke until someone handed her that platter. 

Michal and Herodias have a lot in common.  They have that strange combination of privilege and vulnerability that comes with belonging to powerful men.  They will never go hungry, or lack nice clothes or a warm place to sleep. But that doesn’t make their lives easy. These are people with few choices or opportunities to move towards happiness or self-fulfillment. And that shows up in their lives as dark and difficult emotions and actions. We can, I think, feel some compassion for that. 

Having laid all that out: I’d like to turn to Ephesians, the New Testament letter – epistle – that is the source of our second reading today. It’s a very different text, but there is an intersection point here. Bear with me. 

This passage is kind of a prologue to the letter, beginning to lay out how this author sees life in Christ. And I love the sense of a theology of divine generosity here. 

The author says: We were chosen before the foundation of the world. What an amazing thought.  God’s grace has been freely bestowed upon us in the Beloved, meaning Jesus. Grace, redemption, and forgiveness are lavished upon us. We have been adopted and made heirs, to receive a gracious inheritance as part of God’s family. And so on. 

Reading this text gives me such a sense of just being showered with divine love and grace. It’s an understanding of God’s relationship with humanity through Jesus Christ that I find beautiful and hopeful.

We’ll hear other parts of this letter in the coming weeks. Much of it is lovely, and you may recognize bits that are used in Episcopal worship, like, “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us…”

But. There’s a part of Ephesians that does not show up in our lectionary or our liturgy – that Episcopalians generally don’t read in church. It’s in chapters 5 and 6, and it’s sometimes called the “household code.” 

Let me say a little, first, about who wrote Ephesians. The letter begins, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus…” But a lot of Biblical scholars think this letter was neither written by Paul, nor to the church in Ephesus. There’s nothing in the letter that seems to speak to a specific church community, so it may have been meant to be passed around many churches. 

Hints in the text suggest that it was written 20 or 30 years after Paul’s death – maybe by someone who was a follower of Paul and learned faith from him. 

However, Ephesians is Paul-ish, even if it’s probably not really the voice of the apostle Paul. The language is similar to Paul when he gets poetic, and it dwells on some of Paul’s core concerns: unity between Jews and Gentiles, getting along with one another, staying focused on Jesus.

About 80% of critical Biblical scholars think that Ephesians was not written by Paul. So it’s not totally clear-cut. Thoughtful readers can disagree on this one. 

But I tend to think this is not Paul. And the household code is a big part of why. 

In the letters that we know are really Paul’s voice, we see hints of someone with pretty egalitarian views – in line with Jesus’ own teaching and actions. I talked a few weeks ago about how “Neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female,” is kind of a core refrain for Paul. And he collaborated with and praised female church leaders, and advocated for the freedom of a formerly enslaved man. 

But the household code in Ephesians offers a different vision, of a fundamentally hierarchical society in which many people’s primary duty and virtue is obedience. First, the text speaks about wives: “A husband is the head of his wife like Christ is head of the church… So wives should submit to their husbands in everything, like the church submits to Christ.”

The text tries to soften this, urging a husband, in turn, to love his wife as Christ loves the church. But nevertheless this is a vision of “Christian” marriage that just sounds like standard marriage in any patriarchal society. What Susan B. Anthony, in the 1876 Declaration of the Rights of Women that we read last week, called “the dogma of the centuries: that woman was made for man.”

Likewise, the household code continues, children should obey their parents “in the Lord, because it is right” (6:1). And as for slaves, “obey your human masters with fear and trembling and with sincere devotion to Christ… Serve your owners enthusiastically, as though you were serving the Lord and not human beings.”  

As with marriage, the text tries to make this mutual: “Masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Stop threatening them, because you know that both you and your slaves have a Master in heaven.” 

There was a lot of ambient anxiety in Roman society about whether slaves were going to turn on their masters. Slave revolts were a constant concern. There was even an ancient Roman saying: “Every slave we own is an enemy we harbor.” 

For this author to baptize that anxiety by saying that Christian slaves should be obedient and enthusiastic!… does not sit well with me. Nor does the endorsement of the kind of rigid gender roles and limitations on the autonomy of women that distorted and blighted the lives of Michal and Herodias… and so many others, over the millennia. 

Fundamentally: Bidding wives, children, and slaves to be obedient to their rightful masters was not a Christian vision of society. 

It was just… society. 

A few months ago, our resident historian of the Roman Empire, Leonora Neville, told our confirmation class about how quickly the fresh ideas of Christianity were tamed and conformed to the standards of the surrounding culture – first-century Judea and the Roman Empire.

Over the decades, Christianity made itself palatable enough to ease persecution and eventually become the religion of Rome. 

If this text was indeed written a few decades after Paul’s death, it fits in to that trajectory nicely, as it brings Christian language to bear to justify and defend the cultural status quo. 

A status quo, mind you, that must have been under some threat! If somebody is writing about how Christian wives and slaves should be obedient and submissive, it’s probably because some Christian wives and slaves have started to say, Hey, if we’re all one in Christ Jesus, how come you get to make the rules?… 

I want to conclude by saying three things about reading Scripture – reading the Bible. First: It is necessary and important to read Scripture, to read the Bible, in conversation with itself. 

The Bible is not one coherent thing; it doesn’t have one perspective or tell one story. Imagine sitting down with Michal and Herodias and Paul and the author of Ephesians – and hey, maybe Susan B. Anthony too – for lively conversation about whether women’s primary duty in life is really obedience to men. This kind of work, exploring where texts connect or clash, is an important part of reading Scripture responsibility and thoughtfully. 

Second, it’s OK to pick favorites! Be responsible about how you do it; try not to pluck things fully out of context; try to pay attention to the big themes – there are some – and let that shape how you weigh particular passages. But every faith tradition and every faithful reader of Scripture has some kind of “canon within the canon” – meaning, there are parts of the Bible that are more important to us than others. We don’t weigh it all equally or read it all the same way. 

I do really love the first couple of chapters of Ephesians – those are some core texts for me – and: I feel totally comfortable setting aside the household code. These voices were human beings, just like us; they got some things right, by the grace of God; they got some things wrong, for all kinds of reasons. We are all mixed bags. You can pick your favorite parts of the Bible. 

Third, we don’t read Scripture alone. We read it in community; we read it in conversation with tradition and history and, hopefully, with people who read it with different eyes; we read it, thanks be to God, with the help of the Holy Spirit, who keeps opening our minds and hearts to deeper wisdom and new understandings of how God has been at work in humanity’s story and is at work in our stories, individual and together, today. 

 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Ephesians

https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/household code eph.pdf