Where Have All the Daughters Gone? -- a Father's Day Reflection
There was a show that aired a few years ago called The Crazy Ones, which starred Robin Williams as the father to a no-nonsense Sarah Michelle Gellar. In one of the final episodes, Robin Williams' character is giving a eulogy at the funeral of a good friend of the family. The man's daughter is sitting out in the audience, and Robin begins his eulogy by saying, "If you want to know the true integrity of a man, talk to his daughter."
I'm lucky. I have endless good things to say about my dad. He was my first friend, he taught me how to read, he introduced me to all my greatest loves (history, C.S. Lewis, Billy Joel, Queen, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, James Bond, Alias, Doctor Who), he sat next to me for my first time riding any roller coaster that terrified me, he tried his best to answer even my most difficult questions. To this day, he remains the only one who can tell when my silences are the result of my being upset or simply me just being quiet. He is still the first person I want to tell important news to, either good or bad, and even though I am 32 years old now, my dad goes out of his way to spend time with me one-on-one. He is, I can honestly say, the best person I know.
Strangely, my dad had little fatherly influence in his own childhood. My dad was raised by his grandmother and his grandfather had died before my dad was born. My grandfather (dad's dad) was largely absent and dad's grandmother didn't care for my grandfather very much. Dad knew who he was and saw him occasionally, but they did not have much of a relationship until my dad was an adult. The only real fatherly influence my dad had was the pastor of his church, a Rev. Grady Falk, but even that was mostly spiritual guidance.
So where exactly did my dad learn how to be such a good father? You would think, given that my father is a pastor, that Scripture was his main inspiration. I mean, there are lots of narratives about fathers and children, right? There's the story of The Parable of the Prodigal Son, Abraham and Isaac, David and Absalom (though that is more tragedy than anything else), and of course Jesus and God. And while that may show how Dad could be a great father to my brother, there is an important detail about all of those stories that gives no explanation to why Dad is such a good father to me:
They're all about fathers and *sons.* Not a single father and daughter narrative in the bunch. While I love the Prodigal Son story as much as the next Bible scholar, as a daughter of God, I want to take a Father's Day Sunday to talk about what scripture can tell us about how God the Father loves God's daughters, using the same methodology we often use for talking about the sons of the faith. Typically, we look at narratives of the Israelite forebears -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, etc. -- and apply their worthier attributes to our Heavenly Father.
In trying to do this, however, I came across a very large problem. There were no Old Testament narratives about fathers and daughters that showed fathers in a positive light. Lot's daughters get him drunk and have sex with him in order to keep their line going (and this is only a few verses after Lot offers to sacrifice his daughters to the men outside his house in order to protect the angels from the mob outside his door). Jephthah makes a promise to God before a major battle that if God grants the Israelite army the victory that he will make a sacrifice of the first thing he sees when he arrives safely home, and when the first thing he sees is his daughter coming to greet him, he does indeed sacrifice his daughter as a thankfulness offering. In the story of Job, the eponymous character's daughters are all killed by sickness as part of the cosmic test between God and Satan over Job's devotion to God's covenant. When David's daughter is raped by her half-brother, David does not force his son to marry his daughter, thereby refusing to grant her the protections that he, of all people, was most capable of securing and ignoring God's statutes regarding the protection of women. Saul forced his daughter to leave David and marry another man, despite knowing that David was who she truly loved. (David turned out to not be worth her tears anyway, but it was some time later before his fickleness was to be revealed.)
And these are the stories we get. If the first three Israelite patriarchs had daughters, they were not named, but were grouped in as part of the numbered family tribe, and that was it. If the daughters are named, the narratives surrounding them are not inspiring. In fact, it's downright disheartening. There are stories all throughout the scriptures about God valuing the outsider, the foreigner, the poor, the one who had previously made terrible mistakes. We even see plenty of stories about women in power, both good and bad, strong female friendships, women who single-handedly saved the people of Israel. Why could I find no narratives about fathers who went out of their way to show love for their daughters? What proof was there in scripture that God valued little girls as much as little boys?
The explanation for the lack of stories is simple and evident to anyone who has heard anything about ancient Israelite civilization: ancient Israel was a patriarchy. The entirety of the Bible, but especially the Hebrew Scriptures, are told from a male perspective because, in that ancient culture, the men were the important people. It's not that hard to picture, because if you look at the world today, not much has changed. We've allowed women to go a little bit further into the wider world, but there are still so many doors closed to women (and even more are closed to woc) that are wide open to men. Even as I sit here typing up this blog post, which I hope to one day re-write in a more formal fashion as a sermon, I cannot help but wonder if I will ever be able to give it. While female pastors are more common than they were even 15 years ago, I still more often see us used as pulpit supply pastors than as full time senior pastors.
