In Memory of Her! Exploring the Political Power of Readings—Feminist and Ecological

The Political Power of Readings

Second-wave feminism has long been characterized as a political movement, one in which women sought to change—and in many instances succeeded in changing—the very structures of societies in many parts of the world as these impacted on the lives of women (there is, however, a continuing awareness of oppression of women as women in many societies down to today). Feminist biblical scholars are aware that the ancient text that they study (namely the Bible) encodes cultures and contains texts that can underpin ongoing oppression of women unless engaged critically; hence the emancipation of wo/men has been foundational to the emergence of second-wave feminist biblical interpretation. Initially, Schüssler Fiorenza drew attention to the androcentric nature of the biblical text and to the patriarchal context of production of that text, calling for a hermeneutics of suspicion to uncover these aspects of the text and a feminist historical reconstruction of early Christianity in memory of her. Schüssler Fiorenza (1983: xiii–xiv) said of the woman who pours out ointment over the head of Jesus as he faces his passion:

a woman anoints Jesus. This incident causes objections which Jesus rejects by approving of the woman’s action. If the original story had been just a story about the anointing of a guest’s feet, it is unlikely that such a commonplace gesture would have been remembered and retold as the proclamation of the gospel. Therefore, it is much more likely that in the original story the woman anointed Jesus’ head. Since the prophet in the Old Testament anointed the head of the Jewish king, the anointing of Jesus’ head must have been understood immediately as the prophetic recognition of Jesus… It was a politically dangerous story.

Her goal in In Memory of Her was two-fold: ‘to reconstruct early Christian history as women’s history in order not only to restore women’s stories to early Christian history but also to reclaim this history as the history of women and men’ (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1983: xiv).

My own initial reading of the story of the woman with the ointment was undertaken from a feminist perspective that brought together a hermeneutics of suspicion and reclamation. Using narrative criticism which focused on the woman and her actions, I made the claim that ‘[t]o hear this gospel is not only to hear the stories of Jesus and to remember him by means of them, but it is also to hear the story of a woman’s prophetic action and thereby to remember her’ (Wainwright, 1991: 136). As a result of the redaction critical aspect of my study, I also deduced that:

[t]his story … draws attention to a woman’s recognition of Jesus… It celebrates women’s prophetic ministry and could well have functioned in the community to legitimate and authenticate this activity as it was already being performed by women and/or to encourage its performance. It also proclaims the initiative and courage of women in the face of opposition and misinterpretation of their actions (Wainwright, 1991: 283).

Telling stories of women was already political in the first century and the remembering of those stories today remains so. They remind us, as does Luce Irigaray (1993: 19), that ‘we already have a history, (and) that certain women, despite all the cultural obstacles, have made their mark upon history and all too often have been forgotten by us’.

Across subsequent decades many women’s voices were heard claiming that the political location, experience, gendering, race and a wide range of characteristics of women make for an extraordinary cacophony of voices that need to be heard: womanist, mujerista, African, Asian, indigenous, queer and many others too numerous to detail here. A significant voice from among the many raising these questions has been that of Musa Dube. She says most pointedly:

Postcolonial feminist hermeneutics of liberation are … practices that seek liberation from both patriarchy and imperialism by realizing that gender empowerment cannot be realized while these two structural forms of oppression exist … postcolonial feminism seeks to ensure that women’s empowerment/liberation is included at all levels and forms of the struggle for liberation in the national and international arena (Dube, 2003: 68).

At the conclusion of her article, she draws attention to the incredible web of interrelationships that function within a society when she says that:

[f]rom ancient to contemporary times, it is clear that nations, races, genders, cultures, people of different sexual orientation, and economic and political institutions of various nations/peoples around the globe have always been in contact with and dependent upon each other (Dube, 2003: 74).

The implications of this for Dube are that ‘[p]ostcolonial feminist interpretation(s) thus call(s) for feminist practices that seek for relationships of liberating interdependence between nations, regions, cultures, genders, races, classes, different sexual orientation, and political and economic systems (Dube, 2003: 74).

