First of all, this is the Mother of God. The first chapters are dedicated to Her – the Annunciation, Her journey to the Hill Country, to the city of Judah, Her visit to the house of Zechariah, where She stays for three months. Another woman is Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Then there is the prophetess Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, who, together with Simeon the God-Receiver, meets the Infant Jesus in the temple (Candlemas), praises God and prophesies about the Child, speaking about Him in the temple. It is very important to note the figure of the prophetess Anna on the icon of the Meeting of the Lord, where she is usually depicted next to Simeon, and Mary and Joseph hand over the Child to Simeon and Anna for blessing.

Finally, Martha and Mary, to whom Jesus comes to Bethany. Martha receives Him in her house, and Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and listens to what He says. From the point of view of the Talmud, which says that the wisdom of a woman is in the spindle, this is almost a scandal: the participation of a woman in theological conversations, from the point of view of a faithful Jew, is absolutely unacceptable.

In the Gospel of Luke, we find the parable of the lost coincide (a woman loses one of the ten drachmas and then searches for it). It seems to complement the parable of the leaven that the woman puts in the dough – this parable is found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. So, the female theme in the Gospel of Luke is not fundamentally new, but here it is emphasized.

Both Martha and Mary are found not only in Luke, but also in the Gospel of John. When Lazarus dies, Jesus comes to Bethany to Martha with Mary. It is from here, from this text, that the role and place of each of them become clear.

People often think: what a good Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to His word. And Martha, instead of catching every word of the Savior, is busy with the housework!

But from the Gospel of John we learn something more important about these two sisters... Their brother Lazarus died. Jesus comes to their village. "When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him; And Mary sat at home" (John 11:20). The same Mary who sat at Christ's feet, listening to His every word, is just weeping. She is stricken with sorrow, but nothing grows out of this sorrow. Martha said to Jesus: "Lord! if Thou hadst been here, my brother would not have died; but even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you. Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha said to Him, 'I know that He will rise again in the resurrection, on the last day' (John 11:21-24).

She says the word "know" twice. Jesus responds by saying, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, shall live. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25-26).

And suddenly Martha, the same Martha who rattles dishes in the Gospel of Luke, exclaims: "I believe!"

We all know a lot about God, but often we have little faith in it. Moreover, the more we know, the less we believe. The troublemaker Martha took a step that the prayerful Mary was unable to take: a step from knowledge of God to faith in Him.

Probably, each of us should follow the path of Martha. This path is very difficult, but Martha walks it, perhaps precisely because when the Savior came to her house, she thought that first of all she needed to feed Him. And we very often do the opposite: we want to listen to Christ first of all and forget that the Savior says: "... I hungered, and you gave Me to eat; I thirsted, and you gave Me to drink..." (Matthew 25:35).

That's what Martha did. Her rootedness in real life gave her the mystical power to come from knowledge of God "from a book" to real faith in God, to a real encounter with Him. It is important to understand after what words Martha, renouncing her "I know," exclaims: "I believe!" Christ answers this: "I am the resurrection." It is here that Martha exclaims: "I believe!" She shows her conviction and faith not in some abstract resurrection (as in the case of N.N. Fyodorov – people will be resurrected, but Christ has nothing to do with it), but in the resurrection in Christ, through a personal meeting with Him. Only such a resurrection leads from knowledge of God to faith in God.

Very often people do not believe for only one reason: they have read a lot of books, learned everything, somehow systematized them in their minds, in their memory, but Christ Himself found Himself somewhere "on the margins" of this knowledge. Martha, on the other hand, feels that it is not a matter of the "technique" or "mechanism" of the resurrection, but simply of Christ. In this Man Who stands before her and says the strange words at first glance: "I am the resurrection" ("the resurrection is I").

Thus, the Gospel of John (in the 4th chapter of which, we should add, Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman at the well) can also be called the Gospel of women. As well as the Gospel of Matthew, where on the very first page, in the genealogy of Jesus, four female names are mentioned among the male names: Zara, Tamar, Rahaba and Ruth. It would seem that from the point of view of the Jewish tradition, this is impossible – a female name in the genealogy. But nevertheless, women are named – and not by chance! — on the first page of the New Testament. However, to a greater extent, it is the Gospel of Luke that is the Gospel of women. Here the female theme seems to be brought to the fore. When we note some features of this or that Gospel, this does not mean that the same is not at all in the other Gospels. It is there, but not so brightly highlighted - that's all the difference.

The Gospel of the Children