How Does Jesus View It? - Dorothy Sayers

1893–1957

Dorothy Sayers grew up in academia. Born when her father was headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, England, Dorothy spent her life around education, learning, and books.

One of the first women to graduate from Oxford University, Dorothy earned highest honors in modern languages. After graduation, she chose to go into the world of words, first working for a publisher, then as a copywriter, and eventually authoring many books, essays, and plays. Her fictional character Lord Peter Wimsey was the hero of a series of detective novels and short stories that made Dorothy a bestselling author in the 1920s and ’30s.

Yet Dorothy’s talents went beyond fiction. She learned Italian so she could translate Dante’s Divine Comedy. She considered it her greatest work, and the translation is still popular today. She also wrote books that centered on her faith and often looked deep into the connection between the Creator and his created people.

In Are Women Human?, a collection of some of her essays, Dorothy makes some thought-provoking observations about the relationship between Jesus and women. The women who knew Jesus had never known another man like him, she suggests. He never nagged, flattered, coaxed, or patronized them. He didn’t make jokes about them. He “rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension.”

He “never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female,” Dorothy notes, adding that Jesus himself had “no uneasy male dignity to defend.” She remarked that the church in her day (and some could argue that some churches still in this day) found something “funny” about being a woman even though one could never find that funniness by looking at how Jesus treated and interacted with women.

Jesus treated men and women truly equally.

Have you ever thought of looking at an issue by seeing how Jesus looked at it? Instead of accepting the way the culture views it, or the way a particular church denomination views it, or even how your family views it, pick an issue. See if you can, through reading the Gospels, determine how Jesus viewed it. It might give you a whole new understanding.

God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27