From such a position and as a Matthean scholar, she is critical of the feminist readings that Janice Capel Anderson and I have undertaken of women in the Gospel of Matthew. Her critique is particularly directed at our failure to engage critically with imperialism as it is encoded in the gospel texts (although perhaps not explicitly so in the story of the woman who pours the perfumed ointment over the head of Jesus). Of my feminist reading of the Gospel of Matthew, Dube (2000: 180) says that ‘postcolonial theories on the methods of imperialism, such as its use of divine claims, construction of race, and employment of gender to articulate and authorize subjugation of foreign nations, as well as the various ways in which the colonial respond, could inform Wainwright’s feminist deconstructive stance and guide its reconstructive agenda of inclusion’. The challenge of postcolonialism to feminist biblical interpretation remains with us and makes clear the imperative of feminist interpreters’ engagement with relationships of power and empire that persist in local and global contexts.

Another focal area of critical and political engagement among feminist scholars, and hence also feminist biblical scholars, has been that of gender and sexuality. In a recent article, Regina Ammicht Quinn (2012: 15) identifies three moments in what she calls the ‘secular political women’s movement’: the first two are equality and difference and the dichotomizing of reality characteristic of both moments, and the third she calls ‘analyzing and criticizing this dichotomy of the world of thinking and living’. She goes on to say (Ammicht Quinn, 2012: 16–18) that ‘[t]he discursive field of gender theory advances beyond discussion of equality and difference to express a fundamental concern with the analysis and criticism of dualistic structures … [t]hinking with the help of critical gender categories is dangerous … it lays bare ideologies’.

Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Pender have sought to develop a gender-critical approach to early Christianity taking account of the theories of Foucault and Butler in relation to gender and sexuality. They also are attentive to colonialism, drawing into their paradigm for reading early Christian discourse the theory of Franz Fanon. For them, therefore,

gender is linked with issues of class, race and sexuality in order to conceptualize and ultimately, to construct other cultures and peoples … gender and sex are shaped in the crucible of power relations produced by colonial powers. Thus, gender alongside race and class and various other means of creating and sustaining hierarchies, is mapped in a variety of ways within a colonial/imperial situation (Vander Stichele and Pender, 2009: 30).

It is these multiple features and their intersections, they claim, that must inform readings of early Christian discourses to which the gospels belong. Reading processes are important for such a project and Vander Stichele and Penner turn to the socio-rhetorical approach of Vernon Robbins, which I too have used over the past decade and more, of interpretation (Wainwright, 2006: 24–31).

In relation to these diverse categories of gender, sexuality, imperialism, race, ethnicity and their intersection, Ammicht Quinn (2012: 15) suggests that Schüssler Fiorenza’s ‘kyriarchate’ provides a framework for holding together some of this diversity. In a recent study, Schüssler Fiorenza (2009a: 5) herself uses the term ‘intersectionality,’ noting that it entails ‘the notion that subjectivity is constituted by mutually multiplicative vectors of race, gender, class, sexuality and imperialism’. She links this with the analytic neologism kyriarchy that she developed much earlier in But She Said (1984) as a heuristic framework for analysing the intersectionality of oppressions in early Christianity. In the study of early Christianity, therefore, and its texts, Schüssler Fiorenza (2009b: 15) ‘places wo/men as subjects and agents, as full decision-making citizens.’ She goes on to say that such an approach ‘struggles to elucidate the ways in which biblical symbols, practices, and texts function in the creation and maintenance of ideas about sex/gender, race, colonialism, class, and religion’.

Heather Eaton (2012: 56) says of the women’s movement, as she looks at it from the vantage point of 2012, that it ‘is arguably the largest shift in human awareness since the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of symbolic consciousness … women in all our diversity and complexity, are entering human consciousness as full planetary participants. The consequences are an expansion and an enhancement of the subjectivity, diversity and elegance of humankind as a species’. Indeed the political power of readings has functioned together with the wide range of activities that have constituted the current women’s movement to bring about this ‘expansion and … enhancement’. Eaton, however, expands analysis at this point beyond the ‘multiplicative vectors’ that constitute the human community. Her words evoke the turn toward planet Earth and the participation of all Earth’s more-than-human constituents ² in a shift in what we might call ‘planetary consciousness’ that is catching the Earth community up in a revolution that may exceed that which Eaton has identified with the woman’s movement. Indeed, she herself has said elsewhere that ‘[t]he challenge of feminism to Christianity has been massive. The challenge of ecofeminism is even greater’ (Eaton, 2005: 67). We turn now to this greater challenge.

