The Women in the Story of the Wounded One

part 3

This is Part 3 in the Story of the Wounded One. Find Part 1 here and Part 2 Being the Wounded One here.

Are there any women in this story?

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Let’s look at what surrounds the story of the Wounded One, the before and after, the context.

The whole scene started when a legal expert asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus answered with a question, “What does the law say?

The expert said, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus said, “Yup. Do that.”

The expert asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

And then, Jesus told the story of the Wounded One and the Good Samaritan and then our Bibles insert one of those terrible subheading divisions. These have been so prominent that people often assume terms like The Parable of the Good Samaritan or The Great Commission are inspired parts of scripture. They aren’t. So yes, I can change it to the Wounded One or Jesus’s Final Commission instead of the Great Commission (that’s for another time). They also serve to separate stories that aren’t meant to be separated, or at least weren’t originally. This is to our great detriment and has trained Christians to read stories out of their literary and textual contexts.

After the man repeats the greatest commandment and Jesus affirms him and then tells this story of the Wounded One and the Good Samaritan, the text simply keeps going.

The next story is about a dinner part and it is explicating another aspect of what it looks like to love the Lord your God with all your heart, being, strength, and mind.

The parable was about loving your neighbor.

The dinner party is about loving God.

Both stories flesh out obedience to these two great commands.

And guess what?

One of these two stories is about women.

Go figure. I’m on a kick lately of seeing where the very structure of our sacred texts points over and over and over to the partnership of women and men. Go back and read about the women shepherds if you want. Once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it. We were designed from the very beginning for partnership.

Over and over in the New Testament, Jesus is inaugurating his upside down kingdom where the first is last, the weak are made strong, the poor are made rich, the Samaritan is the good guy, and a woman sits with the men at Jesus’s feet to love God with her mind.

Let me say that again:

A woman sits with the men at Jesus’s feet to love God with her mind.

Jesus has come to a home where Martha receives him as a guest. The language implies this is Martha’s home. She has a sister, Mary. Mary sits at Jesus’s feet while Martha was busy with getting food ready for the meal. Martha says to Jesus, “Don’t you care that Mary has left me to do this work alone? Tell her to help me.”

Jesus doesn’t condemn Martha but neither does he tell Mary to get into the kitchen. Jesus doesn’t condemn Mary, either, and neither does he tell Martha to chillax and come sit down. He says what he sees - Martha is worried and distracted. Mary has chosen something important (better) and enduring.

This is not a story about sisters squabbling. It is not about women belonging in the kitchen or not belonging in the kitchen. It is not explaining how women are. Not any more than the story of a male priest walking past a wounded man explains how men are.

This story is carrying on from the earlier conversation with the legal expert. Jesus talked in a parable about how to love your neighbor or be loved by your neighbor. Now, in his actions, Jesus is talking about how to love God with all your heart, body, strength, and mind.

In Luke 10, this story is the example of someone loving God with their mind. It flows from Jesus’s conversation with the man who questioned him just as much as the Wounded One/Good Samaritan flows from that conversation.

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By way of contrast, here is Martin Luther on women and the mind: For woman seems to be a creature somewhat different from man, in that she has dissimilar members, a varied form and a mind weaker than man.

And John Knox: Nature I say, paints [women] further to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish.

Origen: What is seen with the eyes of the Creator is masculine, and not feminine, for God does not stoop to look upon what is feminine and of the flesh.

John Chrysostom: God maintained the order of each sex by dividing the business of life into two parts, and assigned the more necessary and beneficial aspects to the man and the less important, inferior matter to the woman.

I don’t want to get into more modern-day quotations because they are so wearisome. If you know, you know. (I just bought Beth Allison Barr’s book Becoming the Pastor’s Wife and was so tempted to order five just to get the bonus swag of a pink t-shirt that reads “Women: Preaching and Pastoring Since AD 1” but alas, that’s not in the budget.)

Here is the point. Jesus did not say stop loving me with your mind, Mary. Jesus didn’t ignore her because he couldn’t look at female flesh. Jesus didn’t assign something inferior to Mary.

