Breaking the Patriarchal Mould | The Story of Joanna

April 22, 2020

In her book Women in a Patriarchal World Elaine Storkey focuses on the stories of women who faced a range of challenges and life-changing decisions. In this extract from the book we learn about Joanna, a woman who broke tradition by spending little time at home on the duties prescribed for wives at the time.

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One of the aspects of a patriarchal culture is that women are subsumed under the category of ‘men’. They don’t count on their own. So when Luke names women who were followers of Jesus, we know he is breaking the patriarchal mould. One of the women he mentions is Joanna.

The women who accompanied Jesus on his travels were no less significant than the male disciples. We can assume that they each had their own call from Jesus to follow him. But whereas Jesus largely invited the 12 men to be followers as they were doing their normal work, the call to the women was different. In some cases it seems to have come through an experience of healing. It is unsurprising perhaps that Luke gives us this information, for, as a doctor, he had a particular and professional interest in healing. Joanna is mentioned along with Susanna and Mary Magdalene as someone who was cured of ‘evil spirits and infirmities’. However, unlike Mary’s problem, which is specifically cited in terms of deliverance, we don’t know anything about the nature of Joanna’s healing. We don’t know what her infirmity was or what brought her to Jesus.

We do know, however, that she became a devoted follower of Jesus, so the initial encounter must have been powerful. From that time on, she wanted to be in his company and share somehow in his ministry to other people.

We need to understand the significance of this mixed group of itinerant followers. It was unusual and counter- cultural, to say the least. The Jewish rabbis taught that women should not even socialize with men who were not their relatives, much less travel with them. In fact, Jewish men were discouraged from having any substantial discourse with women outside the family. Jesus was acknowledged as a rabbi but, in disregarding such traditions, clearly welcomed Joanna and the other believing women as his companions on the journey.

If it was unusual for single women to be in Jesus’ group of followers, it was unheard of for married women to be following a roving rabbi. Joanna stands out as someone who broke with tradition on a number of counts. She was married, yet seemed to spend little time at home on duties prescribed for wives. Even more, she was married to an important official, and her absence would surely have been noted by many people in his orbit.

Luke describes Joanna in relation to her marital status, in keeping with accepted protocol. She was ‘the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household’. Her husband was a palace man; no run-of-the-mill officer, but someone entrusted by Herod with many of the key aspects of domestic management; most translations call him Herod’s ‘household manager’. So this immediately raises a very interesting question. What was the wife of a man busy with the affairs of the Galilean king doing following an itinerant rabbi rather than supporting her husband in his role, and maintaining her own domestic responsibilities towards her household? We don’t know. Curiously, we are not told whether she also fulfilled her domestic roles, or whether she simply left her husband to cope as well as he could. Yet it was so abnormal for the wife of a high-up official to be wandering around towns and villages with a teacher and his disciples that we must wonder what Chuza made of it.

There are some clues to this in the situation itself. First, it would not be normal for a married woman to go absent without leave, so we can assume that Chuza knew where she was and that she was travelling with Jesus. In fact, if this had been any kind of defiant act towards her husband, she would not have been his wife for very long! A patriarchal society did not encourage men to tolerate independence in their wives and made it relatively easy to divorce them. So we can assume she had her husband’s support for the way she spent her time.

Second, we know that Joanna supported Jesus financially, and possibly the disciples also (Luke 8.3). Luke records that the women gave out of their own means, which implies that Joanna had her own income, either independently of her husband, which was unlikely, or through his sharing income and wealth with her. Again, it would have been unusual for a man to give his wife a free hand in the way she spent their resources, and this too suggests that Chuza both trusted Joanna and respected her decisions.