A Turning Toward Earth

It has been demonstrated above that feminism entailed a shift in thinking, a straining toward a new consciousness beyond the dualisms that constitute an epistemology of mastery. Also, we have seen the politics that have accompanied such a shift as the ‘differences among women’ informed the expanding feminist paradigm (Braidotti, 1994). For some feminist scholars, however, there was a growing awareness that mastery extends beyond that in the human community to the mastery of the human over the other-than-human. Of this Val Plumwood says in concluding her Feminism and the Mastery of Nature that,

[i]ncreasingly the project of expelling the master from human culture and the project of recognizing and changing the colonizing politics of western relations to other earth nations converge, and increasingly too both these projects converge with the project of survival (1993: 195).

She extends the political aspects of feminism to include a recognizing and an accommodating of ‘the denied relationships of dependency’ that enable us ‘to acknowledge our debt to the sustaining others of the earth’ (Plumwood, 1993: 196). Just as a shift in consciousness, a new way of thinking and of being constituted the development of a wide range of feminist perspectives, so too a significant shift will need to constitute emerging ‘ecological’ perspectives. For Plumwood (1993: 196), such a shift ‘could begin to treasure the incomparable riches of diversity in the world’s cultural and biological life, and to participate with earth others in the great dialogues of the community of life’.

The exploration of such a way of thinking named ecological is taken up by Lorraine Code in her book entitled Ecological Thinking. That such thinking is engaged and engaging, political as well as ethical, is made clear by Code very early in her ‘politics of epistemic location’, the subtitle of her book. She says that,

the transformative potential of ecological thinking can be realized by participants engaged in producing a viable habitat and ethos, prepared to take on the burdens and blessings of place, identity, materiality, and history…. He/she is self-critically cognizant of being part of and specifically located within a social-physical world that constrains and enables human practices, where knowing and acting always generate consequences (Code, 2006: 5).

Early in her exploration of ecological thinking, Code locates it thus:

[it] grows out of my work in feminist epistemology and the politics of knowledge and pivots on modes of analysis and explanation pertinent to feminist inquiry. Implicitly or explicitly, it evaluates modalities of ecological thinking for their feminist or counterfeminist effects. Yet the discussion’s salience—like that of most early-twenty-first-century feminist theory and practice—extends well beyond female-feminist concerns, to engage with wide-ranging social-justice and politics-of-knowledge issues of dominance and oppression (2006: 13–14).

The ecological thinking that Code invokes is not simply the result of adding another ‘multiplicative vector’ (in this instance planetary domination) to Schüssler Fiorenza’s intersectionality within the kyriarchal model of oppression. Rather, it entails a shift to what Code calls a new or reconfigured ‘social imaginary’ so that human knowers are ‘repositioned’ as part of the Earth community or of all those, biotic and abiotic, that constitute the more-than-human. It shares in feminism’s critique of mastery but extends that critique beyond its manifestations within human communities to the planetary community. As a result, I share Code’s eschewing of the category of ‘ecofeminism’ together with some of its more problematic manifestations and yet, with her, recognize that ecological thinking is ‘often contiguous to and in conversation with ecological feminism,’ noting that they ‘frequently make good allies’ (Code, 2006: 17). Indeed, if both ecological and feminist thinking in their finely nuanced forms at this point in time, namely the early decades of the twenty-first century, are engaged with critically, they can constitute a finely tuned hermeneutical paradigm for reading biblical texts.

