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What Did Jesus Do?

This Rock Volume 17, Number 3   March 2006     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   Getting Started with the Fathers of the Church By Marcellino D'Ambrosio   Where to Get Started   The Scandal of the Decades: The Rosary and the Bible By Edward Sri   Further Reading   The Framing of Pius XII By Matthew Bunson   Recent Defenses of Pius XII   Does the Catholic Church Hate Women? By Christopher Kaczor   What Did Jesus Do?   Women in the Church   If You're Looking for Further Reading about:   Catholic Pioneer Conquers Public School Prejudice By Fr. Michael P. Orsi   Damascus Road Helping the Spiritually Blind By Joanna Bogle   By the Book Statues of Limitations By Tim Staples   Truth Be Told Crusading for Truth By Robert P. Lockwood   Up a Notch The Eucharist By Jan Wakelin   Classic Apologetics Questions and Answers By Cecily Hastings   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

Whether authentic Christianity is misogynistic is, at least in part, a question of whether Christ was misogynistic. Christ’s interaction with women suggests that he had an entirely new perspective on the dignity of women in the time and culture in which he lived:

• Jesus began his public ministry and performed his first miracle in Cana at the request of a woman, his Mother (John 2:1–11).
• He healed women of physical and spiritual ailments (Luke 7:37); he offered words of comfort to the woman with a flow of blood and healed her malady (Mark 5:24–34).
• He spent time in the company of women who had been rejected by society (Luke 8:1–3).
• He transcended the letter of the law of Moses when he defended the woman caught in adultery, saying, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7).
• He engaged in conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well and offered "living water" (John 4:10), breaking the racial boundaries of his day.
• Christ insisted that Mary had chosen the better part by listening to him rather than performing the traditional woman’s role her sister, Martha, had chosen.

revealed himself to women as Messiah, discussed theology with women, healed women, was anointed and wept over by women, was accompanied by women throughout his ministry, especially during the last hours of his life, and he appeared to his beloved friend Mary of Magdala after his death ("Catholic Women As Ministers and Theologians," America, October 10, 1992, 244).