A SPACE WITHOUT MALE DOMINATION
An embarrassed and fearful woman secretly comes close to Jesus, with the confidence that she will be cured of a sickness that has humiliated her for a long time. Ruined by doctors, alone and without future, she comes to Jesus with a great faith. She is only looking for a more dignified and healthy life.
In the background of the story, you can find a serious problem. The woman suffers from loss of blood; a sickness that obliges her to live in a state of ritual impurity and discrimination. The religious laws oblige her to avoid contact with Jesus, and yet it’s precisely that contact that could cure her.
The healing takes place when that woman, educated in some religious categories that condemn her to discrimination, succeeds in freeing herself from the law in order to trust in Jesus. In that prophet sent from God, there’s a power capable of saving her. She «felt that her body was healed»; Jesus «felt the saving power that had gone out of him».
This episode, apparently insignificant, is one more expression of what is found constantly in the Gospel sources: the saving action of Jesus, who is always committed to freeing women from social exclusion, from the oppression of the man in the patriarchal family and from the religious domination found within God’s people.
It would be an anachronism to present Jesus as a feminist of our days, committed in the struggle for the equality of human rights between women and men. His message is more radical: the superiority of the male and the submission of the woman doesn’t come from God. That’s why among his followers these must disappear. Jesus conceives his movement as a space without male domination.
The relationship between men and women continues to be sick, even within the Church. Women can’t feel transparently «the saving power» that comes from Jesus. It’s one of our greatest sins. The path to healing is clear: abolish laws, customs, structures and practices that generate the discrimination of the woman, in order to make of the Church a space without male domination.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