I have explored elsewhere, in much greater detail, ways in which ecological thinking, as explored by Code, could inform a reading of biblical texts using ‘habitat’ as a key analytic category (Wainwright, 2012). She highlights the range of interactive features that constitute ecological thinking and that will need to constitute paradigms for reading biblical texts from an ecological perspective: place, identity, materiality and history and a social-physical world that constrains and enables human practices. Into the biblical text, whose very materiality Anne Elvey (2011a: 28–43) has explored extensively, habitat in all its multiplicity of materiality and sociality pushes up. In this regard, Kate Rigby (2004: 436) raises the question: ‘[h]ow then does earth thrust up into the world in the work of art?’

As I grapple with ways of thinking ecologically as a hermeneutic for reading biblical texts, I find Anne Elvey’s engagement with the insights of Kevin Hart’s extension of ‘sociality’ beyond the human to the ‘more-than-human’ community to be significant (Hart, 1999). Elvey (2011: 182–83) employs the term ‘social’ in relation to the human community and ‘sociality’ in relation to the more-than-human and includes both as ‘aspects of the material given’. To shift our thinking habitually to the interrelationship between materiality and sociality within and of the Earth community is challenging indeed. To read biblical texts from such a perspective is even more challenging.

In order to facilitate this, I aim to incorporate Chela Sandoval’s proposal to map power on a ‘flattened but mobile gridlike terrain’ (Sandoval, 2000: 76) into an ecological reading of the inner, inter-, and ecological textures of the biblical text. Power will be seen as a feature not just of the human community and its socio-cultural functions but of the entire Earth community. This is, according to Sarah Whatmore (1999: 27), to ‘recognize the agency of non-human actants’, and she suggests using the term ‘hybridity’ to ‘implode the object-subject binary that underlies the modern antinomy between nature and society’.

Owain Jones and Paul Cloke have extended such theorizing of these dynamic interrelationships of materiality and sociality constituting habitat beyond that of a network of actants. They speak of ‘relational materiality’ whose ‘social aspect is thoroughly dependent on the life–making capacities of a whole range of natural processes which are articulated through various forms, flows and exchanges of energy and matter/materiality’ (Jones and Cloke, 2008: 79). They use the phrase ‘entanglements of flows, forces and materials’ (Jones and Cloke, 2008: 86) to characterize agency within materiality associating it with:

temporal processes where all manner of trajectories – of people, non-humans, economies, technologies, ideas and more – come, are brought or are thrown together to assemble enduring, but also changing, formations which settle out into distinctive patterns of places, yet which are still fully networked into the wider world (Jones and Cloke, 2008: 86–87).

Within a socio-rhetorical reading, these ‘entanglements of flows, forces and materials’ in relation to both materiality and sociality can be explored in their multiple manifestations, as noted earlier, in the inner, inter-, and ecological textures of the text. These push up into the text engaging the attention of the ecological reader. This is a political act in that the interpretive art entangles the interpreter in a process which not only leaves a residual interpretation of text but catches up the interpreter in the shifting of one’s ‘social imaginary’ to one which Code calls ‘ecological thinking’—a shift from the social imaginary of mastery in any of its manifestations. From such a process can emerge what Chela Sandoval (2000: 140) calls a ‘third meaning’ which she says ‘emerges to haunt all that we think we know’. For her it emerges from the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, queer and poststructural/postmodern positionings and perspectives (Sandoval, 2000: 2). Ecological meaning-making in relation to the biblical text extends the arena of such intersectionality to include materiality and sociality within the more-than-human community. It is a political act along the trajectory of but radically different from the early feminist biblical hermeneutics remembered in the opening pages of this article.

It is appropriate, therefore, in the light of the above, to turn now to an ecological reading of Mt. 26.6–13. It will be a ‘revision’ in Adrienne Rich’s terms, an ‘act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.’ It will also be informed by insights gained through interpretations of the texts which are considered ‘parallel’ texts—Mk 14.3–9; Lk. 7.36–50 and Jn 12.1–8—that I have undertaken in recent years as I have been reading ecologically (See Wainwright, 2003; 2007; 2008a; 2008b).

