I.
After talking about the duties of overseers (1 Tim 3:1-7) and deacons (1 Tim. 3:8-16), and after encouraging and exhorting Timothy in the exercise of ministry (1 Tim. 4:6-16), Paul spends a relatively lengthy space of the letter giving instructions not only for the care of widows but also giving some parameters for what appears to be a kind of ministry (1 Tim. 5:3-16). In other words, there seems to be a place for widows as both the objects of ministry and the subjects of ministry—a place of such worth that Paul addresses it alongside weighty matters like dealing with those who depart from the faith (1 Tim. 4:1-3), warnings against false teachers (1 Tim. 6:3-5, 9-10), and “fighting the good fight of faith” (1 Tim. 6:11-16).
Paul’s discussion of widows amidst all of these weighty matters, seems, perhaps, out of place. Which is to say that ‘The Widow’ (as a biblical type) here among these important theological issues seems strange and incongruous. It’s important in its own way sure (as an issue of mercy and justice as in James 1:27) but off-theme here, the result of poor arrangement, an afterthought among more pressing pastoral injunctions. But, I wonder, what if that is precisely the point? What if the place of the widow in our community is a measure of the health of “the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15)? For it seems that The Widow always upsets, unsettles, disturbs and measures those in power by the degree to which they find her “out of place.” She always seems to arrive at us as an after-thought amidst all of the other important endeavors to which we have a pressing and prior engagement. But Yahweh has remembered her, he has called us to remember her, and here she stands arresting our attention.
The widow’s presence in Mark 12 is such a moment of being suddenly arrested by the presence of a widow—and I use “presence” here instead of “arrival” to mark the way in which The Widow never just “appears” but, rather, having always been with us, among those we’d rather redact from our account of things to which we owe our attention, suddenly commands our attention. On the Monday of Holy Week, after effectively shutting-down the Temple (Mk. 11:15-19), Jesus is gives the parable of the tenants of the vineyard (Mk. 12:1-11) and sends the addressees scurrying away (Mk. 12:12). Then Jesus engages with the Sadducees (Mk. 12:18-27), discusses the Great Commandment (Mk. 12:28-34), explains the Davidic lineage of the Messiah (Mk. 12:35-37), and then at last, after condemning the scribes for their religious ostentation (Mk. 12:38-40), sits-down opposite the treasury and, lo and behold, there is a widow (Mk. 12:41-44).
If her presence is a kind of interruption in the flow of a narrative chiefly focused on Christ’s combat with the Jewish leaders in the Temple, it is a divine interruption. For widows are the measuring rod God lays against those who rule in order to judge the quality of their remembrance. The widow at Zarephath (1 Kings 17:7-16), as one such example, is laid against the rule of Ahab as a witness to what life is like under his reign just as the widow with the mite is plumbed against the rule of the Sadducees and Pharisees in the Temple on the Monday before the last Passover.
Widows are the measuring rod God lays against those who rule in order to judge the quality of their fidelity to God.
My chief contention in what follows is that Paul hasn’t made a mistake of rhetorical arrangement in embedding widows interruptingly within the other matters at play in his letter to Timothy. He’s following the Spirit in situating widows, as a lay order of some kind, precisely because it is widows who in God’s economy remind the church who she is. Widows are intentionally interrupting us, and it is precisely in that surprise (“Oh, a widow!”) that God speaks and adjudicates.
This is not to suggest that I am here to argue subtly “women’s ordination” or to give one of those worn-out talks about “the lack of women’s ministry in the church today.”[1] Rather I aim to reflect biblically about the role of The Widow in scripture and to sketch-out a theology of widowhood.
II.
Widows in the biblical register are only female. While good work could be done making biblical sense of the loss of a spouse for older men, when the Scriptures say “widow” they refer to a female subject. Every biblical widow, therefore, is a woman and participates in biblical womanhood, albeit in a particular way—one defined by loss and hope. Two key features of biblical womanhood are critical in understanding biblical widowhood, (1) glory and (2) motherhood. Both originate in the first woman, Eve.
One can think of the way in which Eliza takes center stage in the last song of the musical Hamilton, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?” She finishes the story, living another five decades beyond the death of her spouse. She takes the things which he began, and she makes them glorious.
– The widow wears a specific signifying garment (Gen 38:14, 19). Garments cover nakedness and exposure (Gen. 3:21). The widow has lost the covering of her bridegroom, and therefore wears a distinctive garment that signifies that she is covered by Yahweh himself. She rests under his wings, he will provide for her, he is her tabernacle. This is a theme that Isaiah picks-up later on: “Do not be afraid, you will not suffer shame […] remember nor more the reproach of your widowhood. For your Maker is your husband…” (Is. 54:4-5).
