Woman Once Known
“I tell you the truth that wherever in the whole world this good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.” (Matthew 26:13, CEB translation)
Last Saturday, One Together, our church’s group of people who identify as single, spent a few hours at Crystal Bridges, an incredible museum of art located here in Bentonville, Arkansas. A man in my congregation who is a Norman Rockwell expert as well as a longtime guide for Crystal Bridges, gave us a marvelous tour of both the permanent collection and the temporary exhibit entitled Knowing the West.
The people who made up the tour, many of whom were already museum members, remarked on how wonderful it was to go through the museum with such a knowledgeable storyteller. I have been a fan of this man’s stories since I started serving here (plus, while not an expert, I am definitely a Norman Rockwell enthusiast), so I was certainly glad that others were able to enjoy his stories too.
At the end of the tour, he asked us to share what our favorite part of the tour was. He asked me to start, and I shared, “Besides your stories, my highlight is of course seeing Rosie the Riveter,” perhaps one of Norman Rockwell’s most well-known paintings.
But there was another moving piece for me. It was moving not particularly for the artistry, though, but instead for the description attached to the works, which were spread throughout the exhibit on the West and can also be found on occasion in the permanent collection. It is the artist’s name for each work:
Artist Once Known
It is a decision someone at Crystal Bridges made, and each time I see it, I am moved, almost to tears. Instead of being Unknown Artist, or Anonymous, Artist Once Known acknowledges that there was someone there, someone who at one time was admired for their skill, someone whose work was so beautiful that people throughout ages sought to preserve and keep it. Someone whose work was treasured.
And someone who was treasured as well. Someone who had a name and had a skill and had a purpose and made a difference in others’ lives.
As our tour guide pointed this out in the Knowing the West exhibit, he also shared that most likely most of these Artists Once Known were women. The blankets, the beaded carrying bags, the pottery, the clothing, the ceremonial caps – most likely these items were the work of craftswomen. Women who provided cover from harsh winters, told the stories of their people in the painted jugs of water they carried, even gave meaning to ritual in the crafts they produced for those moments. These were not just Artists Once Known. These were also Women Artists Once Known.
I could not miss the parallel to the Bible. I have on my shelf a CEB Women’s Bible. In the indexes in the back, there is both a list of the named women in the Bible and a list of unnamed women. The list of named women goes on for five and a quarter pages. The unnamed women list takes up seven and a quarter.
To be sure, there are unnamed men as well. Background characters who fill in the stories as soldiers or craftsmen or priests. But usually if a man takes an active role in a story, his name is given. With women, it is a toss up. Maybe her name is remembered. Maybe it is not.
One of the most poignant absences of a woman’s name is in the anointing stories. There is a story of a woman anointing Jesus in all four Gospels. Three of the stories take place near Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion. In Luke, it takes place in Chapter 7, long before the end of the story.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the anointing woman is praised for the action she has taken. And in both Matthew and Mark, Jesus states that what she has done is so meaningful, that wherever the gospel is shared, what she has done will be told in memory of her.
What she has done. But not who she is.
There is some power in a story in which a central character has no name, especially in stories meant to draw us in and help us see ourselves in the story. The absence of a name can invite us to put our own names in and play around in the story. And if there was not such a stark imbalance between the named and unnamed women, or the named men and unnamed women, that could be a very effective argument for the purpose of not giving these women a name. But the imbalance undercuts that argument to some extent.
The possible exception is in the Gospel of John, where both men and women regularly have their name omitted. John is often viewed as the most symbolic of the gospels, and many of the stories are believed to lack such details precisely so they can be representative of everyone. Thus it is surprising that the Gospel of John is the only one of the 4 Gospels to actually remember the anointing woman’s name! Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus! It is not just her action that is remembered here, but also her person!
Of course, even that gets screwed up in Christian history. A pope in the early centuries of Christianity (I am deliberately not remembering his name here – see how it feels!) preached a sermon in which he argued that “the woman from the city, a sinner” in Luke 7 obviously had to be a prostitute, because women don’t commit any sins except sexual ones, especially city women, and we also know her name is Mary because it says so in the Gospel of John, even though these 2 anointings take place at different times, and even though John clearly says it was Mary of Bethany who is Martha and Lazarus’ sister, what John meant to say was Mary Magdalene (even though Magdalene means “from Magdala” and Magdala and Bethany are very different towns not close to each other), the woman who had been tormented by seven demons, and obviously those demons had also to be sexual so surely Mary Magdalene must have been a prostitute because she (who never actually was mentioned to have anointed Jesus but her name was Mary so close enough) had to be the same woman as the woman from the city (a sinner), so Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.
Ugh.
All of this is why I have so appreciated walking through the Gospel of John with former Chancellor of the University of Arkansas John White, because he has deliberately given all the unnamed characters in the Gospel of John names. Of course he didn’t have to give the anointing woman a name in John, because she already has one! (Note: you can follow this journey we are on at the podcast Talking John, and find our episode of the anointing here).
But now I also want all of these unnamed women (and men, for that matter) to have an acknowledgement much like the artists do at Crystal Bridges: Woman Once Known.
That nomenclature is for us, though. All of these Women and Men Once Known are also Women and Men Whose Names Are Known, known by Jesus Christ. He calls their name, just as he called Mary (this time actually Magdalene) by her name in the garden on the other side of the cross. And she recognized it because knows the voice of her shepherd.
So when you are feeling anonymous, or forgotten, or as if what you do is more important than who you are, remember that you have companions all throughout the Bible in the same situation. And remember that you are also part of God’s story, written in the book of life, and called by name, always known.