In Memory of…

Both the andro- and anthropo-centric natures of the biblical narrative are evident as the text of Mt. 26.6 opens with a focus on Jesus, the key human character in the Gospel narrative. Beyond the anthropocentrism, however, readers encounter the materiality of the body of Jesus, a body embroiled in an ‘entanglement of forces’ as the narrator refers to the projected handing over of Jesus to be crucified (26.2)—a grotesque dealing with the human body of those considered deviant by Rome’s political system. Such entanglement continues into verses 3–4 in which the ‘chief priests and elders’ gather in the courtyard or the building complex of Caiphas from which or within which he conducted his public religious and political affairs (Bauer et al., 2000: 150). This is a material space which is entangled in sociality as the gathered ‘chief priests and elders of the people’ conspire to arrest Jesus and to kill him—to annihilate him, to deal with his body violently. Verses 7 and 12 provide an alternative dealing with the body of Jesus: a woman pours myron, a costly ointment, over the head of Jesus (v. 7) and Jesus interprets the pouring of myron over his body as preparing him for burial (v. 12).

Jennifer Glancy (2010: 347) draws attention to the tensive nature of readers’ access to corporeality in ancient texts when she says that ‘[a]s historians we do not have access to corporal exchanges themselves but only to representations … we lack access to ancient bodies’. An ecological reading, however, recognizes that this corporeality pushes up into the text requiring our attention as well as our recognition of Glancy’s conclusion that ‘through bodies and embodied exchanges … cultural complexity takes place’ (Glancy, 2010: 362), a cultural complexity that the ecological reader might extend to a sociality attentive to ‘entanglements of flows, forces and materials’.

Materiality and sociality intertwine as v. 6 opens the narrative of the outpoured ointment (Mt. 26.6–13). Jesus is within a house whose material structure is located in Bethany—separate from and yet still in close proximity to the threats which hang over his body as they have been storied in verses 1–5. An enigmatic aspect of the sociality associated with this house is that it is identified as belonging to Simon the Leper. Intra-textually this evokes for readers the healing ministry of Jesus narrated explicitly in Mt. 8–9, a section that is opened by Jesus’ ‘cleansing’ a leper according to the language of the text. He does so by stretching out his hand and touching the man who has named himself as unclean (Mt. 8.2–3)—touching and in that action being touched, healing and being constituted healer—a gift exchange (Elvey, 2011a: 78–80). Reference to Simon the Leper in the context of the house in Bethany evokes for readers such healing. It happens through the intimacy of human bodies touching in a context that enacts the divine engagement with the corporeality and materiality of the human and, by implication, in an ecological reading, of the entire more-than-human web of interconnectivity in the person of Jesus (Emmanuel/G*d with us/the Earth community according to Mt. 1.23). The text opens, therefore, pregnant with possibilities in the entanglement of materiality and sociality.

Jesus remains the focal point of the next verse that begins with the phrase he/she came to him. The reader is somewhat surprised by the identification of the one who came to Jesus in this place pregnant with possibilities yet ominous with forebodings. It is a woman who has an alabaster jar of very expensive myron or ointment. Aware that when one enters a text from a new critical direction, one carries into the new interpretive task insights from previous entries into the story, I note here that the reference to the woman reminds readers of the other women encountered in the narrative: women named only (1.3, 5, 6, 16, 18) and some unnamed (14.21; 15:38); women healed (8.14–15; 9.18–26) and in that healing being called into the new fictive kinship or the basileia movement around Jesus (8.14–15); Herodias named and dangerous in her association with imperial authorized power; a woman who raises her voice in a challenge to Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter (15.21–28); and an unnamed mother who pleads with Jesus for her sons in a mistaken understanding of Jesus’ basileia proclamation (20.20–22); together with women hidden in the crowds who appear throughout the story. These women’s stories, the understory to the dominant narrative, have been cumulative, as has been the kyriarchal and androcentric story-line. This woman acts and acts decisively: she pours ointment over the head of Jesus as he is reclining at table (Wainwright, 1991).

At the beginning of this interpretation, I drew attention to the androcentric and anthropocentric opening of this pericope informed by a kyriarchal model of power which functions in a vertical or pyramidal mode. I proposed earlier, however, that Chela Sandoval’s alternative model for conceiving power might better serve an ecological reading. She notes that,

global postmodern power is increasingly figured as a force that circulates horizontally, on a lateral and flattened plane, even if many-sided, with deviations occurring at every turn … circulating in a sort of electronic pin-ball game movement, as opposed to perceiving power as a pressure that forces up-and-down, or top-to-bottom, movement (Sandoval, 2000: 72.3–73.4).

