God is Not Fair: Some Thoughts on Women’s Ordination
By Gerald McDermott, Anglican Pastor:
God is not fair.
He deprives men of the most profound and satisfying experience imaginable. Both men and women participate in the creation of another human being, but only women get to carry that little human being inside their body for nine months, nourishing that baby with sustenance from their own body. Only women get to bring that precious child into the world. In many cases, that child will have a more intimate relationship with its mother than with anyone else in the world.
So if God believes in equality, it is a different equality from what most think. God’s equality does not mean giving every person the same chance to do everything.
Neither did Jesus’ equality mean that. He treated women in revolutionary ways, and had female disciples like Mary who studied with him in ways normally impossible for Jewish women. Women traveled with him and talked with him in public in ways that violated cultural conventions. So when he chose his twelve apostles, it wasn’t the culture or his own fears that prevented him from including women.
This is difficult to think through, because we want to believe that Jesus must have believed in equality as we do. But he did not.
Nor did Paul. Several times he told wives to be submissive to their husbands. He never told husbands to submit to their wives. Sure, he told the members of the Ephesian church to submit to one another (Eph. 5:21). But then his very next word was for wives to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22). At that point, we expect him to follow that up with a word to husbands to submit to their wives, but he does not.
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