“Now I Will Have Respect”; “Now I Will Be Looked Up To” – Women Assert Their Worth in the Christmas Story by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

“The Giver of Breath has looked upon me with kindness and has taken away my shame. Now I will have respect in the eyes of my people.” -Elizabeth (Luke 1:25, First Nations Version [FNV])

“From deep in my heart I dance with joy to honor the Great Spirit. Even though I am small and weak, he noticed me. Now I will be looked up to by all. The Mighty One has lifted me up!” -Mary (Luke 1:46-49a, FNV)

Two women, one older, one younger. Both unexpectedly pregnant. Both key players in the Christian Advent story. Both living in a world, not unlike ours today, where women were not fully acknowledged as complete human beings, with all the strength and agency this entails. And both, for this reason, starving for the respect of their loved ones and communities.

According to the biblical gospel of Luke, this is all part of the Christmas story.

I recently read Elizabeth and Mary’s words in these narratives as recounted by the First Nations Version of the New Testament—translated by a team of Native North American scholars. Sometimes reading translations we’re less familiar with can help us see old stories in a fresh light. On this particular reading, I was struck by both women’s brazenness in declaring: I will have respect. And, I will be looked up to by all.

If you’ve spent some time in an evangelical church—can you imagine a woman saying these things in that context? I can, and it’s not pretty.

I can see the judgmental side-eyes. I imagine other women ushering their children in a different direction, to sit in a different pew far away from this arrogant woman who might be a bad influence on them. I can hear the men in power calling her a Jezebel, saying she has a rebellious spirit that needs to be subdued. She’s forsaking her womanly calling to submit to the authority of others, the authority of men.

Or, in nicer iterations—in the kinds of spaces I reflect on in Nice Churchy Patriarchy—God calls us all to be humble. These women are speaking pridefully. It’s not about gender. It’s that none of us should want people to respect us or look up to us. We are to make ourselves less, to decrease ourselves that God might increase in and through us. Not just women, but everyone.

But it is, of course, about gender. As Shannon K. Evans writes in The Mystics Would Like a Word: Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today: “For many of us [women], being seen as arrogant or selfish is the most heinous of crimes and one that we have orchestrated our entire lives to avoid.” The characteristics of pride, humility, self-sacrifice, growth, respect, and value operate differently across power dynamics. And the gendered power dynamics in our world—and especially in patriarchal faith communities—are strong.

It is for this reason that I’m so taken with Elizabeth and Mary’s courageous, hard-won assertions of their own worth. I want respect. It’s okay that I want respect. I want to be valued. It’s good that I want to be valued.

These biblical women want more. They want to be treated with more respect than people have treated them in the past. They want their worth and dignity more fully acknowledged by their communities. They want to be seen for the complex, amazing humans they know they are.

And the biblical texts do not portray these women’s wanting as wrong. Both women are held up as shining examples of faith. Mary, the favored one, to whom the angel speaks, chosen to mother God incarnate. Elizabeth, an embodiment of brave faith, rejoicing in her deeply desired but impossible pregnancy while her husband doubted.

What I see in these women’s words is that we, too, as women today, are not wrong to want more. We, too, deserve respect. When we aren’t receiving the respect we deserve, we can choose to have hard conversations when possible, or remove ourselves from particular people or spaces when necessary. Even if our agency is not respected in the policies of our country as a whole, at least among our churches and our communities—at least among the people we know and love—I hope we are respected. I hope we settle for nothing less.

And I hope, too, to echo Mary’s words, that we seek to live in a way such that others might look up to us. I hope we live in mutuality, learning from one another and recognizing that others might learn from us. I hope we embrace the reality that we have something to offer. We have so much to offer. I hope we embrace a spirituality that lifts us up and doesn’t ask us to make ourselves smaller.

I’m hopeful, this Advent season, that more and more women—Christian women, or anyone to whom these Christmas stories mean something—might hear Elizabeth and Mary’s self-declarations of strength and honor, and follow boldly in their way.