Well, good morning and happy Mother’s Day. So we celebrate Mother’s Day today, and we give a big thank you to all our mothers, both biological and spiritual mothers. And there is an expression you may have heard, it comes from Africa. It says that women hold up half the sky. I think it’s more like 3/4.
And I just realized I forgot to do the reading of the Word. So bear with me here. Let me do the reading of the Word. We’re back to the program now. I jumped the gun a little bit. And my. All right, Luke 8, verses 1 through 3. Soon afterward, he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.
And the 12 were with him. And also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out. And Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager. And Susanna, and many others who provided for them out of their means. The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Lord, as we consider your word, let us hear what you would have us hear. Let us know what you would have us know. And let us do what you would have for us to do for your sake. And in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Well, as you as you may know, I have worked in India for many years. And one of my dearest friends, Brenda, is from Australia. And I just came from Australia visiting her. And she. While we were working there, she interacted a lot. And she and I both, we did a lot of mentoring and working closely together with new teachers for the Bible school. And one of the guys that Brenda worked with a lot, his name is Prabha. And she worked with Prabha before I came. In fact, Prabha had such affection for Brenda because of the input she had given in her life that every year at Mother’s Day, he would give her a Mother’s Day card.
And Brenda would say, oh, Prabha, you know, I’m not your mother. Would say, well, you’re like a spiritual mother to me. So every year, the Mother’s Day card would come. So today we’re going to talk about some of the spiritual mothers in the New Testament. Now, in the first century Jewish world, women had limited freedoms. A Jewish woman would be kept very busy all the days of her life, mostly with household chores, maybe going out to take care of a few animals and then come back in life, as I have experienced, when the power goes off for days at a time. You mean, you know, a different way of life. And if you don’t, can’t turn on the water to get water, life is different.
And it’s very time consuming when you have to go fetch your own water. When you have to cook over an open fire, which we have experienced in India recently, as cooking fuel is now in great shortage in India, that’s another story because of the Strait of Hormuz. And I have learned a few things that when you’re cooking over an open fire, it takes a lot longer than when you have a gas stove. So the cooking and all these things took up so much time in their life.
Boys were encouraged to study the Bible, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. But girls were either excused or not allowed so that boys were encouraged to study. But there was very little opportunity for girls to learn. Formal education, as in going to school, was for boys. Girls might be taught to read in the home, but then most of the rest of their learning centered around running household tasks. But today we’re going to talk about the women who followed Jesus, the women whom Jesus taught. And when you read the Gospels, you’ll read about the Jewish religious leaders. You read about the Pharisees, you read, read about the Sadducees, the Zealots. And also in that same time of period was a group of people called the Athenes. They were all men. The Pharisee leaders were all men. Sadducee leaders were all men.
And where were the women? They were not in these different groups of Jewish leaders. Why? Women were not encouraged to study the Scriptures.
But Jesus is different. He was different and is different. We see the interactions of Jesus with women from beginning to the end of the gospels. In Luke 10:38, we know this passage of Mary and Martha. You’ve heard about Mary and Martha, and they had a little squabble. Why? Because Jesus came to visit and Mary, it said she sat at the feet of Jesus.
And Martha was really mad. She said, lord, tell her to come help me. And Jesus said, she has chosen what is better. Leave her alone. Jesus allowed women to learn from him. Not only allowed it, he encouraged it. And Mary, it said that she sat at the feet of Jesus. And this is a fruit that’s used in that period of time to designate someone who was a student.
So it was probably not only in that one day that Mary sat at Jesus feet. We read in the Book of Acts about Paul. He sat at the feet of Gamaliel. I don’t think that meant one time he was a student in the school of Gamaliel. Who was a famous teacher in the Jewish world. So Mary was a student of Jesus. Likely she was one of the 70. You know how Jesus had his followers.
There were the 12 who we know, but then there was the 70, who was a big. That were a bigger group. And many followed with him in his travels as well. So the societal expectations of women were clear. All housework and no study. How does that sound? Would you rather stay home from school and just do housework all day or rather go to school? School is a good thing. All right, so that was the culture of the New Testament era. It was not the teaching of the Bible, but it was the culture of the day.
And by the way, we read in the Old Testament about women who ran businesses, women who were judges, and women who were prophetesses. And you may have heard of the ancient prayer that shows some of the attitude in the ancient world. This was a prayer that Jewish men would pray, I thank you, God, that I was not born a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. There was an expectation that women and men should not speak across the genders. When Jesus went and met the Samaritan woman, he spoke to her while his disciples were out doing some errands. And they came back, and Jesus is having a very intense discussion with this woman about some big issues in her personal life and some struggles that she’s had, and also going on about the nature of worship and spiritual matters. She has questions. And the disciples come back, and in the text, it says they were astonished that Jesus was speaking to a woman.
Astonished is a strong word. They were not just surprised, they were just floored. Jesus was speaking to a woman. So this tells you what the culture was like in that day. You see, in the synagogue, women would sit on one side and the men would sit on the other side. Even if you were married, you would go to your respective side, and children would split according to gender as well. In the early church, that often was also the case. In fact, I visited a church in India, and it’s a long story, but it was patterned off the church that Thomas started.
