Read this paragraph this morning in a book of Prayers for the Common Good, ed. By A Jean Lesher. THIS is why I love Jesus, put to prose. The passage focuses on gender, but I think it applies to all of humanity. Jesus treats us like no other and helps us to find who we are without making us become someone else. We don't forget ourselves as we follow Jesus, we remember our true selves, who we were created and formed to be.
"Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man--there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as 'The women, God help us!' or 'The ladies, God bless them!'; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deed of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.
But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day…"
--Dorothy Sayers, 1890-1957
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