can a woman be a foot-washer?

Thanks to my sister’s heads up, I discovered that a question I submitted months ago was answered on the “Ask N.T. Wright Anything” podcast this week. The question was not “Can a woman be a priest?”—I’ve already heard some of Wright’s thoughts on that—but it was related to holy orders, and it gave me food for thought as I continue to mull this question.

Perhaps the premise of my question is completely wrong. Questions about what women “can” and “can’t” do in evangelicalism are premised on power dynamics: When a woman can’t be a pastor, preacher, or elder, it has real-life implications for her life in the church and how she is treated and viewed by others. This is indisputable. When she can, it’s judged harshly as an overstepping of her role (in complementarian circles) or celebrated as a sign that men don’t have the universal upper hand in the church (in egalitarian circles).

But holding in tension the fact that a pastor or priest has the power of influence just by being the pastor or priest and the reality that the role is meant to be least in the church, not greatest, is where I keep struggling. Asking “Can a woman be a priest?” might sound more like “Can a woman be in charge?” than “Can a woman be a servant?”, but that’s because we start with a wrongheaded understanding of church leadership in general.

Wright said, in his response to my question, that the aspiration and ultimate fulfillment of every priestly calling is embodied in that priest kneeling before his parishioners to wash their feet. As priesthood in Leviticus was the unglamorous job of butcher, blood spiller, and meat roaster, priesthood/pastoral care today should be the unglamorous job of sacrificing self for the sake of the Church. There is a holy privilege in it, of course, but the cost is high—it’s more like parenthood than power.

When done well, that is. Which, sadly, is rare.

(As an aside: Perhaps it’s not surprising that so much of evangelical culture has historically viewed parenthood and power as very similar things.)

Nonetheless, it gives me pause. I wonder what the nondenominational evangelical church could learn from the Biblical vision of pastoral care—and how its structure might change if leading a church looked more like the thankless job of parenting children than the glory of a pulpit. I wonder how I might word my question differently to reflect the reality of right priesthood more accurately.

Can a woman be a foot-washer?

Can a woman be a bondservant of parish “children”?

Can a woman go to the end of herself for others, for the sake of the Gospel?

If I look at the many devout Christian women across my life, I’d say of course she can—but she’s already doing far more than her share of these kinds of activities. In church, at least, let her be served.

To reach anything like an accurate reflection of these truths, churches and individuals would need to radically alter how they treat and speak about men and women. Less “headship” and “submission,” more “lay down his life.” We inadvertently (or, sometimes, advertently) emphasize the exact opposite of Paul’s intent—the exact opposite of the truth—when we teach these passages in this way, and thereby create a culture of power hunger and oppression that perfectly mirrors the culture of the lost world.

What appeals to me about a position like pastor or elder? Frankly: being seen, heard, and respected.

What appeals to me about a position like a priest or deacon? I’d say walking intimately with Jesus while helping others do the same.

Here’s the thing. All humans, including women, should be seen, heard, and respected—whether they are pastors, elders, or laypeople. Women can and do walk intimately with Jesus while helping others do the same.

Can a woman be a foot-washer? She already is.

Perhaps the real question is, how many men can be priests?

we walk like Mary

“Walk of Mary Across the Mountains” by Maximilian Albert Josef Liebenwein (1869–1926)

I’m sure we’ve all seen any number of artistic interpretations of the journey of the Holy Family to Bethlehem for the census and the birth of Christ. In most of them, Mary’s fragility as a very-pregnant mother seems to be an important theme: She is typically perched on the couple’s donkey while Joseph tirelessly walks alongside, or is at least leaning heavily on Joseph’s support, if she tries to walk herself. This painting, titled “Walk of Mary Across the Mountains,” struck me as so opposite to those renderings that I first thought – until I noticed Joseph and the burro in the shadows of the upper right-hand corner – that it must be depicting Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, not her trek toward meeting God in tiny-human-baby form.

Perhaps it strikes me especially because I’ve been in this “very-pregnant” state twice in the last six years. I know the immense (perhaps near-impossible) ask that a 70-mile journey on foot would make on an unstable pelvis, split abdominal muscles, and half-capacity lungs. I understand why so many paintings show her riding the donkey – which, granted, wouldn’t have been particularly comfortable, either. Yet in this piece, Maximilian Leibenwein has captured something different in Mary that I also recognize: That state of resigned determination that takes a woman from her already-great discomfort through a period of excruciating travail and into the extraordinary euphoria on the other side.

