“And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”
Philippians 2:7-8
On this feast of the Holy Cross, I return to a wonderful book by Barbara E. Reid, OP, Taking Up the Cross: New Testament Interpretations through Latina and Feminist Eyes (Minneapolis, Fortress, 2007). With clarity, charity, and compassion the author, vice president and academic dean and professor of New Testament Studies at the Catholic Theological Union, walks through the different images that interpret Jesus’ death in the New Testament and for each of them explores what “taking up the cross” might mean for people of faith.
I love the way that Barbara takes on the richness and ambiguity of the cross, naming serious critical challenges and affirming its potential to give abundant life. She calls these interpretive choices “deadly directions” and “liberating possibilities.” Both choices she grounds in the real lives of women she has worked with in Latin America.
Here is the voice of a woman who describes deadly effects of the Christian teaching of obedience and submission:
“My whole life I was taught to obey; first of all, my father and mother. At age twelve my father decided who I would marry. My future husband had to come one day to pay his respects to my father and mother, and presented them with a bottle of aquadients. My father and his father made the agreement. I had no say. I could not object that I didn’t even know the man to whom my father had promised me. My only choice was to do my father’s will. …. I tried to be an obedient daughter and wife, but my father was wrong. I was not happy. My heart was always sad. I would cry out to God in my prayers, but the only answer I got was that God ordained that it should be this way.”
Women of CODIMUJ in Chiapas (Reid, Taking up the Cross, 57-58).
However, when the New Testament scriptures about the cross are read in the context of Jesus’ lifelong discernment of and choice to be faithful to God’s will to heal and save, then his example invites us to hope and freedom. Not only do the New Testament authors depict Jesus as an obedient hearer and doer of God’s will, but they portray women who do likewise. Barbara Reid elevates Martha, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the midwives Shiprah and Puah, and explicates their stories as paradigms of faithful obedience.
In the elective I am teaching this fall, B4307 Women in Early Christianity, we encountered another icon of courageous cross taking: the anonymous woman who anoints Jesus in Mark 14:3-9. She enters Simon’s house, breaks open her jar of precious ointment, and pours it all out — in a single gesture recognizing Jesus as the Christ and anointing him for burial after his death on the cross.
I pray on this feast of the Holy Cross that the most powerful symbol at the center of our faith might continue to resonant powerfully, and in our confused and violent world to be a source of freedom and life.
Cynthia Briggs Kittredge (@cbkittredge) is the Dean & President of Seminary of the Southwest. She believes that historical and literary study of scripture in its ancient context can inform and nourish the imagination for faithful preaching and teaching. Professor Kittredge, a contributor to The New Oxford Annotated Bible and the Women’s Bible Commentary, is the author of Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John and Community and Authority: The Rhetoric of Obedience in the Pauline Tradition. She co-edited The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times and Walk in the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.
