By Patrick McCormick | FāVS News Columnist
Last year was America’s biggest, broadest and most sustained year of protests, with hundreds of groups organizing events in thousands of sites involving millions of Americans. By year’s end a rising tide of anti-Trump protests had occurred in an unprecedented 60% of U.S. counties (cutting deep into MAGA country) and drawn over 7 million people to a single day event.
Though conservative Christians form the heart of Trump’s MAGA base, millions of other Christians, alarmed by Trump’s assaults on immigrants, foreign aid, government workers, health care, the environment and democracy, joined last year’s protests.
But what might surprise most of Trump’s Christian supporters and critics is that the Scriptures not only oppose cruel and corrupt rulers and demand justice for immigrants, minorities and the poor, but they strongly urge us to bodily protest unjust structures. Indeed, in the Gospels Jesus and several women resist and transform worldly hierarchies by refusing to stay in their assigned places, modeling how anyone can stand up to injustice.
Many Christians know Jesus constantly resisted unjust hierarchies with a radical set of table manners, breaking bread with outcasts, teaching his disciples to feed, serve and eat with the lowly, and calling masters to wait on servants, as he did in John 13. Surrendering his own privileged position – and challenging us to do the same, Jesus protested the unjust hierarchies of the “kingdoms of the world” by taking a seat among strangers, servants, and sinners.
Mary commands her son at the Wedding at Cana
But few Christians note Gospel accounts of matching protests from rebellious women taking higher seats at the table. These women resist unjust hierarchies – and expand Jesus’ own table manners – by refusing to stay in their subordinate places and claiming forbidden seats and authority.
And while accounts of the Lord protesting hierarchy by taking a lower place at its tables remind us to reject the ambitions and avarice of unjust kingdoms, tales of these women dismantling hierarchies by taking seats forbidden them shows unjust structure can be resisted from below and banishes apathy and despair in the face of tyranny.
In John’s account of the wedding at Cana, Mary forces Jesus’ hand to supply a miraculous bounty of wine. The marvel here is not that Jesus – as he does in six accounts of the multiplication of loaves – provides a feast, but that Mary, a widow and minor guest, wears down her rabbi son and saves the day by audaciously claiming the rank of host.
As in Luke’s parable of the persistent widow bending an unjust judge to her demands, the indefatigable Mary presses Jesus to act, ignores his resistance and instructs servants as if she were master of the banquet. Finally, this widow’s refusal to be silenced, dismissed or stay in her assigned place as a female guest is even more striking because Mary’s successful protest occurs at a wedding feast – where women are handed over by their fathers to become their husbands’ property and obedient servants. Not this woman.
A ‘sinful woman’ crashes Simon’s banquet
Another Mary protests unjust hierarchies in Luke 10 when, while helping her sister serve dinner to Jesus and his male disciples, she steps out of her assigned role as kitchen maid and claims a seat as dinner guest and disciple. Neither Jesus nor anyone else invites Mary to take this step. Rather, she rebelliously protests patriarchy on her own initiative, and this protest forces Jesus to expand his own table manners.
For in rebuffing Martha’s complaint about her uppity sister by saying Mary has “chosen the better part” Jesus recognizes Mary’s right (and, presumably, the right of Martha and all women) to resist her gendered subjugation as a maid and protest hierarchy by freely choosing to break its norms and take her rightful higher place at a reconstructed table.
In Luke 7 another audacious woman protests unjust hierarchies when she crashes the Pharisee Simon’s banquet to bathe his guest Jesus’ feet with her tears and perfume. Identified only as a public sinner, this moral pariah seeks to force the community of the righteous to welcome her back into their ranks by securing a public absolution from Jesus.
Protesting the hierarchical table manners that shunned her as an outcast, this courageous woman dares take up the role of a holy man’s servant, washing a guest’s feet. But even more, by anointing Jesus and showing him greater hospitality than Simon, this outcast has acted as both priest and host and pushed Jesus to grant her the public forgiveness needed to claim her seat at a more just table.
Why nonviolent resistance works
Finally, in Mark 7 another female outcast demands a rearrangement of table hierarchies to make room even for those we consider beasts. Here a Syrophoenician woman crashes into a home where Jesus has retreated to rest and throws herself at the feet of this Jewish Rabbi, begging him to exorcise demons possessing her daughter.
And when he rebuffs her, claiming his healing powers are not meant for foreign “dogs” like her, this Gentile mother turns this humiliating slur on its head and responds that at a just table, even dogs are entitled to food scraps. Struck by her tenacity and love, Jesus reverses himself and expands his table manners to make room for this foreign mother and her daughter.
The scholar Erica Chenoweth has shown that when 3.5% of a society engage in sustained, creative and nonviolent resistance this mustard seed movement can topple even the most entrenched and violent regimes. She has also demonstrated that nonviolent resistance is twice as effective as force, and that women, who bring more creativity and social resources to the struggle are often at the head of successful protest campaigns.
For millions of U.S Christians tempted to despair or apathy from fear that nonviolent resistance from below is useless in the face of an increasingly autocratic and violent government, Chenoweth’s scholarship and Gospel accounts of rebellious women dismantling unjust hierarchies gives us hope and reason to join the avalanche of protests spreading across our land. Go and do likewise.
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.
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