James Nisbet Commentary - 1 Corinthians 11:11 - 11:11

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James Nisbet Commentary - 1 Corinthians 11:11 - 11:11


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

THE DIGNITY OF WOMANHOOD

‘Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.’

1Co_11:11

Such is a part of St. Paul’s answer to the inquiry which probably ever since men have reasoned at all has been a subject of speculative, if not practical, import. What is the true relation of the woman to the man, and the man to the woman? And by the true relation I mean the relation which God first teaches us by natural instinct, and then makes more clear by the light of His revelation.

I. Let us look back to the world before Christ; not to the savage, but the civilised world. Everywhere you will find that the position of women, and the views which men held as to their place in God’s world, is a sure test of the moral state of the nation. Very strange were some of the attempts by which learned men tried to account for the existence of human beings of different sex and the mysterious attraction which each felt for each.

Can we wonder that, with all the helps of culture and high civilisation, woman still lived in a position very much beneath that which God intended for her when He made her to be man’s helpmate and companion. Some of you know, perhaps, what was the position of women in Greece, and even in Rome, where the dignity which seems sometimes to surround the Roman matron did nothing to raise the corrupt state into which the relation of the two sexes had fallen, and which hastened the ruin of the old world.

II. That saying, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord,’ has ever been regarded as the turning-point in the history of woman, the true contrast to the sin of Eve. In the obedience of her whom all nations shall call blessed, the Virgin Mary, God Himself raised womanhood to more than her first estate. All else had failed; education, culture, civilisation, laws without number, they could not, or at least did not, give woman her true place. She was the slave of her husband, the child-bearer; or, if childless, the hated and despised creature, divorced almost at the husband’s will, even when laws prevailed; and in more savage and barbarous countries only what she is now among the Hindoos or the South Sea Islanders, all her life, as it were, apologising for existence, the toy of the hour, soon thrown aside to live a sunless, hopeless life, in seclusion and amid contempt, if not in actual misery and want.

III. It is not without reason that in the Holy Gospels women are made to bear so prominent a place; the three Marys, ‘last at the Cross, and first at the Grave’; the woman who was a sinner, yet received by the all-holy Saviour. Surely not in vain is recorded the tender love of the daughters of Jerusalem; and when we come to the early history of the Church of Christ, we can hardly fail to notice the indiscriminateness with which women were admitted with men to the Church of Christ. The old Jewish exclusiveness was past; no longer is it ‘every male,’ but ‘every creature,’ that is called to admittance by Holy Baptism into the Church of Christ, in which there is neither ‘male nor female,’ but all are one in Him.

IV. Turn now to the writings of the Apostles, and look at the place which marriage has now received. For the history of marriage is the history of woman. And as the nature of woman was ennobled from that moment when God ‘sent forth His Son made of a woman,’ so in the mystery of the oneness of Christ with His Church was marriage made a holy estate. Christ died for His Church. So must the husband be willing to sacrifice self for his wife; and as the true Church loves its Lord, so must the wife devote herself to her own husband ‘in the Lord.’ This is God’s ordinance. Neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord. Each has a special function, a different physical constitution, different moral excellences, different intellectual qualifications; but ‘in the Lord,’ and as members of His body, they are one, each imperfect without the other, each trying to be more like Him Who, as the head of the whole body, unites in His own perfect nature all that is high and noble and good in man or woman, the strength of the man with the gentleness of the woman, the firm, bold grasp with the sensitive, clinging hold of love. So is the old law of nature re-enacted, ‘male and female created He them.’

V. It is to the new dignity given to womanhood that Christianity owes, under God, a great measure of its success, while even that painful and unscriptural teaching as to the worship of the Blessed Virgin has been used by Him Who brings good from evil for the furtherance of His own ends. In the dark and licentious ages of Christianity, when the practice even of professing Christians tended towards the degradation of those whom Christianity had raised, the fact that the Holy Mother of God was still held up as an object of high devotion saved womanhood from losing altogether the place which Christ would have her fill. And certainly when the Jesuit missionaries, St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier, and others, met with such marvellous success in India, we can hardly help feeling that what must have fascinated the heathen more than their self-sacrifice, and asceticism, and earnestness, was the strange fact that these devoted men actually included in their homage a woman, the Mother of the founder of their Faith. So does God continually use misbelief and false belief to teach some truth and prepare the way for a new condition of things.

Rev. Canon A. L. Moore.

Illustration

‘ “In the beginning of the world,” said Plato, “each human being was double, had four hands, and four legs, and four faces, but only one head. This being could not only walk, it could go round and round on its eight limbs, using them as the spokes of a wheel. But this curious being got so strong that the great god Zeus, who made it, became afraid, and after taking counsel with the other gods, determined to cut man in halves; and ever since the two halves of the divided being, the man and the woman, have been drawn together, each seeking its second self.” A strange resemblance has such a fantastic legend as this with the true origin of woman as revealed to us in God’s Word. Both recognise the original unity which marriage renews, but the heathen accounted for the original separation by God’s fear of the creature He had made, while Moses tells us how God wrought in love for the work of His hands, because it was “not good for man to be alone.”

‘That was the legend of the almost inspired Plato: now listen to another view, more absurd and far less true. Aristotle, puzzling how to explain the fact that such creatures as women could ever exist, is content at last with the explanation that Nature always does the best she can, and tries always to make perfect men, but her materials are so stubborn that often her work is marred, and, instead of men, women are formed; women who are “men spoilt in the making.” ’