Courage Is for Humans
Today was my day topost over at Tapestry. Here's what I wrote: A class I teach includes an overview of women in churchhistory. In addition to reading accounts of women martyrs, students watch thefilm “Iron Jawed Angels.” Most people don’t realize that Alice Paul, a keyleader in the fight for suffrage in the USA, was a Quaker.
Driven by her conviction that God made man and woman equal,Alice Paul worked tirelessly for a constitutional amendment giving women thevote. After viewing the film, one of my students wrote this to me: “All was welluntil completing the reading for class today and seeing Iron Jawed Angels. Themovie had an enormous impact on me. I've realized that all throughout the lastfew months the word that keeps coming up both within and outside of me is‘courage.’”She went on to say that she had always thought of courage asa manly quality rather than a human quality. But as a result of her Spirit-led,film-inspired clarity, she realized courage was for women, too. Consequently,her plans shifted from spending a summer in comfort to pursuing a ministryopportunity in Ethiopia. And that summer in Africa has led to a lifetime ofservice planned as a missionary living overseas.
I’ve mentioned this story in the past, and I tell it againbecause I continue to encounter people who associate courage with manhood,which is all well and good, until they disassociated it from womanhood. Ifcourage is manly, they think, then “a woman who acts courageously is actingagainst her gender. Men were made to rescue, but women were made to berescued.”
As many conservative churches focus on biblical manhood andbiblical womanhood, teaching in some of these contexts at times borders onmentoring in Christian subculture norms rather than the Bible. How can aChristian female roofer in America risk being labeled as “unfeminine,” but a female Christian rooferin Kenya is “doing women’s work”? Aren’t biblical norms supposed to beuniversal and timeless?
I am all for being masculine and feminine. Truly. But whenthe labels prohibit us from experiencing our full dynamic range of personhood,and when our churches teach conformity to these labels, aren’t we missingsomething? Why not focus instead on pursuing Christ and the fruit of the Spiritembodied as a woman or embodied as a man? After all, Jesus cooked fish, Jacobcooked stew, and the deacons in Acts 6 served the widows their food. If weteach service to one another, our applications might even challenge gendernorms at times in the name of love and service.
I would argue that courage is for males. But it is also forfemales. Are not all believers told throughout scripture to “have courage”? Andwhat is “fear not” but a reminder to put off fear and put on courage? More tothe point, what was Queen Esther, if not courageous in the face of death? Didshe wait for Mordecai to come rescue her? No, she rose up and rescued not onlyherself, but an entire people group.
And what about Jesus? According to the story in Matthew 9,our Lord encounters a woman with a “female” problem. And notice what Herequires of her: “But a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage fortwelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. For she keptsaying to herself, ‘If only I touch his cloak, I will be healed.’ But whenJesus turned and saw her, he said, ‘Have courage, daughter! Your faith has madeyou well.’ And the woman was healed from that hour.”
His only imperative was, “Have courage, daughter”?
She was made to be courageous!