Influential Women of the New Testament

On Easter morning women were the first to see the risen Lord. Where were the guys? Where were the men?

In the upper room with the doors locked for fear of the Jews. And then the ladies come. They get up in the middle of the night. They get all of their precious herbs and ointments and fragrances together.

They come into the garden to anoint the body and there's no body. Because of their commitment to the Lord, the women braved the potential dangers, went directly to the tomb and were given the overwhelming privilege of seeing Jesus. It's just one example of the honor Jesus showed the women who followed Him. Here's Dr. R.C.

Sproul. It's obvious, isn't it, that there were a significant number of significant women who had significant roles in the life and the ministry of Jesus. It says something to us, in fact, about Jesus, that Jesus as a man, as the Son of God, as the Son of God, as the Son of God, as the Son of Man, and as the Son of God, obviously enjoyed female companionship. He was not married, but He spent a great deal of time with women. And we can dismiss that and say, well, He just did that out of ministry. But if we look closely, again, at the life of Jesus, He was a woman and He ministered to men, but not only that, His friends, some of His closest friends, most trusted confidants, those who helped Him humanly bear the burdens of ministry, a burden of ministry that none of us could ever understand, obviously.

They were women. Also, a cursory reading of the New Testament would show us how Jesus treated women. One of the things that I've noticed every time Jesus speaks with women is how He talks to them. Have you noticed that? He doesn't patronize them, but He doesn't play games with them. But in every single instance where we see women encountering Jesus in dialogue in the New Testament, Jesus treats them with respect. There's a little key that I want you to notice. There's a word in Greek called gune, which is the Greek word for woman, and it comes over into our language.

How? Gynaecology, all right, is derived from the Greek word for woman, gune, not goon, gune. Goon is the Greek word for the man, right?

But we're the goonie birds. But in any case, the term gune is translated into the English language by the word woman, and that creates sometimes an unfortunate impression with some of the translations that we pick up of the New Testament where you will hear Jesus talking to women, and He says to them, woman. For example, when His mother comes to Him at the wedding feast at Canaan and tries to get Him to do something about the shortfall of wine and the embarrassment of the host, Jesus says to her, woman, what are you to Me? Now that sounds like the greatest put-down that a son has ever expressed to his mother in human history. It's like, woman, who do you think you are? Because in our language, to call a woman by the direct form of address woman is not usually very respectful, is it?

Huh? Say, hey, woman. That doesn't sound very tender or very loving, but that is a problem of translation. In the language, it was a form of address of utmost respect. So, Jesus doesn't say, woman, who are you to Me? But it's like in our archaic use of the term ma'am. It's ma'am.

He's speaking deferentially. He's acknowledging her womanhood and her motherhood at that point. Now, when else does Jesus address ladies as women? It blows my mind that when He has a conversation with the woman at the well, who had all these husbands, who was an outcast from the community because of her radical immoral lifestyle, the reason why she was there at the middle of the day was that because she wasn't allowed to be seen with the rest of the women of the community who always came to draw their water early in the morning.

Women were not found at the public well at noonday unless they were social outcasts. And when Jesus talked to her, He called her woman. When the woman who was caught in adultery was dragged in public humiliation and as a spectacle and put at the feet of Jesus by those who wanted to stone her, and they obviously were calling her every obscene name that they could think of, Jesus says to her after He dismisses the crowd with His classic way that He did it, He says, woman, where are your accusers?

He calls her woman. Now, one of the examples, in fact I think the best example that we can find in the New Testament that shows you the affection, the respect, and the tenderness that is loaded in that term, woman, is when Jesus was on the cross. And when He was showing concern for the well-being of His mother, you recall, He committed the care of His mother into the hands of the youngest of His disciples, whose name was John.

And so while He's going through the agony of crucifixion, His mind is focused on taking care of His mother and making sure that John is going to be all right. And He says to His mother from the cross, woman, behold Thy son. Son, behold Thy mother.

Some people think, you know, erroneously that what Jesus was saying is, mother, behold your son. Mother, look at me. No, He wasn't saying, mother, look at me. She was already looking at Him.

Look at me. She was already looking at Him. Mother, behold Thy son. And He's indicating John. And then He speaks to John, John, behold Thy mother. But again, the point is, when He spoke to His own mother in the midst of the agony of His own death, do you think He would use a demeaning, insulting form of address?