In truth, there are no father and daughter narratives in Hebrew Scripture because nobody bothered to ask the women what their stories were with their fathers; or, if they did, they did not think them important enough to write them down. In the Old Testament, we can see ways NOT to treat our daughters, but the relationship between fathers and daughters, even in the terrible stories, is not the focus of the narrative.
After I came to this realization about the shortcomings of my Scriptures, I sat back and comforted myself with the knowledge that my father was apparently a better man than the Israelite patriarchs or David, "The Man After God's Own Heart." If a eulogizer was to ask any of the daughters of these men about their fathers, I do not think they could say much for their father's integrity. Not only was I a lucky girl among most of my personal friends, but I was a lucky girl compared to most of the female forebears of my faith.
I thought then that I had to be wrong about all of this. Surely there were scriptural father and daughter relationships that were positive, that future generations of young girls could read and see a loving God in the words. Surely God values women for their mere existence and not just because they can birth sons. Right? I can't deny I was close to begging for God to bring a story to my memory. I could only think of one story on my own though: Jairus, the man from Mark's Gospel who finds Jesus and asks for him to come and save his daughter who is near to death. I'll come back to this story in a moment, but this was honestly the only story I could think of where a father is proactive in showing love for his daughter.
When I couldn't think of any other examples, I called the best Bible scholar I know: my father. We bandied a few names about, but they were all negative examples except for Jairus. Then I reached out to my seminary and clergy friends via facebook and asked them for help using the same question. Once again, we could only come up with Jairus and one quick reference to Philip of Caesarea, of whom it is mentioned in The Acts that he has four unmarried daughters who prophesied. It's an interesting fact, and we can figure from this verse that he raised his daughters in the faith and had the wisdom to heed the words they were saying. But that's all we hear about them.
While I was happy that we had the Jairus story, I could not help but be disappointed that out of all the books of the Old and New Testaments that we had only one story and one small aside to give hope to daughters everywhere that God the Father values them and loves them the same way God loves God's sons.
Then I had a brainwave. I was thinking about the story of Jairus and remembered learning about the story in my first semester in seminary, and specifically thinking about the seminary word "interlacation." My New Testament professor preferred to use the slang phrase "Markan Sandwich." This fancy idea is simply that you have two stories that are linked together (story A and story B). Story A will begin, be paused in the middle and tell the entirety of story B, and then a return to story A to finish out the theme. The writers of Mark used this format a lot, and it's put to great thematic use in the Jairus narrative. The story of Jairus is actually the A portion of a two part narrative, and acts as the bread of a Markan Sandwich. The B-- the meat of the story -- is the narrative of the Bleeding Woman. The way the structure works is that Jairus comes to Jesus and says that his daughter is dying and asks for Jesus to help. In typical Markan fashion, Jesus hurries on after Jairus to see the daughter (everyone is always rushing around in Mark's narrative), but while he is on the way there, he is slowed down by a massive crowd who all want to see if Jesus can manage to heal this girl. At one point, Jesus feels his power being tapped into from somewhere and asks, "Who touched me?" When a woman who had been hemorrhaging blood for 12 years answers that it had been she who had done it, Jesus responds, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace." Then, the narrative returns to the story of Jairus and the servants of Jairus announce that Jairus' daughter has died. Jesus continues on to Jairus' house in spite of this news and raises Jairus' twelve year old daughter from the dead.
[I feel I should mention that the stories of the Bleeding Woman and the raising of Jairus' daughter are also in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. The other iterations follow the same basic narrative of Mark, but it's commonly accepted among New Testament scholars that Mark was the earliest written gospel and the writers of Matthew and Luke merely restructured this particular narrative portion and moved it to a different time in Jesus' ministry, though he is still coming out of the synagogue when Jairus first approaches him. (If you wish to read the story, Mark 5: 21-43 is the narrative we're speaking of here, but you can also consult Matthew 9:18-26 and Luke 8: 40-56.)]
