May 14, 2012 – Judges 19

You can look at this story and say how cruel the men are by offering up the women to save their own skin.  If that is your soul focus, you are not going to get much out of reading Scripture.  That is the way it was.  Women were not seen as they are today.  They were seen more as property than human.  Would you offer your TV to someone who threatened your life.  I think you would.  I am not condoning it, just trying to put it into cultural perspective.  We sometime read our modern understanding into a 3500 year old story. 

While we are talking about the way women are treated in the past and in the Bible, things were not much different than this when Jesus was alive.  And although Catholics have been blamed for keeping woman in the home or sexist for not allowing them to be priest, women were given very liberal roles in the early Church compared to the world in which they were in.  Women were not allowed to be witnesses in court, yet Christ uses the woman at the well as a witness to the town, Mary Magdalene was a witness to the Resurrection, and The Blessed Virgin as a witness to the Lord’s coming into the world.  Some of the roles women played in the early Catholic Church would have been shocking to the world around them.