He calls her woman. And that reveals, I think, something of the enormous respect and affection that Jesus had for the women in His life. I think a case could be made that two of His closest friends when He was on this earth were Mary and Martha. And the reason I say this is we see Jesus on the move. He's itinerant.

He's going all over Palestine speaking to crowds and the multitudes. And we see how draining His ministry was to Him, how He at times would sense the power go out from Him. And we saw that Jesus found a very, very heavy need to get away from time to time from all of that, from His people. He would withdraw to be by Himself, to be with His Father, to go into the mountain to pray, to be alone, away from the press of the multitudes and the needs that He was trying to serve every day of His life. But what did He do for recreation? What did Jesus do to relax?

That gives you a key to a person's personality. Every time we see Jesus taking time out to relax, He's going to Bethany, to the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. It's not that He's just there with two lady friends, but the three of them are His most intimate friends when He leaves the ministry to get time out, to go relax, to put His shoes up on the desk and take it easy. He doesn't have to preach any sermons, although He does have to preach sermons even there because, you know, even they won't let Him alone.

They're asking Him questions all day long. But I'll tell you what, I don't know how Jesus thought, because I don't have the mind of Christ. Nobody has the mind of Christ perfectly. So we can't really know a hundred percent how Jesus felt in His ministry. But I can identify at one point, He was in the ministry and I'm in the ministry.

Now, there's a huge difference there, obviously, but that much we have in common. We're both in the ministry. And I know that when I'm on the road, I have a policy that everybody, when I go to speak someplace, I get letters that say, oh, we can put you up. There's some wonderful people in our congregation. They have this marvelous house and they have a guest cottage and they have a car at your disposal and we will have you lodged like a king. Every time I go away, I get that kind of a letter. And then we have to go through the embarrassing thing of saying, R.C.

would prefer to stay in a hotel or motel. Why is that? Because I go into the house of a stranger after speaking all day, then what? I'm working all night, right?

It's just more work. And the people may be the nicest people in the world, but if I don't know them, then I have to be on, see? And the only time that I stay in people's house, houses, instead of in public accommodations when I'm on the road is when it's people that I know well and that they are my close friends. Now, maybe I'm projecting something I shouldn't hear. Maybe I'm reading something into the text, but I'm convinced that's why Jesus went to Bethany, because He was comfortable with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. They ministered to Him.

What do you suppose the Father thinks about Mary and Martha for the ministry they had in their lifetime to the Son of God? The Father was pleased, because there is a sense that there are kinds and forms of encouragement that no man can give a man. Only a woman can give a man certain kinds of encouragement. Now, obviously, there are kinds of encouragement that only a man can give a man, and only a woman can give a woman. But there is that special dimension where only a woman can relate to a man and a man to a woman. And let's not forget the fact that Jesus was a man, and He, I'm sure, responded not only to male fellowship but to female fellowship. And I'm not talking here about romance at all.

I'm talking about friendship, because there is such a thing as a real, deep, human level of friendship between men and women. We have a picture at home that's in our family album that's one of Vesta's favorite pictures. It's a picture of my dad walking on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, taken, I believe, in the 30s, where he was like wearing spats, shoes, and he had this funny hat on. And he is walking down the boardwalk with my mother on one arm, and my dad's best friend's wife on the other arm, and he's walking down the boardwalk like this, and you can just see he was feeling like a million dollars. And Vesta looked at that and said, look at that, that's just like you are. He says, this is all your girlfriends. You have so many lady friends. And I'd do, I'd go nuts if I had just only men friends, because there's a single man friends, because there's a sensitivity somehow that women have that men don't have, and they gave that to Jesus. Again, look at women that he encounters in his ministry. I think of the Syrophoenician woman. If ever there was a woman to whom Jesus spoke disrespectfully, it was this Syrophoenician woman. You remember her, that she came, and she was not Jewish, and she wanted to learn from Jesus, and Jesus is saying to her, hey, don't you know that I come for the lost sheep of Israel?

And the woman says, well, even the dogs eat the crumbs from the master's table. And Jesus allowed us how she was a dog. I mean, that's, but she was a dog in terms of the standard pigeonholing of people in that world.

