My Jesus: Woman Lover
Author’s Note: I’m not sure I like this piece, but I promised some very kind people for every “trash” piece I published, I’d publish at least two “good” ones. It’s kind of a hybrid between poetry and essay. The Scripture references to explain my melodrama include the following:
- Matthew 5:27–28
- Matthew 15:21–28
- Matthew 19:9
- Mark 5:24b-39
- Mark 7:24–30
- Mark 14:3–9
- Luke 7:11–17
- Luke 18:15–17
- John 4:4–54
- John 8:1–11
So many in the world today look at the followers of Christ claiming He only loved the “good” women — the perfect in body, mind, and soul who always do just what’s expected of a good woman to do, no less and certainly never more. Therefore, He loved no women and they can’t love Him.
But’s that’s not my Jesus.
My Jesus sees a woman’s intellect:
She begged Him for the soul of her little girl to be freed from satan’s servants. He rejected her because she wasn’t Jewish. She argued that He could spare a moment for a moment was just a crumb from a Jewish feast. He granted her faith and her daughter’s healing and honored her rhetoric with a place in His story.
My Jesus looks beyond a woman’s sexuality:
A woman who is not the wife is value for her person hood. Men are warned to see the person-virtue and to not look lasciviously to mind-see impropriety. Men are to love women for a lifetime and not abuse, not discard.
My Jesus prizes a woman’s health:
A woman was tired of doctors. She’d bled longer than a childhood. Was it fibroids, hormone imbalance, endometriosis? Who knows? She was tired, small, and scared. She didn’t want to bother Him because she was too unimportant. She thought she’d just touch the hem of His garment and that would be more than enough. But He felt and He knew — so He healed, freed, and gave peace.
My Jesus defends a woman’s honor:
He sat eating with the elitists of His day, as a woman walked into the room. She broke her alabaster jar, a bride price of perfume, to anoint His head. And so, to the chagrin of all the male dinner guests, He made her tale to be known in His story.
My Jesus stands with lonely women:
A widow was mourning with her friends. On the bier was the cold, lifeless body of her only child a boy. The crowd was moving to the tombs outside the town, and the body sealed away meant a meager subsistence in outcast solitude. But the Lord saw her — His heart went to her. And the dead man lived again to care for his mother.
My Jesus values women’s babies and children:
People believed their kids had value, so they begged for Jesus to bless their kids for a prophet’s blessing had more value than the costliest perfumes. The apostles tried to rebuke the parents, but Jesus rebuked the apostles and scooped up those little ones for heaven demands child-like faith.
My Jesus accepts foreign women:
Jews hated Samaritans. The Samaritans were the kids who left home and lost their religion. But Jesus had to go through Samaria. He had to meet a woman at a well. He wanted water; she just wanted friendship and an end to rejection, as evidenced by five husbands and a boyfriend. Jesus gave her Living Water. She became the first evangelist to her hometown scorners.
My Jesus forgives sinful women:
They drug her there and threw her at His feet, the unclean adulteress publicly shamed in clean temple courts. Jesus wrote in the dust at His feet while the crowd tried to trap Him and end her “pathetic” dirty life. But He issued the ultimate challenge: “Throw the stone if you have no sin.” While they evaporated, He forgave her and set her free with grace.
Please, please, don’t think less of my Jesus because of what His followers do or say (even me). My Jesus loved all women — from infant to widow, from local girl to foreigner, from imbecile to intellectual, from the devout to the two-bit whore. So He went to the tree of death to bring life to all even me. Please think of Him like this and love Him despite us.
