THOSE RESURRECTION WOMEN

Mary H. Schertz

Twenty years ago I was a brash young feminist riding the euphoria of being part of the first critical mass of women students at a denominational seminary. The very air we breathed was an intoxicating concoction of freedom and creativity.

During those years, I radically swept out such concepts as "servanthood," "mutual submission," the indefinable and ineffable Gelassenheit (meaning something along the lines of yieldedness) and even, in my most honest moments, the "cross"—at least as I had understood it growing up.

The last, I admit, gave me pause. If I swept notions of the cross out of my mind, was I still a Christian? Servanthood, mutual submission, and Gelassenheit were deconstructable. I was fairly sure these were concepts that applied differently to women than to men—and perhaps they did not really apply to women at all. At least not to women raised in the Anabaptist tradition—with its accompanying overdose of self-denial.

What we needed, again I was fairly sure, was an antidote of empowerment, self-actualization, and autonomy. So servanthood, submission of any kind, and Gelassenheit were out. And the cross? Well, maybe.

There was truth in who I was then and what I thought then. These years later, I do have my regrets—waste of the spirit though they may be. Certainly I would like to call back some actions and words. On the whole, however, what we—those other "angry" women and I—were about was true and necessary.

And part of my continuing pain is that much of that anger and clarity is still necessary. My young adult niece and her friends still talk about guys who cannot deal with smart women. My students at the same seminary where I once gave up servanthood still deal with many of the same issues. They still search for empowerment, for self-actualization, and for autonomy. They still question their own overdoses of self-denial and seek healthier, more productive self-concepts.

But, even as I acknowledge the ongoing need for the prophetic feminist witness, I have come to the point of wanting to embrace, once more, some of those "dangerous" notions I once so sweepingly rejected. Words and concepts such as servanthood, mutual submission, and even Gelassenheit have taken on new meanings—meanings centered in new understandings of the cross. The journey of these past 20 years, the journey that made me rethink some of my earlier judgments, has been one of relationship and of the spirit.

Real Relationships
Mess Up Ideology

I cannot adequately thank the feminists who have nurtured me and the feminisms that have become a vital part of my life. I cannot imagine, nor do I want to imagine, life without these women and these ideas.

But I would be less than honest if I pretended these friendships and studies have been painless. Ideologues and ideologies of any stripe often lack an ability to deal with people as whole, conflicted, and conflicting beings. In the end, I needed to be grounded in the tension between the ideals of feminism and something more traditional and encompassing—for me, that was Christian faith and the church, difficult as that was for many of my closest feminist friends to understand.

At the other end of the issue, there is little doubt that life would be a lot simpler if men really were the problem. Or even if patriarchy really were the problem. Unfortunately, the problem is more complex—our socialization as men and women, power and our human propensity to own it and use it against other people, privilege and our human difficulty in even acknowledging it let alone relinquishing it.

When it comes right down to it, the people who have nurtured me, challenged me, loved me are both men and women, feminists and not feminists. Conversely, the people who have failed me are also men and women, feminists and not feminists.

The Women (and the Men)
of the Resurrection

The biblical story that calls me most powerfully to feminism and, paradoxically, beyond feminism to the cross of Jesus Christ, is Luke’s story of the women at the tomb. In that story, some of the women who have faithfully followed Jesus from Nazareth, only to abandon him in his hour of greatest need along with all the rest of the disciples, finally come to their senses. They try to do the right thing by him. They return to being good, practical, pious women—observing the Sabbath, preparing the appropriate spices and ointments for the body, returning to the tomb.

But they are surprised by a rebuke for which I will always be grateful. Instead of affirming their proclivities as good, religious women, the angel at the empty tomb challenges them to remember what Jesus told them in Galilee and to become the first evangelists of the resurrection. And they do. They allow that transformation to happen in their lives.

Despite the less-than-appreciative reception they receive from their male counterparts, we all know the end of the story. They get the message out—and the world has never been the same.

Servanthood, mutual submission, Gelassenheit—the first people we think of in relation to these words may not be the resurrection women. I suggest, however, that they are among our finest examples. Because the point is that our surrender is not ultimately to another’s will or desire but to the very gospel itself, as we have received it. That good news includes both the cross and the resurrection.

That good news calls us beyond our socialization, beyond convention, beyond any expectation put upon us by any human being. In that sense it calls us to a more radical feminism than any we have known. Surrender to the gospel is hardly surrender to patriarchal ideals.

The Art of the Gospel

A while back I asked one of our students with an artistic bent to make a banner for my office. The conversation was a casual one over lunch at a friend’s house after church on Sunday. We were talking about sewing, of all things, something she was just learning to do. We talked a little that day and she came in the next week to look at the space I wanted to use. I suggested the resurrection women of Luke 24 as a theme; we set a price and talked in general about arrangements.

Years have gone by—and I still do not have a banner in my office. And I never will, at least not anything like what I envisioned. What I will have someday is a work of art. Tanya has in these years attended fabric fairs, read books, studied quilt exhibits, found one of the finest liturgical artists to be her mentor, and generally taken the project to realms I would never have imagined.

One day she spread out her dozens and dozens of fabric swatches and showed me the design. The richness of the colors, textures, and concepts took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes.

Partly my response was to the sheer beauty spread out before me. Partly I was responding to the birth of an artist—especially poignant because I now knew that tendonitis had forced Tanya to lay aside becoming a pianist. Partly I was responding to the integration of cross and resurrection, biblical text and life, suffering and joy, not only in Tanya’s art but also in her spirit and our interaction.

The moment assured me that surrender to the God who is the Father of Jesus and of us all is a surrender to life, not death, and a surrender to joy, not despair—even as we all experience enough of both. Surely in that moment, the resurrection women of Luke 24, gone on to their heavenly reward, must have been grinning along with us over the still-to-be-stitched fabric scraps.

—Mary H. Schertz, Elkhart, Indiana, teaches New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and directs the Institute of Mennonite Studies there.