Thought for the week: Alastair McIntosh on Women’s Day
‘More is going on than meets the eye.’
A couple of weeks ago it was International Women’s Day (8 March). It was in that week that the tragedy of Sarah Everard’s murder was unfolding, and on the Wednesday a YouGov poll revealed that eighty per cent of British women have experienced sexual harassment in our shared public spaces.
Many of these women shared their outrage on social media. They said they often don’t feel safe outdoors, and that men must take responsibility. But that demands the eyes and heart to see the problem.
It made me think about a story of two women in the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel. A synagogue official called Jairus begs Jesus to come and heal his dying daughter. As he sets off to their house, another woman comes to touch his coat, hoping to find healing.
A symmetry of numbers connects both of these characters. The girl was twelve years old, just on the cusp of womanhood as it would have been understood then. And we’re told the older woman had been bleeding for the same length of time.
Most translations into English don’t bring out the depth of this woman’s suffering. They speak about her ‘illness’, her ‘affliction’ or her ‘plague’, and mention that doctors had been unable to cure her. But the Greek original puts the situation in much stronger terms. It suggests a tortuous, oppressive pain; and specifically, such as that caused by a metal-studded whip.
What’s more, when Jesus asked the older woman why it was that she’d touched him, she tells ‘the whole truth’ or, as an old translation puts it much better: ‘the truth of every hinge’.
This hints that more is going on than meets the eye. The woman’s plight is in a highly patriarchal culture. With eyes to see and heart to feel, could that be what the story is about?
The girl is dead when Jesus gets there. But he raises her with words of affirmation – ‘Young woman, stand up!’ – and he tells her father and her mother to give her nourishment.
Now, with the week of International Women’s Day over, I leave you with a thought: What nourishment is called for in our times? And what, to stand against the powers of patriarchy?
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