I found myself remembering Dr. Spencer, my New Testament professor, in talking about the importance of interlacation, mentioning the two thematic flips that are important in this particular story. First, we have mention of the number 12. In addition to 12 being an important number in Israelite history (there are 12 tribes of Israel), it is also the age wherein a girl starts to transition into a woman (i.e. it is around this period that a girl begins to menstruate. And yes, that was an intentional pun). In Israelite society, that means that this girl was not yet of any value to her father -- her father was probably in talks to marry her to a man in the village, but she probably as yet could not bear children. That makes Jairus seeking out Jesus even more notable; whatever value she has to her father, it is an emotional bond. To the wider Israelite society, Jairus' daughter does not yet have a purpose. In reverse, we have a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. If she's menstruating, she cannot get pregnant and she cannot be touched without making the recipient of her touch "unclean." That would not mean the person who touches her has sinned or is cursed, but they would not be able to enter the main part of the temple or synagogue for a certain number of days after they touched her. This woman is, in short, a valueless pariah. She cannot be shown physical affection by her family, and she cannot fulfill her function in society by having children. These women do not have the identity of mother or wife, and scripture does not even give us their names.
We are given their identity, however. The twelve year old girl in the Jairus story has the identity of a "daughter." And, despite what her identity may have been before the healing, Jesus gives the Bleeding Woman a new identity when he sends her to her home after she reaches out to him. Jesus re-identifies the nameless woman as "Daughter." Wouldn't it be something if churches, instead of calling it the story of the Bleeding Woman renamed it "The Daughter of Jesus." That's a mantle I wouldn't mind taking up for myself. What an honor for that woman to have bestowed upon her!
I will always wish that we had more positive biblical narratives about fathers and daughters, but I cannot discount the quality of the two in one story that we do have. (And there are probably more stories that my associates and I forgot about or did not think of in the moment). I mean, in one of the stories, Jesus himself is the father in the narrative! If you believe that Jesus is the final and best revelation of who God is (as I firmly do believe), then Jesus giving the woman the title of "Daughter" is God making the woman God's daughter. The only thing the woman did in the story that set her apart from anyone else is that she reached out to Jesus in faith that touching even a piece of his garment would be enough to heal her completely. That means that any woman who reaches out to Jesus with faith that Jesus can heal her broken pieces can partake in the title of "Daughter," too.
I know that there are many girls and women who had fathers that were a lot more like David or Saul. Many more had fathers who treated them like the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures -- men who might acknowledge that they had some daughters, but would never bring them up or name them to contemporaries, and treated them more as burdens they had to be responsible for than as blessings from God. To all you strong women who have made yourselves into the parent your father refused to be for you, I applaud you. To all you women who made sure to marry men or women who you trusted would be better fathers than yours was to you, I applaud you. To all you strong women who are still working through the pain and trauma of abuse and/or neglect from the first men you knew in your lives, I applaud you and I stand with you.
Sorry to all my male readers out there. I realize this post is very pro-woman and talks a lot about girly feelings. But every year I hear the same stories on Father's Day and I genuinely believe it's because I always hear a man preaching from the pulpit on that Sunday. And while I cannot discount the importance in the biblical narrative of fathers and sons (since Jesus' relationship with God is characterized by that relationship), I am a pastor/theologian, and I gender identify as female. And I do believe it is of vital importance that the modern Church learn how see God through all available perspectives. God created humankind in God's own image, which means every iteration of humanity is part of God's likeness: male, female, non-binary, white, black, Asian, Latinx, brown, Native American, etc. -- every possible permutation of human experience. Therefore, to understand God as a father, one has to know the experience of what it means to be a daughter, and what our experiences with our fathers have resembled. Historically speaking, that is rarely a positive experience, and in too many households in the modern world, it means being the sufferer of various forms of abuse.
But I also believe there is hope. The stories of Jairus and his daughter and of The Daughter of Jesus (it's official. I'm renaming that story cos I like my title better) give us strong illustrations of what God intended fatherhood of daughters to be. God intends for fathers to find healers for their sick girls. God intends for daughters to believe that their fathers are men in whom we can believe and trust. God intends for the purest forms of love and devotion to exist between fathers and daughters, and for us girls to have a father we are proud to claim as our own as we should be proud as Christians to call Christ our own.
I hope everyone has a safe Father's Day. If you have a good relationship with your father, make sure to give him a call and tell him how much you love and appreciate him. If your relationship with your father hasn't been the best, or if he was absent, please call up a man in your life that had a positive influence on you and let him know you're thinking of him. And if your father has passed on, I hope that you can find some comfort in your memories of him and the lessons he taught you, and I pray that this holiday does not cause too much pain for you.
Thanks for reading my rambling, and blessings to you all!
Happy Father's Day!