What did Jesus do for women?

 (This is the second in a series on Rachel Held Evans’s “A Year of Biblical Womanhood.” To read the first post, click here.)

Rachel Held Evans is trying to follow “as literally as possible” what she calls “a year of biblical womanhood.” To her this means obeying Old Testament as well as New Testament commands for women. For example, she stayed in a tent, sat on a stadium cushion, and did not attend church while she was having her menstrual period (see here). Her actions (and her definition of “biblical womanhood”) raise critical questions: What did Jesus do for women? And what are the implications for women today?

We find one illustration of what Jesus did for women in Mark 5:21–34 and Luke 8:40–48. A synagogue ruler has come and pleaded for Jesus to go to his house and heal his daughter, who is dying. As Jesus goes, a crowd presses around him. Among them is a desperate woman. She has had a continuous discharge of blood for twelve years, and all the doctors have been able to do is take her all money and make her worse. But her bleeding is not just a chronic medical problem. It is a chronic religious problem. She is unclean. As long as she has a discharge of blood she cannot come before her God at the temple.

She should not even be here, in this pressing crowd. She is making everyone who even brushes against her unclean. The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, calls the days of a woman’s menstrual bleeding “days of separation,” days when she must sit apart from everyone, lest she contaminate them.

And then she touches the fringe of Jesus’ robe.

Now, according to ceremonial law, this should make Jesus unclean, or at least the garment she touched. But instead Jesus makes the woman clean—she is immediately healed from her bleeding. Jesus is the Holy One, and where he is, is holy ground. No unclean woman can make him unclean. Indeed, it is the other way around, because she has come into contact with the One who redeems us from the curse of the law and makes us holy.

This is what Jesus does for women. We are no longer under curse, because Jesus became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). More than that, he has made us clean. Our sins are like pig filth (Luke 15:15), excrement (Isaiah 4:4), leprosy (Leviticus 14), and menstrual blood (Isaiah 64:6). But when we touch Jesus, we become holy. Paul puts it this way: Jesus “gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:27 ESV).

By living in a tent, by sitting on a stadium cushion, by staying home from church, Evans is acting as if Jesus is not present, making her and every place he stands holy. She is acting as if she herself has not yet touched even the hem of his garment. And actions sometimes speak louder than words.

Again, I don’t think Evans is trying to say that Jesus has not touched and saved her and made her holy. In fact, I think she just doesn’t realize at all what she is saying. She is confused: about the Old Testament, the place of the ceremonial law, the transformation Jesus brought about, and many other things.

More on this to follow....