From such a perspective, we note that the woman enters the story with what Sandoval (2000: 73.4) calls her own ‘racial-, sexual-, national-, or gender unique forms of social power,’ as does Jesus, Simon and the disciples (v. 8), her own ‘peculiar quotients of power.’ She enters what has already been described earlier as a liminal space, a time-space in which Jesus’ body, his very life, is under threat. And she comes with and in relation to a material element that in some ways dominates the narrative, an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume/myron (v. 7). Furthermore, she does not simply come with this beautiful alabaster jar of ointment but the text goes on immediately to highlight her action, she pours this ointment over the head of the reclining Jesus in a demonstration of power. In the inner texture of the text, the woman, the myron and the reclining Jesus are woven into a dynamic movement at the centre of which is the alabaster jar of myron. It is an entanglement of materiality and sociality: the myron with all its dynamics for soothing and healing, the bodies of the unnamed woman and of Jesus with their powers to give and receive, and the sociality that they and the myron are caught up in and for which the house provides a place or space.

In order to understand this central feature, I propose to draw on and extend the intertextuality I explored in two different readings of the parallel Markan text (14.3–9, Wainwright, 2003: 157–78; 2008: 131–40). In returning to those essays, I note that while I proposed a multi-dimensional reading perspective (feminist, postcolonial and ecological) in ‘Pouring out Healing Ointment’, my focus was still predominantly on the human characters and the power dynamics in the narrative analyzed from a kyriarchal or vertical perspective. The postcolonial hermeneutic did, however, give rise to a recognition of the ‘borderland space beyond dualistic genderisation’ (Wainwright, 2003: 167).

I was first alerted to the extraordinary intertextuality in verse 7 by Marianne Sawicki (1994: 149–81) in her article ‘Grooming Messiah for Death’. She drew attention to the language of text, especially the verb katacheō/to pour out, and its evoking of a custom among women householders of pouring sweet things (katachusmata) over the head of a newcomer to the household, an act of recognition and welcome (see Aristophanes, 1991: §788–800). ³ My own intertextual work would indicate, however, that the most significant source of intertextuality for the action of the woman is the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. Chapter 15 of this work is devoted entirely to myron, the perfumed ointment similar to what the woman brings into the house of Simon the Leper where Jesus is reclining.

That the Deipnosophistae provides the richest source of intertextuality is evident in its reference to the action of slaves who at the beginning of the symposium ‘passed round perfumes/myra in alabaster bottles/alabastois’ (xv.686). In my article ‘Healing Ointment/Healing Bodies’, I explore the materiality of the alabastros, drawing into the text the ‘stalagmitic deposits from which this transluscent marble called alabstros was obtained’ and going on to point out that ‘(i)t was often used for decorative vases to hold perfumes or perfumed oils because it was believed to preserve them’ (Wainwright, 2008b: 134). The intertextuality associated with myron is vast and cannot be explored in detail here. Suffice it to note that the pouring of ointment over the head does not appear extensively in the Deipnosophistae but in xv.687, Athenaeus cites classical texts to provide meaning: ‘To these words of Cynulcus, Masurius replied: Good heavens, man, you don’t know that the sensations of our brain are soothed by sweet odours and cured (therapeuontai) besides, even as Alexis says in Love-lorn Lass: A highly important element of health is to put good odours to the brain (or head we might add).’ The text goes on to discuss the pouring of myron over the breast, noting that ‘it contains the heart, obviously because even the heart is comforted by sweet odours’ (of myron understood) (xv.687).

This intertextuality addresses the sociality surrounding the very material element, myron, and the entanglement of material substance and the corporeality of human bodies. Myron refers to a range of perfumes and oils, as the Deipnosophistae makes evident, an aspect beyond the scope of this study. Its varieties are listed in xv.688 under the heading that ‘[c]ertain places produce the best perfumes’ but the entanglements of materiality and sociality become more evident when Athenaeus says that ‘the excellence of the perfume is due in each case to those who furnish the materials, the material itself, and the manufacturers, rather than the localities’ (xv.688).

