On January 28th Janelle Monae gave this speech at the Grammy Award Ceremony. “Tonight I am proud to stand in solidarity, not just as an artist, but as a young woman with my fellow sisters in this room who make up the music industry…We come in peace, but we mean business. And to those who would dare try to silence us, we offer you two words: Time’s up. We say time’s up for pay inequality, time’s up for discrimination, time’s up for harassment of any kind, and time’s up for the abuse of power…”
Her message was clear. The oppression of women and the behaviour of men in positions of power had to stop. Too many women had been wounded at the hands of men. The time had come for women to be seen and treated as equals. Anything less than that would not be tolerated any more.
Thankfully things are changing for women. We might want change to be quicker but we are experiencing more freedom than ever before and in the West certainly more freedom than the majority of women around the world.
But underlying all this is the question, why have women been so badly treated throughout history? There could be many answers to that one writer, Cath Elliott, said the following, “Christianity is and always has been antithetical to women’s freedom and equality…religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression.”
According to Cath Elliott and many others, the reason why have women been abused and treated so badly is because of religion. Christianity, along with other religions, are seen to be misogynistic and patriarchal. But is that right? Does Christianity suppress women?
Before we answer the question we first want to address the fact that the church hasn’t and still doesn’t treat women well. There have been abuses and discrimination. And we want to say that such behaviour is unacceptable. There have been too many times throughout history when the church has failed to stand up for women when it should have done.
But thankfully the church’s failings are not the sum total of its treatment of women. Throughout history, Christianity has had a positive impact on the lives of women. In the early church, Christian women often experienced a much greater equality than the women around them, particularly widows were cared for by the church rather than forced to remarry.
Not only that, Christianity’s belief in the equality of women has led them, at different points in history, to speak up against the infanticide of baby girls, provide care for abandoned baby girls and to encourage the education of women. While the cultures they are living in would have condoned the suppression of women in these areas.
However, the reason we can say with confidence that Christianity doesn’t and shouldn’t suppress women is because of how Jesus treated women. As Jesus is the image of the invisible God, looking at how he interacted with women gives us the perfect picture of God’s attitude toward women. Let’s look at one of them in Mark 5.
We jump into the narrative when Jesus is on his way to the house of a synagogue leader, Jairus, whose daughter was dying. It was to Jesus this desperate father came pleading for him to come and help. Remarkably Jesus agrees. He was willing to go out of his way to help this girl. A girl who in that society would have been insignificant and not worth the effort. But Jesus considers the life of this little girl worth saving. She is worth the effort.
While on his way, Jesus meets another woman, who had suffered greatly. Mark doesn’t record why this woman had been bleeding for twelve years but we can suppose she was suffering from pain and feeling weak from blood loss. She had done what any of us would do when faced with an unexplained illness and had sought help from the doctors, the experts; the respected men within her society. But this didn’t bring any relief, in fact, it only made her condition worse.
But things were even worse for this woman because her bleeding made her ceremonially unclean. As a result, she would have been separated from society and family until she was able to be cleansed at the temple. However for this woman because of her continually bleeding she could never become clean. She was constantly on the outside with people avoiding her for fear of contamination.
She had suffered at the hands of men and felt the shame of being an outcast for so long. Her situation was hopeless and in her desperation, she turns to the only man she thinks can help. In the melee of the crowd, she reaches out and touches Jesus’ cloak.
This woman shows remarkable bravery. She knows she could make Jesus unclean. She doesn’t know how he could react. Men and women didn’t associate with one another. But she is willing to face whatever might happen because she has nothing else to lose. And it worked. She is freed from her suffering.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Jesus wants to interact with the woman. He knows she needs more than her bleeding healed. So he looks for her.
Despite all the odds of finding her Jesus wants this outsider to know she has been seen. And when he sees her Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for getting in his way, slowing him down or for being a silly unimportant woman. Instead, He calls her ‘daughter’. She is no longer a woman who has been ostracised and marginalised. She is now part of his family. He also declares that rather than her touch making him unclean, his touch has made her clean. He has brought hope to her hopeless situation.
This woman who had been continually ostracised and marginalised is not suppressed or abused by Jesus. Far from ignoring her, Jesus offers her comfort and healing. He offers a way back into her community and family. He gives her back her worth and significance.
This interaction is not unusual in the life of Jesus. Theologian Dorothy Sayers writes this about Jesus. “Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were the first at the cradle and the last at the cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never had been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious.”
Jesus valued women, he engaged with them, he taught them, and he listened to them. He offered them freedom, equality and life. We see this in the meeting of the Samaritan woman at a well during the heat of the day; in how he interacts with two sisters Mary and Martha; it is how Jesus loves and cares for his mother; or how he interacts with women on the outskirts of society. In all those exchanges and more we see something that is counter-cultural. Counter-cultural to the 1st-century Jewish culture he lived in and counter-cultural to the 21st-century Western culture we live in.