Here is what Jesus said about Mary as she sat his feet, learning:

“Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.”

There are two women in this story, one loving God with her mind and one struggling to grasp the concept. Just like the men in the story of the Wounded One. This is not a story for women only because there are no active men in it (other than Jesus). Not any more than the previous story is for men only because there are no women in it. Together, the two stories capture Jesus’s point about loving God and loving neighbor. Men struggle to do it and men succeed in doing it. Women struggle to do it and women succeed in doing it.

Love the Lord your God with all your mind. Love your neighbor.

Here’s a guy doing it (Luke 10:30-37). Here’s a lady doing it (Luke 10: 38-42).

Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.

Love your neighbors, ladies and gents. Love God, ladies and gents.

It will cost you your body, strength, soul, and mind. That’s why you need each other. It won’t be easy. Learn from each other’s examples and encourage one another to strive after these better things.

Being the Wounded One

parable of the wounded one, part 2

This is Part 2 to The Parable of the Wounded One. You can find Part 1 here.

Here is a quick story of what this looked like for me just a few weeks ago, when I was the Wounded One.

In February I spoke at Crown College in Minnesota. I talked about the story of the Wounded One and then I drove home. I try to turn the story of the Good Samaritan upside down, encouraging especially American Christians to recognize ways we are not always the helper, giver, or savior, but that we are sometimes the one in need of help. Even service can come from a posture of triumphal overlording, if we refuse to acknowledge our own weakness and need.

Anyway…

Within about 10 minutes of starting for home, I nailed a pothole in the road. Like a serious pothole. The kind that would swallow a camel in Djibouti. Or a GTI Golf in Minnesota. I know how to avoid them in Djibouti, could practically drive down our road with my eyes closed and tell you every bump and hole. But I was not expecting one on Highway 7 at 55 mph.

Nailed it.¹

Popped the front driver’s side tire and dented the rim of the car.

It was a mess.

I pulled over and got to work changing the tire.

(this is a popped tire in Djibouti, not Minnesota. It actually exploded like this while sitting on the back of the car in the sun on a hot summer day. We were inside the house and heard the POP. That’s how hot it was there.)

I could not figure out how to change that stinking tire. It is a newish car, more techy than the old Land Cruisers I’m used to that we drove in Africa.

A driver pulled up behind me and a White, Christian, American man got out. He was one of the other speakers who had been at Crown with me. We met over lunch.

“I actually don’t know how to change a tire,” he said. “Should probably learn!”

He offered to give me a ride somewhere but I preferred to stay with the car and figure it out, so he drove on. Even though he couldn’t help, it was kind of him to stop.

I got on the phone to call roadside assistance when another car pulled up and another man jumped out, a Brown man with a thick, non-American accent.

“Help?” he said.

“Yes!” I said.

He got right to work where I had left off and boom bang boom, tire was changed. It was so fast and he kept smiling the whole time. Huge grin on his face. We talked a little bit, but his English wasn’t strong. I learned that he is a newly arrived immigrant from Turkmenistan and has been in the USA for five months.

Newly arrived immigrant.

From Turkmenistan.

All I kept thinking was, I am so glad you are here.

Turkmenistan is 89% Muslim.

It is likely I had a Muslim Good Samaritan.

He was so kind and so thoughtful. He even gave me baby wipes to wash my hands and made sure that I got safely back onto the super-busy road before pulling out behind me and waving me on my way.

I teared up as I drove the rest of the way home.

This was exactly what I had just been talking about at Crown College, exactly what I have experienced over my twenty years in the Horn of Africa. I have been neighbored and served over and over by the Muslims in my life, both Muslims I know as friends and Muslim strangers who pull up beside my flat-tired-car.

I am so glad they are in my life.

I am so glad they are here.

When have you been served by a Good Samaritan you weren’t expecting?

Why do you think we always imagine ourselves as the one to help, not the one in need?

When is the last time you looked at a newly arrived Muslim immigrant and thought, I’m glad you are here?

