Excerpt from a New Life Service

Jesus and Women

By Doug Clark

In contrast to the attitudes of our day, both here in the East and in the West - where I come from - Jesus is never exploitative of women. He's the one man who dares to talk openly with the prostitute at the well in John 4. He breaches every standard of his culture by doing that. And yet the woman, even while she is being exposed for everything that she is - a prostitute with multiple marriages and a sordid life - even while all of that is being exposed, she is never threatened. She is never humiliated by Jesus in any way. He simply lifts her out of her filth and gently clothes her in the righteousness of her heavenly Father.

Jesus' disciples come back to the well, and they find their teacher - their honored teacher! - talking with this woman of the streets. And John records in his gospel, "No one dared ask, 'Why are you talking with her?'"

Why don't they ask the question? Because in Jesus there is such perfect manliness, such perfect security in his own sense of manhood, that he is free from the "prison" of having to put a woman down in order to prove what a man he is.

You never find Jesus intimidating a woman. You never find Jesus sexually threatening a woman. You never find him threatened or intimidated by a woman in any way. There's no lewd look, no coarse jesting with Jesus. He doesn't have to prove anything - because he's 100% man.

I think that's why both men and women are equally attracted to Jesus. Jesus only lifts and affirms every woman who comes to him. Women find in him the man that they wish every man could be. And men see in him the man that they know they ought to be.