– There is a custom of having her received by the brothers of the deceased in order to “raise-up offspring” for the dead man (Gen 38:8). The death of the bridegroom does not extinguish the maternal call, it alters it. God is the one who will raise-up for the woman a seed from death and nothingness, just as he promised to do in Christ once and for all (Gen 3:15).
– The widow lays a unique claim on the justice of those in power. Judah is in some way obligated to provide for her (with sons and with an inheritance). The widow is not a politically or economically advantageous client for a patron to take on if the ultimate measure of success is material prosperity. She is not an investment. According to the flesh—for even the children she produces will not be reckoned as the offspring of the faithful brother but of the dead man. Only if we trust the God of the living and the dead (Matt. 22:32; Mk. 12:27; Lk. 20:38), one who holds promises even after the covenantal party perishes (Ex. 2:24, Ps. 105:9), one who brings things from death (Rom. 4:17), and who raises the dead (Heb. 11:19), can we reckon the widow justice.
The provision for widows expands under the Mosaic Law (cf. Ex. 22:22-24; Lev. 21:14; Deut. 14:29, 16:11, 16:14, 24:19-21, 26:12-13, 27:19). Central to all of these regulations is the logic of provision. Israel must provide for the widow because Yahweh has made her cause his own (Deut. 10:18), and the widow enjoys a special status of legal protection (e.g. her garment cannot be taken in pledge, Deut. 24:17) presumably because she is now his ward.
Like the orphan, the widow lays a unique claim upon the land of Israel. The edges of the field are to be left un-harvested for her provision. The symbolism is clear: all the land is Yahweh’s, he is the high king over Canaan, and he commands that his stewards, those to whom he has entrusted tribal allotments, care for the widows which are also his. His servants—the yeomen of Israel— must reckon her as belonging to his household.
It is in the story of Ruth that these various themes of widowhood merge into a fully-orbed image. Ruth and Naomi are both widowed. Both are without a nuptial covering. They enter the land of Israel, into Bethlehem (literally the House of Bread), Yahweh’s grain basket, and they glean in the fields of Boaz. Boaz, as commentators everywhere note, is the model for a biblically just Bridegroom Redeemer. In him Yahweh provides for the substantial needs of the two widows: grain, bread, wine (Ruth 2:14-16). Boaz also embodies Yahweh by “covering” Ruth in the fields, commanding his men not to harass her (Ruth 2:9). As a widow Ruth belongs to Yahweh, of whom Boaz is seneschal and servant. She therefore falls under his protection. Ruth doubles down on this, motivated by Naomi who (like Deborah) conceives a plan which will make a Redeemer of a man who needs some motherly persuasion (Ruth 3:1-5; cf. Judges 4:4-10).[3]
All the land is Yahweh's, he is the high king over Canaan, and he commands that his stewards care for the widows who also belong to Yahweh. God's servants must regard Israel's widows as members of their own household.
Ruth’s cry at the feet of Boaz is the simultaneous cry of the bride and the widow: “Spread your wings over me!” (Ruth 3:9). Which is to say “spread your wings over me, I am a widow in need of covering!” as well as “cover me, wrap me in your garment, take me into your tent, be to me a bridegroom!” It is to demand of Boaz that he fulfill the levirate. Boaz does so, and Ruth conceives a child. Boaz has raised-up a seed for the woman and for the deceased husband. But his faithfulness exceeds those two leviratical dimensions. He has been faithful to Naomi also. The women of the neighborhood respond to the birth of Obed strangely, “A son has been born to Naomi” (Ruth 4:17). Ruth and Naomi are the composite picture of widow-mother to whom Yahweh will be faithful. They are overlapping generations (what Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy calls “distemporaries”)[4] of widowhood. Widows make bridegrooms, widows make sons. They glorify the present generation by leaning on the promises of God, and they conceive of the future as “mothers in Israel” by leading God’s people along the paths of his covenant mercies.
III.
