The Unsung Heroes

Karl Barth was a Swiss reformed theologian. He was well-known for his multi-volume theological work, Church Dogmatics, a commentary on Romans, and the Barmen Declaration – a Christian document speaking against the Nazi government. Many say that Karl Barth single-handedly stopped German liberal theology from taking over the world.

In recent years, people started scrutinizing his relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum. She was his colleague, critic, researcher, advisor, collaborator, assistant, and confidante, and Barth credited her for most of his work. The confession of his love for her and Charlotte moving into the house of Barth as Aunt Charlotte has come under great scrutiny in modern days, although no evidence is given for emotional or physical adultery between them.

A few decades ago, Dan Brown’s The da Vinci Code hit the bookshelves and the theaters. Its premise: Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdalene, and their child was the holy chalice. A few decades earlier, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar portrayed Mary Magdalene as wanting to have a romantic relationship with Jesus and couldn’t.

In contrast to these, evangelical Christianity is afraid to speak of Jesus’s relationship with his female followers, perhaps thinking it would sound as bad as Karl Barth’s relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum. How could a couple of opposite sex have a plutonic relationship as intimate and non-sexual as David’s and Jonathan’s? Only in eternity will we get a comprehensive idea of Jesus’s relationship with the unsung heroes – women that followed him and ministered to him.

As Jesus died on the cross,

Several women were watching from afar. Among them: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jacob/James the son of Micros,* the mother of Joseph, Salome, and all the ladies who followed him from Galilee and ministered to him. Many other women traveled with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. (15:40–42)

Luke and John list Martha, her sister Mary, Susanna, Joanna, and Peter’s mother-in-law as people who supported Jesus’s ministry from their living expenses (Luke 8, John 11). But a partial list of women that might have followed Jesus could include the woman with the blood issue, Jairus’s wife and daughter, Jesus’s sisters, the Syrophoenician woman and her daughter, the mother of James and John (the sons of Zebedee), the two women who anointed Jesus with myrrh, “the other Mary,” the widow who gave two mites, Elizabeth (his aunt), Mary (his mother), Anna the prophetess, the widow of Nain, the Samaritan woman at the well, a woman caught in adultery, the mother of the man born blind (John 9), and Mary the wife of Clopas (John 19:25). Many of these followed Jesus and ministered to him – breastfed him and raised him (Mary), cooked him meals (Martha), washed his feet (Mary), washed his hair (the woman of the street), paid for his travel and living expenses (Susanna and Joanna), buried him (Mary Magdalene, Salome, and other Mary-s), and witnessed his resurrection (Mary Magdalene, his mother, and other Mary-s).

While we are grateful for the male disciples who preserved Jesus’s words and works for us, we must be equally thankful for the female disciples who kept the Lord safe and cared for. They, too, contributed to the Scriptures. For example, Mary, the mother, would have been the source of information about Jesus’s childhood. Those women were copartners in the Lord’s ministry, and we must honor them as such.

* Most translations give the adjectival meaning, “Jacob/James, the lessor.” But it can also be that his father’s name was Micros.