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Next week Part 3: The Women in the Story of the Great Commandment and the Wounded One

1. Yes, we submitted a claim to the city. They replied that because they had no “previous knowledge” of this pothole, they cannot be held at fault. So I guess just deny you know anything ever is the lesson? I don’t know how it is my fault that there was a pothole that dangerously large in my lane on a major highway. If I’d been in our Jeep, I probably would have rolled the car. And no, I wasn’t speeding. I was, impatiently, stuck following behind two large trucks that couldn’t get up to speed.

Loaves and Fishes, Library-Style

How to Be Human, with Lari

(I started a 4-part series last week about the parable of the Wounded One from Luke 10. However, I had the immense pleasure of interviewing this lovely young lady and wanted to share her story. So I am bumping the next part of the Wounded One series to next week. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did).

The world is on fire. Gaza and Israel. Ukraine and Russia. Sudan. Ethiopia. The USA making Canadians angry, like the nicest people in the world angry? Every morning the news is a fresh flurry of 💩.

When Covid began sweeping the planet and we were all in the early stages of terror, anxiety, shock, sickness, anger…all the things, I went for a walk with a friend in Djibouti. Don’t worry, we were outside, distanced, all good. I remember looking down at our feet where a little yellow flower was forcing its way up through rocks and debris.

“The world is a 💩 show,” I said to my friend, “but beauty insists on being beautiful.”

That flower spoke hope to me. She was designed to be beautiful and she was going to live into that design even when it meant growing up through a pile of trash in the hottest country on the planet. Her little yellow power transformed that block, in my mind, calling it to be better than trash and rocks and debris, calling the whole street into goodness.

We need this. We always need this. But when I wake up in the morning these days and check the news (after coffee!), I also need a dose of goodness and beauty insisting on being itself: good and beautiful.

Last week I interviewed my third grade niece about a story I’d heard from her mother, my sister, because it was the most precious thing I’ve heard in a long time. Now, I’m sharing it with you.

Here is a story, based on my interview with Lari, of goodness and beauty, reminding us how to be human. Loaves and fishes, library-style.

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Lari (not her real name) is a reader, writer, and illustrator. She loves the school library and the librarian, Mrs. Gallagher.

“She helps me pick out books she knows I will like, and if I read a book fast and turn it in early, she lets me take out a new book.”

Lari got a $25.00 gift card for her birthday and started to dream about what she could buy.

Valentine’s Day was approaching, and Lari usually gave Valentine’s cards to her classroom teachers.

“But all of a sudden, I had this idea of giving a book to the librarian. I usually don’t even give cards to the extra teachers like the librarian or the PE teacher. But I had all this money and I thought, I’ll give Mrs. Gallagher a book for the library. I can use my birthday money for it!”

“My mom took me to the bookstore and I picked out two books for the librarian.”

Lari loved a book called A Wolf Called Wander, by Rosanne Parry, a Portland-based writer. The story is based on a true story about a wolf who traveled over 1,000 miles to find a home. There was a sequel to that book that the school library didn’t have yet, so Lari picked up that, A Wolf Called Fire. It had just been released the week before Valentine’s Day.

“There was also another book by Rosanne Parry, so I got that one, too.” Lari laughed and said, “My mom had to add like $2.00 because I didn’t have enough money for both books plus tax.”

Lari brought the books to Mrs. Gallagher, for the library.

“I didn’t read them first, I wanted to give them to her first. She was so surprised. She said, ‘Oh my gosh, these are for the library?! Thank you so much!’”

Later, Lari checked out the books herself. She laughed about that, too, checking out the books she had purchased.

“It felt good to give the books to the librarian and really, that means I gave the books to like 500 kids.”

A month later, Rosanne Parry came to a book event near Lari’s hometown. She and two friends went to meet her.

“But first,” Lari said, “We went to church where it was a a special day to wear our pajamas and bring a stuffy (stuffed animal) and my friend didn’t have time to go home and change, so she came to meet Rosanne Parry in her pjs, with her stuffy, that was funny!”