Widows also remember the past, and thereby measure and judge those God has put in power. God calls both Elijah and Elisha into encounters with widows (1 Kings 17:7-24; 2 Kings 4:1-7) and one of the things that results from those interactions is a judgement against the kings, the regal bridegrooms and the sons of Israel. Theirs are kingdoms, unlike David’s (cf. 1 Sam 25:39-42; 2 Sam 14:1-22; 2 Sam 21:11-13), in which widows have no voice. The princes of Israel are judged by their care for the widow, widows are the plumbline stretched against them. For instance, while Yahweh remembers the widow at Zarephath, Ahab creates widows—e.g. when he the killing of the prophets (1 Kings 18:4) or profits from the death of Naboth (1 Kings 21:1-16). Yahweh provides for the widows and their children, he raises the son of the widow from the dead (1 Kings 17:17-24). Ahab, on the other hand, profits from the death of sons, the sons of Hiel on the walls of Jericho (1 Kings 16:34) and, presumably, others at the altars to Canaanite gods (1 Kings 16:30-33; cf. Deut. 12:31; Jer 19:5 2 Kings 23:10).
Yahweh’s concern for the widow is good news because Israel herself becomes a widow (e.g. Lam. 1:1). The exile leaves Israel like Eve, dead in Adam, the first husband, dead in her sins and trespasses. She is a widow (Is. 47:8-11), but God is the redeeming bridegroom (Is. 54: 4-5).
Thus, the life of our Lord is marked by widows:
– Anna, who like Deborah serves as a prophetess and mother of Israel, hails him at his infancy (Lk. 2:36-38).
– Mary, his mother (presumably a widow by the wedding at Canna) like Deborah tells him his time as come (Jn. 2:1-5). Like Naomi she has a cunning role to play in the revelation of the Bridegroom. Naomi shuffles Ruth out the door, Mary shuffles Jesus to the stone jars. It is interesting to note the similarity also in the way these two widow mothers Naomi and Mary instruct those involved in the revealing of the Redeemers’ glory “do whatever he tells you.”
– Jesus, as the greater Elijah, raises the son of the widow of Nain (Lk. 7:11-17).
– One of Jesus’ last instructions on the Cross is for the provision of his mother (Jn. 19:25-27). He gives her to the care of his beloved disciple.
Jesus comes to his broken Israel, crushed under the heel of Rome and the heavy yoke of the scribes and Pharisees and finds her in a state of widowhood—she has lost her Bridegroom. His redemptive work not only touches the lives of real historical widows, but it also displays the way in which God is at work in redeeming humanity which finds itself, like Ruth or Naomi, without hope or promise. Like all of the widows of the Old Testament, Jesus arrives to be the kinsman redeemer, the Boaz, for all of humanity. Or, in other words, just as Yahweh has declared himself the defender of widows in general, so also Christ reveals just how far he is willing to go to defend the bankrupt and “widowed” humanity. Christ also can be understood as the ultimate son raised up by the Lord on behalf of the dead father Adam.
Indeed, Mary as the widow-mother of Christ continues in a prominent role among the fellowship of the new community of Jesus even after his Ascension. M. Cathleen Kaveny notes the way that “[j]ust as the cross, a sign of shame and death, becomes transformed in Christ into a symbol of divine glory and eternal life, so in Christ’s mother widowhood becomes reconstituted from a sign of weakness and isolation into a symbol of strength and inclusion.”[5]
This, then, is the biblical world into which Paul speaks concerning widows. The Widow mothers us in God’s story. The Widow continues the glorify and raise to maturity those things which began before many others can remember. The Widow demands that boys become bridegrooms and care for the poor and cover the naked. If the work of the Church is to labor in the Lord’s Harvest (Matt. 9:37-38), the widow has a role to play in missions as well—the edges of the field are hers to glean. Widows tell the stories we were not around to witness and would not know save for the telling of the Widow. They finish their generation’s story. The Widow tells the church when the world runs out of wine.
IV.
From these typological contours of widowhood we can make sense of the New Testament instructions regarding both the church’s care of widows and their role in ministering to the saints. Widows instruct the young women, because they once were (Titus 2:4-6). Widows, having been faithful to their own wedding vows, can speak into the marriages of the congregation and tell them “keeping your vows ‘till death’ will kill you, that’s what ‘till death’ means.” Widows sit with the struggling mom of three who hasn’t heard a full sermon in ten years, and who no longer feels attractive in a bathing suit, and who is always tired, and for whom an affair or gossip or slander or too much drink or any of the several coping mechanisms (cf. 1 Tim 5:6, 13, 15) that masquerade as a variety on “liberation” might seem a desirable alternative, and says “This will be worth it in the end.” The widow looks at the young men and says, “Lead well, the lord has chosen you.” Widows lend their voice to the prophet office of the Church saying to the kings of the earth “I am the plumb line drawn to measure your rule.” Widows help the church say the Creed, having said it herself years before many in the congregation were born. She is our living tether to the great martial array of saints who preceded us in time.