One of the disciples, he went to India and he started a church there called the Marthama Church. And I visited with some friends. And it was the same thing as in the first century. All the men went to one side and all the women went to the other side. Husband and wife sat on opposite sides. And so this was the world of the first century, when Jesus walked the earth and Jesus was the man who was different. He taught women, he healed women, and he had women who Followed him.
Today we have a modern concept of following that involves something like this.
I am now a follower. Now, when it said in the Gospels that someone followed Jesus, that meant that they put on their backpack and their sandals and they walked with him and went with him. So to follow Jesus meant to walk on the road that Jesus walked. And there was a group of women that walked on the road that Jesus walked. And this we read about in Luke chapter 8, Mary Magdalene and many others. And they had been healed. Some have been healed of different kinds of sicknesses, or in Mary Magdalene’s case, we don’t know exactly what she was dealing with, but she was oppressed by some kind of darkness in her life. She was delivered and she followed Jesus.
We read about many healings in the New Testament, but we don’t always know what happens to that person afterwards. And in this little three verses that we read, they may not sound like the most exciting things, but it is exciting. Why? These were women who followed Jesus. So Jesus had his 12 disciples, but there was also a group of women disciples that followed him. So they were healed. And then they joined the team with Jesus. They put feet to their faith. And Jesus, as he traveled from city to city and village to village, teaching about the kingdom of God, he was not traveling alone.
Sometimes we think, oh, yeah, Jesus went here and there, and he went with his disciples. But we don’t always have the whole picture that there was actually quite a group of people with Jesus, and it was a team effort. So we’ve got Mary Magdalene, and she comes many times in the scriptures, in fact, most notably, she is a witness to the first resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus. And Jesus says, go tell your brothers that I have raised. And she goes and tells the 12 disciples. And do they believe her? They thought she was saying idle tales, making up stories. But Peter had some glimpse of maybe there was something to it. So he ran to the tomb.
He wanted to see for himself, and he did. So Jesus not only taught women, he empowered women. He released them into ministry and to proclaiming spiritual truths. Then we’ve got Joanna here. We don’t know a whole lot about her, but she’s identified as the wife of Chuza. And who is the wife of who is Chuza? Herod’s household manager. Herod was not a nice guy. They said it was better to be Herod’s dog than to be in his family, to be one of his kids or his wife.
Not a nice guy. Nonetheless, it was a position of honor, I suppose, to work in A high status like that, it would be like if some of us worked in the White House today. Whether or not we liked the particular administration that’s there. Nonetheless, it’s a high profile job. So we’ve got different types of women and we’ve got Susanna. We don’t have any more information about her and many others. It was not just a few small handful of women. There were many others.
They all put feet to their face and followed Jesus on a dusty road. What kind of ministry were they doing? Probably many of the similar type of things that the 12 disciples were doing. They were also, it says they were providing for them out of their own means. So this seems like the business income generation part of the team was coming from the women they were contributing from their own means. And we don’t have any more details than that, but these women were using their own financial resources to participate in the ministry. They were giving out of their personal resources and not getting reimbursed. So they were the givers and the supporters of Jesus ministry. So these women gave back again and again.
They traveled locally in the area of the Galilean towns. They also traveled all the way to Jerusalem with Jesus walking. It’s a long walk. So they were dedicated. When Jesus was crucified, where were the men? They fled. Perhaps it was more dangerous because they were men and the women could kind of fly under the radar more, I don’t know. But the women were there. The men were afraid, but these women were strong and courageous.
These are some few of the spiritual mothers that we have in the Bible, in the New Testament. There’s not time to mention many of the others. We’ve got Priscilla, who taught Apollos, a man, more accurately the way of the Lord. Chloe was probably a leader in one of the house churches in Corinth. Phoebe was a benefactor of Paul and a friend of mine did a word study on that and it’s translated benefactor, but it’s probably something more easily translated like leader. So Paul considered this woman Phoebe to be a leader of him and many others as well. If you read one of the Another chapter that might not seem so exciting is the last chapter of Romans where Paul is giving greetings to long lists of people. And if you look carefully, more than half of the people are women.
There are so many women who have been spiritual mothers in the past and in recent history. Some of my own heroes are those who gave their lives in India. You may have heard of Amy Carmichael, who was a missionary in India in the 1800s. She was an Irish woman And she went to India and ended up rescuing young girls from exploitation where they were forced to do things they didn’t want to do in Hindu temples. She was there for 55 years without a break or visit at home. Pandita Ramabhai was an Indian woman who as a widow, did tremendous things. She translated the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into Marathi language, which is the language of the state of Maharashtra. And she opened a home for children for disabled and for widows, which still stands to this day.
And some of my students have come from her. You know, she started this in 800 years ago or longer, and they’re still going on and so many others. Dr. Ida Scudder was the first, first woman admitted to the medical school in Cornell in I think 1890. And she went back to India and she started a hospital and started a medical training center, which is today considered the gold standard of medical care. And if you have a difficult to treat medical condition, you want to go to the Velour medical center started by a single woman. And I mean, all of us have many people. I can think of so many people in my own personal life who have invested me in me, in my spiritual life, have opened doors and cared for me and helped me at critical times of my life.
So today we celebrate the contributions of mothers of all women of all kinds, girls also, anyone who cares for others, teaches others and helps others. And we remember that Jesus was different from the men of his day. He affirmed the gifts of women, taught them and released them into service.