An ecological understanding of this text can be extended if we bring Jones and Cloke and their ‘entanglements of flows, forces and materials’ to verse 7. The exploration of the inner and inter-textuality of the text has demonstrated that the text evokes ‘temporal processes’ in and through which alabastron and myron are processed from Earth elements into gifts given to the human community. They are intimately connected to Jesus who faces death and to an unknown woman who brings the gift of perfumed ointment to pour over his head. Both the materiality which has been made more visible in this discussion as well as the sociality of the more-than-human constitutes the ecological texture of this Matthean text. The myron is rich in history and potential and its being poured over the head of Jesus is an act of healing and comforting drawing Jesus, the myron and the woman into the rich sociality that the text constructs at this crucial moment in the unfolding story beyond numerous confines, including that of gender. Of such an intimate interrelationship Malafouris says,

[i]f human agency is then material agency is, there is no way that human and material agency can be disentangled. Or else, while agency and intentionality may not be properties of things, they are not properties of humans either: they are the properties of material engagement, that is, of the grey zone where brain, body and culture conflate (2008: 22, emphasis is that of the author).

The next verse (v. 8) breaks onto the ‘flat grid-like terrain’ of interrelationships that we have seen as characterizing verse 7. Those named ‘disciples’ indignantly name the outpouring of myron as apōleia—waste or destruction. They have failed to recognize the poignancy of this time despite Jesus having alerted them to it just prior to his entry into the house of Simon: the Human One will be delivered up to be crucified (26.2). ⁴ It is as if they have not heard the words nor understood the actions of the woman nor recognized the healing effect of the myron. They have not allowed themselves to be drawn into the web of relationships, the sociality that links human bodies and other-than-human healing ointment. Rather they interpret the action of the woman as a waste, placing themselves outside the gift event which has taken place. The myron is interpreted as a commodity and they question why it was not used in a commodity exchange process—sold for a large sum which in turn could be given to the ‘poor’/ptōchois. There is no specificity of persons in this group called ‘the poor’ nor is there any indication of human relationship with them on the part of the disciples that could make this exchange a gift event such as that described in verse 7. This is made abundantly clear in light of Anne Primavesi’s discussion of what she calls a ‘gift event’:

[t]hese interactive relationships between giver and receiver, between giver and gift and between gift and receiver link them openly, materially, sensually, with the link made tangible (usually) in some object passed by one to the other, chosen by one for the other and received by one from the other. They are also (usually) linked privately and/or publicly in and across individual boundaries, through bodily, familial, political, emotional, sexual or economic relationships or contractual bonds (Primavesi, 2000: 154–61, in particular 156).

Jesus responds to the disciples’ challenge thrown down in front of the woman’s action and Jesus’ entry into the interrelationships it constructed: For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me (Mt. 26.11). Such an interpretation does not negate the Matthean Gospel’s concern for those who are poor, without the material resources necessary to sustain life. Indeed the ministry of Jesus is characterized by the poor having the good news brought to them (11.5). And the one who comes to Jesus asking what must be done to have eternal life is told to sell his or her possessions and give to the poor (19.16–22), gifts are to be shared. The climax to this thematic is the last great parable that Jesus tells in 25.31–46 with its pivotal point: Truly I say to you, as you did it (gave food and drink, welcomed, clothed and visited – exchanges which involve not only the material but also the corporeal) to one of the least of these (my adelphoi/brothers) you did it to me (emoi) (25.40). Jesus parables the gift exchange which is to characterize those who participate in his preaching of the basileia of the heavens/sky (4.17), a new vision for the Earth community. This is his last ‘word’, bringing that ministry which he began in 4.17 to a close—he had finished all these sayings (26.1). As we noted above, Jesus then enters into a gift exchange in which an unnamed woman recognizes that he is the one most in need, a recognition not shared by the disciples. Jesus, however, affirms the gift in his response to the disciples’ almost violent interjection. He says that she had done a good work eis eme/in me (v. 10) while at the same time acknowledging that there will be other opportunities for ongoing gift exchanges with those who are poor (v. 11). Time, in this instance, is the central concern.

