On The Value Jesus Placed On Women

Jesus’ inner circle may have consisted of men, but he was no woman hater. Throughout his ministry, he interacted with women in respectful, loving ways. He hung out at the home of his friends Mary and Martha. His entourage often included Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and other women. When Jesus ministered to women, he honored them as people, in the same way he ministered to men.

In an essay, the brilliant mystery writer and theologian Dorothy Sayers wrote,

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has 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.

Sayers’s observations about Jesus help to shed light on what Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer . . . male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Jesus modeled that truth. Certainly he understood the basic gender differences, but he saw both women and men as people cherished by God.

We pay lip service to that notion in modern times, but we still have trouble looking past the differences. We define things as women’s issues and men’s issues. We even create Bibles for women and Bibles for men. Perhaps we will always be fighting a battle of the sexes. But that’s not what we learn from Jesus.

It’s comforting for a woman to know that Jesus values her not because of, or in spite of, the fact that she’s a woman. We could say the same thing about men. He values you because you’re intrinsically valuable just as you are, male or female, created in God’s image—so valuable, in fact, that Jesus gave his life for you.

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