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November 4, 2019
Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM
I just came back from a “ladies lunch” with six parish women. Readers of a certain generation will smile at the notice, that of the dishes shared, there wasn’t a single molded Jell-O salad. One was remarried after divorce, and six of us were single – four as widows, one a divorcee, I a celibate – which is likely a gift to the men who didn’t marry me. But the fact is, women through years of heroically and silently supporting family members through crisis after crisis, ordinarily come to the wisdom of knowing they don’t have to wait until the next life to live without marrying or re-marrying. So the Gospel addresses a question men have: Who will be the owner of the female body? Is she reproductive property to be seized and claimed? Margaret Atwood strung out this scenario in the dystopian novel, “A Handmaid’s Tale.”
The Gospel – about the long-lived wife who out-lasted seven husbands – is both hilarious and tragic. It’s usually read soberly as though it’s about living eternal life like sexless, childless angels, not an especially appealing prospect for some. The notation in the daily prayer booklet “This Day” says, “He is not a God of the dead, but of the living.” A theological affirmation, true, but this is not why the confrontation with resurrection-denying Sadducees appears in Mark and Matthew as well as Luke. It was an account, like a memorable parable, that “worked” to shake believers from their engrained conviction about male superiority: “What is a man entitled to demand from a woman?” This Gospel flips the question so the issue of human dignity and equality of persons can be heard from the woman’s side: “What is a woman entitled to be as a person?”
What’s hilarious are the back-stories of the hypothetical. Imagine the parents of the seven sons. Hear the nagging. “When are you going to give us grandchildren? Then each son in turn fails them. They are distraught. The parents are relentless. They believe their sons are abundantly-endowed stallions. But each son, obedient in turn, trembles. Will I be spared the fate of my older brother? This woman is a black widow – every brother she beds dies. Did brother number six, after several months – or several years – start to suspect this woman is a clever poisoner? That suspicion proves useless. He dies anyway. Or are they mindless lemmings, mechanically following an older brother onto a path of inevitable self-destruction? What kind of idiotized parents would they have been if they’d had children? Lucky they were childless.
Hear the wife’s parents: “We went to all this trouble to arrange a marriage into this wonderful family and provided you a big dowry. You’re our only daughter, so you have to stay with them, our honorable tribal kin, and follow levirate law for our sakes, or we’ll lose our investment. Have babies – that’s your duty. Keep trying.” So she does. She outlasts them all. But there they are, lined up, waiting for her in the next life. The hypothetical ironically envisions that only the men have the right to claim her. What if the woman doesn’t want be chained as the forever- wife to any of them? What if she’s done with the whole system?
The tragedy of the story is precisely this image: Men are lined up, competing to claim a woman as though she were property at an auction because each in turn has “had her.” The tragedy is that this wife who outlived seven husbands makes us think of 11- year- old girls married off as fourth wives to 50-year-old men in Yemen; Thai, Chinese, Cambodian and Vietnamese girls lured, sold, resold and trafficked for the international sex trade; a woman gang-raped on a bus in India; Korean comfort women whom Japan refuses to acknowledge as victims during WWII; school girls kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Boko-Haram in Nigeria – then raped, threatened, carried off and assigned to be the wife-property of a fighter. And the American women imprisoned in U.S. jails, over 90% of them victims of childhood sexual abuse or rape before they were 16.
The Gospel struggles for words to redeem the dignity of women from their debasement as men’s property. Affirming women’s integrity, individuality and autonomy, we can repeat the words of Jesus: “Women can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.”
Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM, is a Sister of Mercy and Ph.D. theologian. She is a litigator and family law attorney in private practice. She lives in San Jose.