Reading
Luke 8:1-3
8 After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; 3 Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
Comment
The preaching of the kingdom of God is an itinerant activity, which Jesus does not carry out alone, but together with his disciples. He moves from city to city, because “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). Together with him we find the Twelve, but also a small group of women, something completely unusual for the religious culture of the time. The rabbis, in fact, did not have women as disciples. This reluctance is evident in the Johannine account of the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, where Jesus' disciples were surprised to see him talking to a woman at the well (Jn 4:27).
“Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water” (Jn 4:15) exclaims the Samaritan woman at the well; and the three women who follow Jesus in his ministry seem to have quenched their thirst of that water. Mary, coming from the city of Magdala, is identified by a tradition without any objective confirmation with the woman who in the previous Gospel passage pours the perfume on the feet of Jesus and that pours it on the head before the passion; here it is simply said that she was freed from seven demons, but another tradition, always without any foundation, makes her a prostitute. Joanna and Susanna are mentioned only here.
It will be women who follow Jesus in his passion and stay under the cross, with Mary, the mother of Jesus and John, the disciple he loved. And women are always the first witnesses of the resurrection, heralds of the good news to the Twelve themselves.
The Scriptures present an ambivalent attitude towards women, starting from the progenitor Eve, through whom sin entered the world, to the numerous warnings contained in the book of Proverbs, in which man is warned against the female capacity to circumvent and make fall into sin.
Yet, the whole history of salvation is dotted with figures of exemplary women blessed by God, starting with Sarah, who conceives Isaac in her old age and shares in the promise made by God to Abraham of a descendant more numerous than the sand of the sea and, therefore, of redemption that extends beyond the very borders of Israel; and then Rachel, wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph, who "weeps for her children", representing the one who intercedes with God for Israel (Jer 31:15, taken from Mt 2:18). Through a woman the incarnate Word decides to come among us: Mary, the new Eve, is the instrument through which the messianic promises are fulfilled.
The women of the Old and New Testaments are mostly silent figures, but they are significant in the history of salvation. Their silence is always fruitful.
Prayer
Grant us, o Lord, to be associated with you in the preaching of salvation and our actions, guided by your Spirit, be ever more eloquent than our words. Amen.
- Rev. Dr. Luca Vona