Widows arrive among us on Good Friday and tell us as we weep over Christ’s death, that they too know what it is like to bury a bridegroom. Widows are marked by age and loss. Widows suffer the loss of the bridegroom, they embody faithfulness to the end which waits on a future Bridegroom who will restore them. The widow lays a levirate claim on Yahweh. We often only conceive of the church’s eschatological cry of “come lord Jesus” as exclusively the yearning of a young bride, and while it is that, widows add a harmony line to our maranatha. It is not merely the cry of the young impassioned bride, it is the cry of the old bride who has weathered persecution, trials, testings, and the death of the beloved; it is the cry of a bride who has been faithful and true, like the name of the Rider on whom she waits (Rev. 19:11). The widow, in her hope and her proximity to death, embodies the question in her bones “grave where is thy victory? Death where is thy sting?”
V.
The ancient church, following the lines of instructions and examples of the New Testament, had a specific office or ministry for widows—not merely a ministry for them but a ministry of them. The main image used in reference to this office by the ante-Nicene fathers is of the bronze altar of the Tabernacle and Temple: “…we have already compared the brazen altar to the company and circuit of widows; for they are a living altar of God.”[6] The historic lay office of widow was an office of prayer and intercession as well as works of mercy and instruction.[7]
But prayer does not end the similarity between the office of widow and the bronze altar. The bronze altar was also a place of sacrifice, a place where life was transformed by death into a moment of communion with the Lord. The widow performs a similar operation in the life of the local congregation. If aging, as Jean Amery suggests, is that event “through which the knot and the ‘un’ of our existence make themselves known and become evident to us,” making growing older “a desolate region of life lacking any reasonable consolation”[8] then The Widow shows how God makes the place of death and desolation a place of life and communion (cf. Hos. 2:15). The very body of the widow becomes a witness against such hopelessness. The widow proclaims the truth of the final levirate: death for God’s people is not without consolation, that valley is not without hope. She brings a body scarred by time, inscribed by experience, and marked the forces of decay into the holy place of God’s House and communes with her Lord, setting an example for the Church to follow.
For many death is an unthinkable quandary—a perpetual threat we know is a real possibility, feared and yet not taken totally seriously, always arriving somewhat unexpected except in the very holy. “No one believe in his or her death,” Amery says flatly.[9] We don’t know how to process it, nor what it signifies. Someone must teach us its meaning. The Widow makes death thinkable. Not only does she bear it in her aging body, not only does she remember her departed spouse, but in her passing through the various deaths of her life, the widow is becomes a picture of what dying means for the Christian—growing closer to death and, therefore, to God. She mothers in us a vision for the Christian art of dying.[10]
Increasingly, after the papacy of Gregory (AD 590-604) the office of widow, as well as the historical order of deaconess, were subsumed by the monastic life. Thus, while early medieval monastic orders swelled with ranks of nuns and anchorites, the local parish was evacuated of its rolls of widows and its offices of deaconesses. But perhaps this absence was not felt in an incredibly acute way due to the regular ministries of mercy carried-out by the monastic communities. However, after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, these orders were not restored to their parochial expression. Then did the absence of women serving (in some capacity) in God’s house become more painfully realized, among which the role of the “widow-mother” in the parish was a key social factor. Moreover the forces at work in the following centuries (industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, popular culture, digital revolution) drew an ever tightening circle of exclusion around the elderly in general and the widowed in particular. That was a loss for the Church and for the world to which we are called. And if that loss has been real throughout the past centuries, it has reached a particularly painful state today.
Ours is a culture in which pain and old age and death pose existential problems, these are things which we must silence. Much of what currently passes under the banner of “catering to the elderly” in contemporary western Christianity is subterfuge for muting the presence of the elderly. They are rarely seen in the worship of God’s people, and they are served in ways that sequester them from full spectrum of social interaction across generations. One is right to question whether having offerings of both “contemporary” and “traditional” services at churches, as is common practice today, is actually a service to those elderly, or if it is all a way of keeping them from contaminating the younger services with the arresting testimony of the widow. Much worse are the countless ways in which video-calling technology has been deployed under a guise of safety to keep aging congregants at home (and out of sight). Our age of hypermediated connection does not, in fact, lend itself to an increased unity among the people of God. Rather, as Byung-Chul Han observes, “it serves to pass over those who are unfamiliar and other., and instead find those who are the same or like minded, ensuring that our horizon of experience becomes ever narrower” ensnaring us in an “ego loop, ultimately leading to an ‘autopropoganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas.’”[11] “Engagement” today now carries multiple meanings and we can easily equivocate when talking about “engaging with widows.” Do we mean cultivating embodied encounters or do we mean tracking the degree to which those we are tracking have responded to mediated “nudges”? Do we mean dropping some expendable income through in-app giving so that widows have food, or do we mean eating with them?
