Sayers: No one ever spoke to women like this Man

I’m making a point of collecting and sharing quotes on the uniqueness and glory of Jesus.  This is from Dorothy Sayers, in her book Are Women Human?, which I found quotes in Leanne Payne’s Crisis in Masculinity:

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.

There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words of Jesus that there was anything 'funny' about woman’s nature.

But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day.

- Are Women Human?, pg 68-69 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005)

Lord, give grace to Your Church to treat our sisters as You did!

On a sidenote, Payne’s point in quoting the passage was actually quite a good one – she wites that anytime an intellectual system builds itself on the contrast of one class with another (women vs. men, poor vs. rich, etc.), that intellectual system creates a conflict between the two.  One class will always come out on the downside of the comparison: women have indeed been oppressed by men, the poor have indeed been oppressed by the rich.  But to focus on that contrast is to perpetuate conflict – women’s rights at men’s expense – and whoever buys into that system becomes a warrior for the oppressed class. They end up being oppressors themselves, albeit in a different way (e.g. the feminist professor who verbally abuses the comparatively helpless young men in her classes).

The answer is not to “balance the scales” by exalting the downtrodden at the expense of their oppressors.  The answer is reconciliation, which happens at the cross, when both sides lay down their rights, repent of their wrongs, forgive those who wronged them, and find a new identity in the One who had nothing to repent of, but nonetheless laid down everything for them:

Galatians 3:28 (ESV)
²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.