Such a bloke!

 

When I wrote ‘Miriam’s Sisters, Deborah’s Daughters’, my aim was to uncover the biblical stories of the women who had been hidden in narratives edited by the patriarchy. To re-imagine what leadership might look like if our exemplars were women rather than men. I didn’t have to look far or dig too deeply - the women are most certainly there - just covered up by the amplification of many less competent men around them.

I was reminded yesterday of just one of the things that is manifest in patriarchal leadership - that absolute confidence to take on a task even when only part of the task can be imagined: While women might pause to consider the full implications and be more hesitant, men will often leap right in as soon as they see the beginning.

This Palm Sunday, as we reflect on the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, to the adulation of the crowds around him, I’m grateful for that trait in Jesus that made him ‘such a bloke’. To take on flesh and blood, not knowing where that would take him, what he would encounter on the way and the cost of paying the price in the vengeful politics of empire that don’t react well to subversive opponents. I’m grateful that he was willing to carry on regardless, meeting and enduring each part of the mission.

As we move through this week, considered holy in the Christian calendar, bearing witness to how the journey became lonelier for Jesus and how he became more isolated in ‘seeing it through’, may our gaze encompass the courage and tenacity of the women who accompanied him all the way to death and beyond. As we celebrate that Jesus was ‘such a bloke’ in embarking on a mission whose end he could never orchestrate or conceive, may we notice the women who remained with him at the cross, who prepared to anoint him in death and who were witnesses to resurrection.