Jesus: Feminist or Liberator?

Maybe Jesus wasn't as much a feminist as we like to think. Much has been made about how egalitarian Jesus was, how he elevated women in a culture that demeaned them. But this morning, my pastor unpacked a fascinating angle on Jesus' interaction with the Syro-Phoenician woman from Mark 7 and Matthew 15 that gave me a new perspective.

Maybe Jesus wasn't as much a feminist as a liberator.

In the second half of Mark 7, Jesus goes on something of a tour throughout Gentile territories, spreading his message and good deeds. He does this on the heels of an altercation he had with Jewish religious leaders about rituals and righteousness. The Pharisees can't see past certain taboo behaviors, but Jesus is trying to show them that the kingdom of God is not about behavior or rules, but about heart change. Then in Mark 7:24, Jesus lands in Tyre and performs a miracle for someone who is certainly not in the religious in-crowd. In fact, the religious leaders with whom Jesus was feuding would have likely considered her inferior to themselves in at least two ways: she was Gentile, and she was female.

And that's when it hit me that Jesus may not have promoted the cause of this woman, or other women, so much because of her gender, but because of her oppression.

When Jesus announced his ministry in the synagogue at Capernaum, he quoted the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
    to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor

If Jesus had come in some parallel universe whose history was scarred with female oppression of men, he might have trumpeted the cause of men. But he didn't. He came in our universe where perhaps no other group of people has experienced so much oppression throughout history as women. If Jesus came to liberate and empower victims, he came for women.

I think it's abundantly clear that Jesus was radically progressive when it came to women, but until today, I never thought clearly about the reason for that.

But then, this really isn't a very big revelation, I suppose. Women have never lobbied for special treatment because of their gender, only because of discrimination associated with their gender. The next question, then, is "Where does that come from?" Why do we have this innate sense of justice that tells us that people — male, female, black, white, young, old, rich, poor, gay, straight, educated, uneducated, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Hutu, Tutsi, Arab — should not be oppressed?

Genesis tells us that people are icons of God, created in His image. Ecclesiastes tells us that eternity is written in our hearts. There is an innate, moral law that commends fairness and must be silenced for oppression to thrive. When Jesus reached out to women, he may have been saying something about the motherhood of God, but he sent a more resounding message about the justice of God.

Maybe Jesus' feminism was less about gender and more about justice.