Right? But then Jesus reached out to this woman and answered her needs and said of her that he had not found faith like this in all of Israel. And so Jesus sent this woman away with his benediction, whom the world considered a dog. Or consider the woman with the issue of blood that bothered Jesus, intruded on him, interrupted him when he was on the way to raise somebody from the dead. Jairus, you remember, had come and his daughter was dead, and he pleads with Jesus to come and do something, and so Jesus says, okay, I'll go, and he's walking down the street, and the word goes through the mob, all of a sudden say, he's gone to that dead girl. And boy, the crowd started gathering and pushing around him, and Jesus is striding.

He's all business. He's going to go to the home where there's a dead girl, and he's got all these people watching to see what he's going to do with this dead girl. And suddenly in the middle of it, he stops, and he said, and he said, who touched me?

And what's Peter's reaction? Like it always is. What do you mean who touched me? Ten thousand people have touched you. How am I supposed to know who touched you? Everybody's bumping and jostling you about.

How could we possibly know? And Jesus just ignores him and says, wait a minute, somebody touched me because I felt the power go out of me. Go out of me. And he looks around, and there's this woman cowering, and she had been hemorrhaging for twelve years and gone to every doctor there was with no relief. And she's sort of timid. She said, you know, I'm sorry, I just felt if I could just touch the hem of your garment, I would be alright. And Jesus said, your faith has made you whole. Now the thing about it that touches me about that encounter is that Jesus could have said, wait a minute, there's a dead girl over here. I don't have time for this.

I'm going to go raise somebody from the dead. Can't you see that that's where the focus of the crowd is? That's the big issue.

I don't have time for the little stuff. But He stopped for her, and this was His pattern. How about when Mary Magdalene comes and pours the alabaster ointment on His feet and gives this extravagant manifestation of adoration and wipes His feet with her hair.

You talk about a moment of human tenderness. That woman is on her face wiping Jesus' feet with her hair. And Judas is all upset because of all this waste of money.

And Jesus has to rebuke Judas. He says, let her alone. Let her alone.

God is never opposed to extravagant love. And He takes care of Mary Magdalene, a woman possessed with seven devils, a woman who was a professional prostitute, became an intimate part of Jesus on her own. How close was Mary Magdalene to the heart of Jesus?

She wasn't very well esteemed by everybody else in town. But Jesus was her Savior, Jesus was her Lord, and Jesus was her friend. And when Jesus was crucified, the Bible says that there were three women standing there. Mary, His mother, Mary, His aunt, the wife of Clopas, and who else? Mary Magdalene.

All the other Fairweather fans were running for their life. Jesus' mother is there, His aunt is there, and this prostitute is there. At Calvary, Mary Magdalene came out of the crowd and stood at the foot of the cross.

I stand with you. And I'll tell you what, God did not overlook that. How would you love to have seen the risen Lord with your own eyes, to have been an eyewitness of the resurrection? Where were the guys? Where were the men?

In the upper room with the doors locked for fear of the Jews. And then the ladies come. They get up in the middle of the night.

They get all of their precious herbs and ointments and fragrances together. They come into the garden to anoint the body, and there's no body. There's no body. There's no body, okay? And they come back there, and they tell the disciples, most of whom dismiss them as what? Bitty old, you know, crazy ladies, right?

What do you ladies know? People don't come back from the dead. But Peter and John run because they're the leaders.

Okay, ladies, step aside. We'll take charge. We're going to the tomb, and if there's any substance to this, we'll find out. And they'll go there, and guess what God let them see?

An empty tomb, a folded grave cloth, and a couple of angels. And they're all excited, and they run back to tell the guys. And while they're running back, Mary Magdalene is in the garden by herself, and a man speaks to her. And she doesn't even look up, and she thinks it's the gardener. You know, he says, what's the matter? She said, they've taken away my Lord, and I don't know where they've led Him. And he says, Mary. And she says, Rabboni. The first human eyes to see the resurrection of Jesus Christ were the eyes of a prostitute that Jesus loved. He said, Mary. Do you think she ever forgot that? What I see in the New Testament of the women who surrounded Jesus is the virtue of loyalty.

They weren't groupies, but they loved Him with a loyal love. We need that. We do need that. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Thank you for joining us for the Saturday edition of our program. Each week we've made our way through Dr. Sproul's series, Great Men and Women of the Bible. And we're wrapping up that series today, which means this is your final opportunity to request our resource offer for a gift of any amount. When you contact us today with your gift, we will send you Dr. Sproul's video series, Dust to Glory. In 57 messages, he surveys every book of the Bible and explains their content in light of the rest of Scripture. Plus, we'll include a disc containing the study guides for each message.

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