Two of the most important events in the gospels involve the appearance of angels: the announcement of Jesus’ birth and his resurrection.
What’s similar between them? The angel appears to women.
It’s not a male priest who’s entrusted with the news of the birth. It’s not the male disciples who are entrusted with the news of the resurrection.
While the men are cloistered and confused, the women go to the tomb of Jesus. They are entrusted to take the most important news in all history back to the men and convince them of what’s happened.
The greatest news in history, it should be announced it to the male priests in Jerusalem right? Except, that game is over. The angel announces this news to a commoner, a woman––a girl actually––an adolescent, unmarried virgin, in a middle of nowhere town.
Zechariah, the priest in the beginning of Luke's account of the birth of Jerusalem, he's in Jerusalem, in the Temple - at the very doorstep of God. An angel appears to him, he hesitates and is struck silent. Meanwhile, miles away from the Temple, in Nazareth, a place of scorn from religious elites, an angel appears, and Mary embraces the message
Her qualifications were zilch. She's not a priest, not educated, she doesn't live in the right place, and most importantly she's not a man. What she did have was God’s favor, his presence: the gospel that God is redeeming his creation through nobodies from nowhere places, particularly through people rejected by the dominant culture and through instruments that patriarchy discredits.
But, those with little hermeneutical imagination ask us to believe that the gender of these messengers is incidental to the meaning of the story.
Because?
Because one of the most difficult and most disputed verses in the entire New Testament is supposedly God's totalizing WORD on who can preach. If you ignore context, ignore counterexamples, ignore the narrative of the gospels’ collective witness this makes some sort of sense I guess. But, in a highly stratified, patriarchal culture, God chooses women to bear witness to some of the most important events of his story of redemption and there’s a reason for this beyond just getting the information from point A to B.
As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.”