WOMEN ARE NOT MEASURED BY CHILD-BEARING.

Jesus’ radical teaching about womanhood continues! It makes a person wonder what many religious folks would do if Jesus showed up today! (Perhaps He does and we crucify Him all over again, so to speak.) His attitude in Luke 11:27-28 might be one of the most difficult for religious people to grasp. Jesus was normally proactive in His teaching. He used events and situations to teach truth, so we seldom see Him reacting. But when He did teach by reaction, we see something of how angry God is at sin! This is one of those times! One day a woman complimented Jesus by referring to how happy His mother must have been to have given birth to such a wonderful son. She simply said, ‚Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!‛ This woman meant no harm, but Jesus rebuked her, and His rebuke was not gentle! Rather, the word choice and word order in the Greek text indicate that His rebuke was sharp and severe! Jesus seems to have been deeply troubled by the woman’s reference to woman in purely reproductive terms. This prompts one male scholar to remark, ‚Jesus clearly felt it necessary to reject the ‘babymachine’ image of women.‛ Childbearing is a wonderful thing! But Jesus was teaching that childbearing is not to be worshipped. It is not to be the standard by which a woman’s life is to be measured. He seemed to be concerned that women did not see themselves as God sees them. And He seems to take every opportunity to change their thinking. This is interesting to me because of an experience I had in an African nation in 1983. On this mission, we were being hosted by our African sisters, with each woman in our group being paired with a woman in the host group. Immediately, in an effort to get acquainted, my hostess asked me if I were married, to which I replied yes. With this, she was comfortable! Her next question was whether or not I yet had children, to which I replied no. With this, she was visibly uncomfortable! She essentially shut down. At the time, I didn’t know that, for these women, being married and having children were, by far, the main things in life. It was the sole reason for their existence. It was what defined the women. It was their measuring stick of success. Childbearing was the one thing that removed shame and vindicated them as women! Had I realized this, I’m sure I could have been more accommodating—somehow! Yet, even if I had been able to mend the communication breakdown, I’m not sure that this dear woman could have overcome her own limitation in order to continue the conversation. A sidebar to this story is that the main purpose of the mission was to teach women the Jesus lifestyle, including His message of their equality with men!