Toward the end of each of my pregnancies, I didn’t know what scared me more: that I might be pregnant for another three weeks, or that I might not be pregnant for another three weeks. Each option was defined by a different kind of uncertainty and discomfort, but either way, I could not escape the fact that my fate was to endure the uniquely life-upending transition of a birth, sooner or later.

Mary’s baby is coming. The pain is inevitable; the process is inevitable; the birth is inevitable. He is coming. Her body will do the work, and she must only be ready to meet him.

But unique to Mary’s circumstance is that it’s not merely her firstborn son coming; it is her Lord. The Messiah is coming. After millennia of relentlessly inviting his people into his space, God Incarnate invaded ours, bringing heaven to earth and commencing the rebirth of humanity through the birth of Jesus.

Ready or not, the King is coming.

We remember his royal-and-lowly approach in Advent, in part, to remember that the King still approaches us; the King, though come, is also here, and is coming again. He has already-and-not-yet come, already-and-not-yet rescued us, already-and-not-yet glorified us.

How do we approach him? How can we be ready to meet him? Perhaps with a doggedness like Mary’s, as she made the journey toward the “greatly multiplied” pain promised her in Genesis 3:16 for the sake of meeting the snake-crusher of Genesis 3:15. She was at once humble and bold: humble, in her wholehearted submission to God’s use (Luke 1:38); and bold, in her unflinching determination to praise the Lord for the goodness and certainty of his plan for her life, and for her whole people besides (Luke 1:46-55).

We need not have birthed children from our bodies to know what it is to make an arduous trek through certain suffering for the sake of immeasurable joy. This is the story of every saint, every martyr, every follower of Christ – the story of my life and yours. Pain in life, and death at life’s end, are inevitable. But on the other side is Jesus. And with us every moment – though like Mary in Leibenwein’s depiction, we cannot yet see him – is Jesus.

Every day is another step toward the God who has stepped toward us. Every day, a step closer to his presence, a moment nearer to the full realization of his glory. We walk humbly, yet boldly: obeying and praising, walking and singing, enduring and rejoicing. We walk like Mary, across treacherous mountains and valleys of shadow, until at last we see our Lord face-to-face.

a kingdom of children

I started reading a recently-released book this week called The Dignity of Dependence. I’m only four or five chapters in, but it’s been a thought-provoking read, especially insofar as it emphasizes 1) that women are different from men and 2) that women are also less different from men than we think, because we tend to start from a false premise of what a human being is.

The false premise is that humans are autonomous creatures who control their identities, destinies, and day-to-day lives, independent of anyone else. In our society, the more independent you can be, the more human you are; the less help you need, the more valuable you are. I’m an oldest daughter—this is my native tongue. (Just ask my therapist.)

It’s not shocking, then, that we so easily throw away certain classes of people: unborn babies, those with disabilities or mental health crises or addictions, the elderly.

We have built a society on something that doesn’t exist and now we are all trying to cram ourselves into its mold. Men can do this more successfully because they are more separable from their children and less influenced by cyclical changes in their bodies, but they can never really do it successfully. No one can (not even oldest daughters). We are all dependent: on the weather, on events outside our control, on how and when and where and to whom we were born, on our energy levels, on our resources, on the other people around us who keep the world running while we play our very small part.

The ruse is easier to uphold now than ever. I’m reading through the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder with Clara, and as we began The Long Winter, it struck me how utterly helpless the Ingalls family must have felt to have no advance notice of when the next blizzard would strike, how long it would be, or how much snow would fall. They had no radar or satellite or meteorology team tracking every “atmospheric river” and irregular storm pattern. They had minutes to get to shelter when the cloud appeared in the north sky. Even the old Native American man who warned them of the hard winter to come—based on centuries of living intimately with the land and observing its patterns—could only give a general alert about the season as a whole, no weekly or daily or hourly forecast.

Now, we can order our lives so that the weather affects us less, but it is still a force outside our control, as wildfire season and hurricane season annually remind certain portions of the U.S. and the world. In my part of the country, one of the most disturbing eventualities that no one can fully predict is “the Big One”—the massive earthquake that could happen at any time along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. We are loathe to admit how many such forces exist in our well-oiled machine of a society, and how perilously we all traverse the line between comfortable autonomy and desperate helplessness. Men in general have a better shot at keeping up the pretense, but they also have the loneliness, depression, chronic pain, and addictions to show for it.