Parry signed Lari’s book. She made sure to show me the autograph over Zoom.

How many third graders would spend their birthday money on books for everyone? How many of us have the spontaneous generosity or creativity to consider how our abundance can be increased for abundance for everyone?

This is loaves and fishes. One child’s lunch multiplied to feed over 5000 men plus women and children in the New Testament. One child’s birthday money multiplied for 500 other readers.

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Lari and I also talked about her writing and illustrating work and here are a few key takeaways for other writers:

• Sometimes I feel like my writing isn’t very exciting and I need to put something exciting in there.

• I need a punch or a statement point in my stories.

• I have a writing group and we share our stories.

• We write stories about the same characters from different points of view and help each other figure out better endings.

• I have an editor (her older sister). She helps add good words and fixes my mistakes.

• My stories now might not be the ones I publish when I’m an adult, but they are helping me practice.

• It is hard to erase what I already wrote. Sometimes like three whole pages! But Rosanne Parry told me I should keep it, like put it somewhere else because maybe I’ll use it later.

Wise words!

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What is it to be human? In a world of scarcity and fear, isolationism and anxiety, I think it is to be kind. To be generous. To respond to our sudden urges to bring others joy.

It is to insist on goodness and it is to allow that goodness to spread out, like a little yellow flower, like a third-grader using her birthday money to buy two books for a librarian and 500 kids.

Do you have a story about how to be human?

The Parable of the Wounded One

part 1

Do you know the story Jesus told about the Wounded One?

The story is popularly known as the story of the Good Samaritan and is found in Luke 10.¹

I want challenge you to reread the story but to reframe it as the story of the Wounded One and then come back and read the rest of this post. It is part one of four. Spoiler alert, part three will bring women into the story.

**

Jews and Samaritans were not friends. They agreed on just enough about God to fight over who was right about God, to be competitive about religion. Samaritans read the same Torah, worshipped the same God and observed the same festivals as Jews. But Samaritans did not worship in Jerusalem, they worshipped on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. They also had ethnically mixed with Gentiles from as long ago as 720 BC. Jews, including Jesus’s disciples, couldn’t imagine anything good about Samaritans.

In John 8:48 Jews ask Jesus, “Aren’t we right in saying you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?!” Just one chapter before the story of the Wounded Man, in Luke 9, Jesus and the disciples are kept from stopping in a Samaritan village and the disciples are so self-righteously enraged they ask if they can call down fire from heaven to destroy the village. Jesus tells them to get over themselves.

And then a few verses later Jesus tells this scandalizing story about a merciful Samaritan. Samaritans do not stop to help Jews and Jews don’t want them to. Until the Jew is naked, beaten, and abandoned in a ditch. From this position of need and vulnerability maybe, just maybe, the person who thinks he has the right ideas is ready to have his conceptions about who is good and who is merciful overturned.

We love to take this parable and place ourselves in it. The provoking questions become: What kind of neighbor are you? Priest, the Levite, or Samaritan? Are you going to show mercy, be a good neighbor? Or are you too consumed by your religious duties or moral purity or pressing schedule that you can’t be bothered to help someone in need? But that’s not the only lesson here, and Priest, Levite, Samaritan aren’t the only players in this story.

What about the bandits? Have you ever asked if you are possibly in the position of causing harm? Have you taken advantage, left damaged people in your wake, even unintentionally? Or the innkeeper? Have you ever been in the right place at the right time and someone else was blessed because of your establishment?

And then there is this wounded man. Have you ever been the wounded one? The one in need of mercy, the one in need of being neighbored? I don’t mean in the specific sense of having been attacked and lying on the side of the road necessarily, but in the sense of vulnerability, of needing help? In my experience, authentic connecting happens in the refining fire of receiving mercy from the very people we think we are supposed to serve.

Most of us probably much prefer to do the neighboring and see ourselves in that Good Samaritan character, at least that is who we want to be. And, if we’re honest, I think most Christians think we are the Good Samaritan. Maybe on a crabby day we’re the Priest but we are never the Wounded One. Not the Wounded One. Especially not in front of people we are “ministering to” or if those people are potential spiritual competition or enemies.

