International Women’s Day and Martha’s Blunt Honesty

You will likely be on your phones this International Women’s Day, and if your social media timelines are anything like mine, you would not be alone in feeling a bit deflated.

In recent years, on International Women’s Day, social media has been awash with a continuous stream of trite pink infographics, misquoted Emmeline Pankhurst speeches and 1960s photos of women burning their bras. Lethargic bubblegum feminism bursts the banks of our timelines and floods the harsh realities of truth with an overwhelming ambiguity.

There can be something bewildering about this online response, like bringing a balloon to a funeral. We know the balloon does not capture the tone correctly, but, at the same time, we still want to mark the occasion to celebrate women’s lives and contributions.

However, this content is just so distant – infantilised – from our shared reality and the price we pay in a society that still does not value women equally. These posts can purposefully avoid the actual point of International Women’s Day. Instead, they represent a digestible dialogue that avoids the bitter pill that needs to be swallowed.

For example, kitsch floral fonts stating “no man without a woman” do little by way of illuminating that, according to the UN global estimates, a woman dies roughly every two minutes from childbirth or as a result of complications arising from pregnancy. Just as reposting a painting of Michelle Obama does little to educate people that, in the UK (2017-2019), Black women are more than four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white women. Of course, this only scratches the surface.

While some on social media will engage with these matters, generally, the masses are invited to participate in International Women’s Day by passively reposting content perceived as demure and socially acceptable.

In short, the hard truth is becoming absent from a day when it is most needed.

As a woman with autism, I have repeatedly been criticised for my blunt honesty. Growing up, my mother would regularly implore, “Just because someone has asked you a question, it does not mean that they always want an honest answer.”  I will continue to reply, “Well, why ask?”

I have taken comfort in the fact that I have an excellent predecessor of blunt honesty: Martha.

As Jesus requests that the stone be removed from the tomb, Martha steps in to say the obvious: ‘“Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days”’ (John 11:39).

Martha has a point. For a body to be placed in ‘a cave, and a stone lay upon it.’ (11:38), as was typical of Jewish burial practice in this period, the body will barely have been concealed from the intense heat of Bethany. Lazarus’s body would have been in an advanced stage of decomposition and, as Martha boldly points out to Christ, would be stinking.

Ultimately, Martha’s unabashed appraisal of her brother’s bodily condition makes her different from her sister. Even in historical terms, where interaction with corpses was comparatively commonplace, it would still be socially indelicate to speak about a loved one in such visceral terms; this is far from a subject of social chit-chat. You can hear Mary’s groan as Martha says it – embarrassed to have a sister who does not know when it is best not to give the honest answer.

However, if you should ever look at a painting depicting the Raising of Lazarus – particularly those by Giotto and Geertgen tot Sint Jans – there will almost certainly be at least one gentleman who holds his nose with a face of extreme disgust.

What these artists demonstrate is twofold. 1) Martha was correct; there was a stench. 2) that Christ manages to resurrect a corpse so extreme in its decay that even those who stand within a healthy radius can still smell him. That is truly spectacular!

As such, Martha’s choice to share the truth so publicly may not have been comfortable, but her honesty is a central pillar of understanding the extent of the miracle Jesus enacts.

When we perpetuate an online presence filled with banal slogans on International Women’s Day, we deny the extent of the stench.

This day is just as much for the women who suffer domestic abuse in their own homes. For the two women who refused to kiss on a bus only to be bloodied and beaten in response. For the women in Sudan forcibly subjected to female genital mutilation, or the Uyghur women raped and sterilised in concentration camps.

We do not need to bring a balloon to the funeral, but instead, like Martha, we need to be frank about the stinking body.

Christ said, ‘“Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep”’ (John 11:11). As a society, we are sleeping, and this International Women’s Day, it is time to wake up and smell the stench. Only by admitting the smell is there, no matter how horrific, can we begin to raise those who need it most.