Women can only so pretend if they deny the fundamental difference that makes them women: the ability to give and sustain life from conception through weaning, and then nurture the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs that continue to form a human being into a whole person in the years beyond. This difference is rooted in the very things that our society deems less human, less valuable: her body’s comparative weakness and limitations; her cyclical hormone changes; her vulnerability to becoming, at some point in her reproductive life, an irreplaceable half in a dyad of dependence.

And plenty of women do choose denial. They take medications to stop menstruating and prevent pregnancy. They abort babies, often including babies they want, because they lack any support system that would allow them to be that “tied down.” They send their newborns to daycare and use hands-free breast pumps to get through the work week—often with very little choice, due to the way our economy is structured.

Anything to avoid acknowledging (or worse, causing someone else to notice) that which looks like need, dependence, helplessness.

Anything to avoid being human—a creature imaged after the Architect of Sabbath rest, the endlessly interdependent Triunity.

I wonder what our culture could look like if we swapped our hyper-American definition of humanness and success for a more accurate and more Christian one.

Following Jesus is built on the acknowledgement of need and neediness. A Jesus-follower is aware of her own need—for deliverance, for guidance, for spiritual food, as well as for the New Creation community the church is supposed to be—and compassionate toward the neediness of others, especially those society deems least worthy. There’s not a lot of room in Christianity for bowing to the false god of independence, which is really just another guise for the god of self and the sin of pride.

Of all places in our world, the church should be the most welcoming to those who are dependent. To the old and infirm. To the physically disabled. To the depressed, the panicked, the addicted, the hungry, the homeless. To the babies and the children. To the women.

Jesus said of the little children, “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”—to such as are dependent, needy, of least value in a worldly sense, but most attuned to the real world beyond the veil.

The kingdom of heaven is not for the powerful or the productive or the ones who can best separate themselves from their own human needs, or the irritating neediness around them. It does not belong to the Donald Trumps or the Elon Musks or the Doug Wilsons. It’s not a place that Herods or Pharisees will feel at home.

It is for children. For big-eyed, trusting babies who never doubt for a moment that they will be fed when they cry. For men who can fear not their true human dependence. For women who learn to embrace theirs as a gift, a picture of Jesus who selflessly nourishes His church from His own body.

It is a better Eden fitted for a better Adam and Eve, a tabernacle with the veil torn in two, a temple with no need for an outer court to contain the unworthy rabble. God in Christ Jesus flings open the gates and His hand of abundance feeds us all—rich or poor, able or unable, employed or unemployed, citizen or foreigner, police or prisoner, male or female, old or young.

In that kingdom,

The wolf will live with the lamb,
and the leopard will lie down with the goat;
the calf and young lion and fatling will be together,
and a little child will lead them.

The cow will graze with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play by the cobra’s den,
and the toddler will reach into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy
on all My holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the sea is full of water.

Isaiah 11:6-9

I have often envisioned this very literally. A literal lion hanging out with a literal calf. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see such in the New Earth.

But this is about the coming of the Messiah, the Branch of Jesse, which happened two thousand years ago. This prophecy is not just for our next life—it’s a vision of the kingdom of heaven here, and what we ought to have been doing for the last 2,000 years.

Who is a lion? In the Bible, usually a king, or a person of power. Who is a snake? A deceiver or an agent of the Enemy. And who is a child? A Jesus-follower, a citizen of the kingdom.

The vision of Christ’s kingdom is one of the powerful and the powerless dwelling together in peace and joy and mutual need in the presence of the Lord, all following the wisdom of childlike trust and vulnerability. We are all less different, less separate than we think.

It’s a glorious vision that demands a total reshaping of our values and the stories we tell about ourselves. We must learn to see ourselves not as gods in our own mythologies or main characters in our own novels but as children, as fearless as my two-year-old for the trust we have in the one who empowers, feeds, and protects us. We must learn to see ourselves first as human, and human together.

I once read a poem that ended with these three lines, and I haven’t been able to shake them since, so I leave them with you:

and Babylon will fall
to a kingdom of children
who play at the adder’s den.