Who is the last person on earth you would want to come along in your time of need, maybe give you mouth to mouth CPR? Who would you never want to be indebted to? Who do you hide your weaknesses and pain from? Republicans, Democrats, LGBTQAI+, different races and ethnicities and religions, someone with different theological convictions?

From the perspective of the wounded man lying naked and half-dead, anyone, anyone who stops by to help is your new best friend, your neighbor. You don’t care if this neighbor looks like you, thinks like you, worships like you. You just care that they show you mercy when you need it most.

It is transformative to be in a position of needy vulnerability and to be served by someone.

I moved to a rural village in northern Somalia (Somaliland) in the Horn of Africa thinking I was going to be a good neighbor. I was not needy or vulnerable, I was an American! Well-educated, comparatively wealthy, physically healthy, and armed with all the right answers to spiritual questions. I was going to help people. I was ready to be the Good Samaritan.

The first day in Somalia in 2003 my 2-year-old daughter fell off the roof. The twins had been exploring the new house with my husband and climbed up a rickety ladder. My husband half broke her fall, but she hit the cement hard. In the end she was incredibly absolutely fine. But we were terrified. Our first daylight hours here and our vulnerability was totally exposed. We thought we had come to Somalia to do great things for God and it turned out that the people we intended to “serve” and maybe even “save” saved our lives time and time again and I mean this literally. They saved our physical lives as we navigated how to respond to death threats, helped me find pediatricians, stopped me from foolishly walking toward gun battles I failed to recognize, protected us during political violence, surrounded me with armed guards while I ran the inaugural marathon.

How many times in Djibouti have Somali women cared for me when I felt helpless and confused? Once outside a women’s tea shop a man started harassing me. The owner, all the employees, and all the customers saw what was happening, poured out of the tea shop and started throwing their shoes at him and he bolted. A few years ago, my teammate and four other women were camping in the north of Djibouti when a sudden storm washed away the road. Five Somali men spent ten hours walking eight miles down the mountain in front of the car as my teammate drove down. They literally rebuilt the road as they walked, ensuring these ladies would get down safely. I could tell story after story of how we have been well-neighbored by the people we were “ministering to”.

I can’t think of a more effective way to grow in faith than the spiritual practice of being vulnerable and shown mercy by a religious “other”.

Jesus is constantly exposing prejudices and overturning convention. The people listening to Jesus’s story of the Wounded One and the good Samaritan were likely scandalized. They thought they knew the answer to the question about how to inherit eternal life: love God, love neighbor. Jesus turns this upside down and makes them think about the religious enemy as capable of showing them, the Chosen Ones, mercy. He’s also saying hey, you who think you’ve got it all together as those Chosen Ones – you might end up in pain one day, wounded and needy. Will you let someone serve you, maybe even someone you despise?

Can we be honest about our pain? The wounded man couldn’t hide what he’d gone through from the Samaritan. He wasn’t too proud and didn’t insist on getting himself to the inn. He accepted the help of someone he would never have worshipped alongside.

Historically a lot of ministry has come out of a triumphant attitude, and there is triumph in Christianity but it belongs to Jesus. Christians, especially us American ones, seem to think we need to give, build, lead, create, instruct, teach…what if we actually need to receive, cooperate, follow, participate, listen, learn?

I’m not saying don’t be a Good Samaritan and I’m not saying indiscriminately spread your weaknesses all over the place. But I am saying it is okay to be vulnerable and needy. It is okay to let other people into our hardships and pain and to let them neighbor us.

When have you been well-neighbored by someone you might have been inclined to fear or who you thought you were supposed to serve?

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Next Week Part 2: When I was the Wounded One in February 2025

Then Part 3: The Women in the Story of the Greatest Commandment and the Wounded One

Then Part 4: Thinking about Race and the Body and the Wounded One

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If you’re here for ghostwriting posts, go here.

1. I think people in positions of power came up with that title.

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