Sunday: Mastery of the Inferior Status of Women
WEEK 8
SUNDAY
MASTERY OF THE INFERIOR STATUS OF WOMEN
Galatians 3:26-28
We come now to consider something related to what we have been studying, namely, that women received the Holy Spirit on the same basis as men. “All were united in their devotion to prayer, along with some women. . . . They were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:14; 2:4). The “all” included the women.
That unobtrusive little fact is one of the most important and explosive facts ever introduced into life. There is enough dynamite in it to blow our existing institutions and attitudes into bits. For this simple fact meant that a woman as a woman received God’s highest and best gift—the gift of the Holy Spirit. If this highest gift was open to women, then what about the lesser gifts of life—are they open to women too? They haven’t been.
Every day, the pious Jew thanked God that he was not born a woman, a leper, or a Gentile. The women might note their company! This intrudes itself into the pages of the New Testament and applied even to our Lord, “(It’s written in the Law of the Lord, ‘Every firstborn male will be dedicated to the Lord’)” (Luke 2:23). Why “every male”? Why not every child, male or female? Because of the revolutionary fact that a woman as a woman had not received the Holy Spirit on the same basis as a man.
And this held among the Gentiles. A Roman father, writing from Alexandria to his wife, said, “I will send you some money as soon as my wages begin. If the coming child you’re to have is a boy, keep him; if a girl throw it away.”
The Aga Khan, head of an enlightened Muslim sect in India, who was once given his weight in platinum, said to his women disciples: “Nag your husbands until they allow you to take part in public prayers.” He didn’t mean that they were to lead the prayers or to pray audibly on their own, but just to be in the same congregation with the men and go through the same congregational prayers.
These statements give us the view of women in societies in which the Holy Spirit was not given to women as women. That simple fact changed their relationship to God and man and society.
O Lord, I thank you that your love is broader than man’s mind, that you are oblivious of the things that divide us into inferior and superior. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall treat everyone as a child of God regardless of birth, color, class, or sex.