Luke 1: “She will be saved through childbearing”

But women (Greek:"she") will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. (1 Timmy 2:15, NIV)

This Pauline statement is a tough one. I was in a bible study with a group of high school men and women a couple of weeks ago and the young man who was leading the discussion on this chapter declared he wasn’t going to touch it.

“I’ll get killed,” he said.

“We’re all Christians here,” I replied.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

I invented part of that. Nevertheless, I agreed with him, and we moved on to chapter 3.

In his commentary on this passage, E. Glenn Hinson writes that “it is difficult, maybe impossible, to interpret.”

So why do I bring it up? Because I think there may be a clue to interpreting it in the first chapter of Luke.

5 In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. 6 Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. 7 But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old.

The tradition of the barren matriarch: by all accounts the aged wife and her husband priest are righteous and blameless in the sight of God, yet they are shamed in the eyes of the community by her barrenness. They are old, beyond the possibility of redemption by a natural childbirth, doomed to go to their graves without an heir, to descend into nothingness with no one to remember them. (Notice it’s the woman who is shamed and assumed to be barren, not the man.) The community gossip is that there must have been something wrong with Elizabeth, some secret sin, for God to have disgraced them with a childless marriage. Though Luke declares both of them righteous and blameless, the community gossips are not so sure. Barren Elizabeth is always suspect, not quite as good as the other women who have born children. Poor Zechariah! Bless his heart!

In such a circumstance, what is salvation? What would it mean to be saved, redeemed? How could she be restored to the community, to receive the Lord’s favor?

For Elizabeth the answer is clear: a child!

24 After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. 25 “The Lord has done this for me,” she said. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”

She’s made whole. Her barrenness is healed. Her shame is removed. If there were an unknown sin, it has been removed. The Lord favors her. He did this for her. And now, five months into her impossible pregnancy, she can venture forth and show the world. She is redeemed. No one can look on her as a suspected sinner and outsider any longer. And the Lord has fulfilled his promise through her. She is blessed. She is restored to the people. In a word, she is saved.

The problem, it seems to me, is that we have reduced salvation to a single meaning: avoiding hell and going to heaven when we die. But in the bible salvation is a rich, multi-faceted concept, not easily reduced to the individual soul’s ultimate destiny before God. It means more than that. In fact, every healing in the bible is a metaphor for salvation. Every time an outsider is brought into the inside and is restored to community, it’s salvation. And Elizabeth is saved through childbearing that removes her shame and disgrace in the eyes of the people. Rather than being disgraced, she is now graced by God. And, by the way, God is also saved from disgrace—his word is fulfilled—through Elizabeth’s childbearing.

Now I don’t know exactly how this applies to Paul’s statement in 1 Timothy. Maybe it sheds a little light, gives it a little context. Maybe Timothy's congregation included women who were gossiping at worship. Maybe there were among them a barren woman or two who were the subjects of that gossip, who were held at arm's length, who were outsiders. I don't know. But if Paul didn’t have in mind this Elizabeth story, this barren matriarch tradition, when he declared that women will be saved through childbearing, he should have. Because I can’t come up with any other way to excuse what he wrote.