If “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is […] looking after orphans and widows in their distress” (Jas. 1:27) as well as giving them a place of service and ministry among the people of God then what we are called to is a deep conviviality—a “withing” of life. It means both orchestrating ministry of those who are the “bronze altars of prayer” as well as paying the cost of organizing rides, doing house calls, offering mediation between them and family members over matters of estate. It means enduring the telling of the same old stories for the umpteenth time, and reading long emails written in all caps criticizing your sermon. It means both making sure the widow has food today, but it also means the often more costly work of making sure all the widows have a place to go for Thanksgiving dinner.
When we talk about "engaging with widows," do we mean dropping some expendable income through in-app giving so that widows have food, or do we mean we intend to eat with them in embodied, Christian community?
Far from being a thing about which a few stories are told, a few Levitical regulations promulgated, and some curious instructions given in Paul’s letters, The Widow traces the narrative of Redemption: she points us to what it looks like to being faithful, having herself, by God’s grace, been faithful to the end. The care and support we show her and the prayers and ministry she offers for us point beyond the foreclosures of the grave to the God of the Resurrection. Her office bears witness to a world deathly afraid of Death and anything that recalls its visage, that Christian hope lies not in the denial of death, but that in the fact that Christ has conquered it. The widow stands in a particular way as an embodiment of the truth that “the Cross cannot be defeated […] for it is defeat” itself.[12]
FOOTNOTES
[1] As is the case in much of the available theological studies on widows in the Bible and the early church published by big theological publishers, e.g. Bonnie Thurston, The Widows: A Women’s Ministry in the Early Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989); Lynn Cohick and Amy Hughes, Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority, and Legacy in the Second through Fifth Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017).
[2] See the discussion in Peter Leithart, The Glory of Man (West Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2024), pp. 101-126; and James B. Jordan “Liturgical Man, Liturgical Women —Part 1 & Part 2,” Rite Reasons, Studies in Worship, No. 86 (2004), https://www.biblicalhorizons.com/rite-reasons/liturgical-man-liturgical-women-part-1-and-part-2/.
[3] There are several compelling reasons to believe that Deborah was a widow, the wife of the deceased Lapidoth (cf. Judges 4:4), which makes her claim in the song of Deborah profound: “I Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7). Though this makes for some exciting exegetical discoveries, I have chosen to avoid including Deborah so that the claims made in this essay can be traced directly to clear examples of widowhood in Scripture and don’t pose a stumbling block for those for whom the inclusion of Deborah would be a problem.
[4] Eugen Rosestcok-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock; 1970), p.28 as cited in Peter Leithart, I Respond, Though I Shall Be Changed: Essays on the Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2023), p.104.
[5] M. Cathleen Kaveny, “The Order of Widows: What the Early Church Can Teach Us about Older Women and Health Care”, Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, vol. 11:1, (2005), p.14.
[6] Methodius of Olympus, Symposium, 5.8, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0623.htm; this image is used also by Polycarp in his Epistle to the Philippians, Tertullian in To His Wife, and is found in the Didascalia Apostolorum. While I disagree strongly with many of her conclusions, I am indebted to the work of Margaret Butterfield’s dissertation “Widows as Altar in Christian Texts of the Second and Third Centuries,” PhD diss., Harvard University, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37944984.
[7] See some of the discussion in M. T. Lysaught ‘Practicing the Order of Widows: A New Call for an Old Vocation’, Christian Bioethics, 11(1), (2005) pp. 51–68.
[8] Jean Amery, On Aging: Revolt and Resignation, trans. John D. Barlow (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p.127.
[9] Amery, p. 113.
[10] For more on the Christian art of dying, of a good death, see Kimbell Kornu’s lecture “The Christian Art of Dying in a Time of Pandemic,” Theopolis Institute, (April 18, 2020). https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=223770075629997; and also Alastair Roberts, “The Christian Art of Dying Well,” Theopolis Institute Blog, (June 11, 2020), https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/78388/; and Jeffrey Bishop, “Ageing and the Technological Imaginary: Living and Dying in the Age of Perpetual Innovation,” Studies in Christian Ethics, 32(1), (2019), pp. 20-35.
[11] Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception, and Communication Today, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), p.3; Han is quoting Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin, 2011), p.15.
[12] G.K. Chesterton, “The Ball and Cross”, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol.7 (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p.152.
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