Before turning to the final note of Jesus’ three-piece interpretation of the gift exchange of verse 7, I want to nuance the indignant objection of the disciples so as not to lock their response into a dualistic meaning-making process. Earlier in this article, I suggested that they had failed to understand the gift exchange that characterized verse 7. In a previous interpretation of their question, why this waste or destruction, I noted that it:

can function repetitively and radically in the contemporary ecological crisis. They [the disciples] draw attention to the excessive nature of the gift event, to what seems to be the squandering of Earth’s resources by some so that others are rendered poor, so that they become the scapegoats whose lives are given up for the many who live beyond their means (Wainwright, 2008b: 138).

It can be affirmed, therefore, that ‘gift and gift giving are tensive in nature’ (Wainwright, 2008b: 138) and that an ecological reading needs to allow for ‘diverse positionings’ in the language of Code (2006: 61) or the possibility of multiple readings that can create a third space beyond dualisms.

Returning now to Jesus’ third interpretation (v. 12) of the gift exchange of verse 7, it is important to note that he re-emphasizes the materiality and corporeality of the exchange, claiming that the pouring out of healing ointment upon his body is a preparation for his burial. He draws attention to the material myron and its agency in such preparation. The myron is caught up in the ‘entanglements of flows, forces and materials’, continuing to be encoded in the text in its materiality and being linked to and linking inextricably the woman and Jesus in the house of Simon with the disciples present and being challenged by Jesus’ interpretive words. An ecological reading of this text demonstrates the diverse agencies that constitute this scene and that ‘[t]he agency of making places and patterns is relational and set in the material world as well as the social, the cultural and the economic’ (Jones and Cloke, 2008: 87).

In concluding this ecological reading, I propose to interpret verse 13—Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her—in dialogue with Chela Sandoval’s hermeneutic of love which she claims constitutes the new third space that gives rise to new interpretations. It could be argued that this very verse itself operates as an ‘underlayer of oppositional consciousness’ (Sandoval, 2000: 2.1). It places the action of the woman and the entanglement of flows, forces and materials (including human bodies) with and in which she engaged or was engaged at the heart of the ‘good news’. And this is to be proclaimed en holō tō kosmō (in the whole cosmos), the entire planetary realm.

The Matthean story-teller does not place Jesus at the centre of this story and its remembering. Rather he affirms the extraordinary interconnectedness of human corporeality and the material agency of the other-than-human which collectively constitute a ‘good news’ that far transcends a single human action or person and yet redounds in and through both the person of the woman and her extraordinary action. The reader cannot remember the woman apart from the complex materiality and sociality present and enacted in the house of Simon. We have demonstrated in this reading that they cannot be separated when reading ecologically. And so to remember her in this way is to read ecologically, it is to proclaim the good news not only ‘in’ the whole world but so that its import and impact might have a powerful ethical effect ‘in’ that kosmos.

This functioning of the final verse and hence of this whole story could be said to participate in the ‘technology for social transformation’ that Sandoval describes as ‘love’. It is ‘a constant reapportionment of space, of boundaries, of horizontal and vertical realignments of oppositional powers’ (Sandoval, 2000: 180.1) such as we have seen in the ecological reading of Mt. 26.6–13, a reading climaxing in verse 13. For Sandoval herself such transformations have an impact within the human community, they have a political effect. Reading with Code together with Sandoval, it is evident that these transformations extend into the ecological realm of the materiality and sociality of the more-than-human.

Conclusion

A contemporary ecological reading of biblical texts is, indeed, a ‘revisioning’, an ‘entering of an old text from a new critical direction’. It is a political act that engages contemporary feminist critical theory and eco-criticism to shape meaning both from and for a third space beyond the dualisms of a social imaginary of mastery. It is necessarily an ongoing task that catches one up in the spiral of the interpretive act in which one shapes meaning, new meaning, and is in turn shaped by that meaning. But it is more than that. It also entails an ethic of responsibility as a planetary citizen, an ethic of transformation, an ethic of love.