Mark 5:41

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMAN

“And He took the damsel by the hand.’

Mark 5:41

This is the earliest miracle of raising the dead recounted in the Gospels. Two others follow, but the one was a growing youth, the other was a man of mature age. The young woman was Christ’s first miracle of resurrection. On her was wrought first this stupendous miracle. For her was won this earliest triumph over death and hell.

I. The fundamental principle of the Gospel charter.—Is not this a significant fact in itself, for it proclaims the fundamental principle of the Gospel charter? It announces that the weak and the helpless in years, in sex, in social status, are especially Christ’s care. It declares emphatically that in Him is neither male nor female. It is a call to women to do a sister’s part to their sisters. Christ’s action in this miracle is a foreshadowing of His action in the Church. The Master found woman deposed from her proper social position. A moral resurrection was needed for womanhood. It might seem to the looker-on like a social death, from which there was no awakening; but it was only the suspension of her proper faculties and opportunities, a long sleep, from which a revival must come sooner or later. It was for Him, and Him alone, Who was the Vanquisher of death, Who has the keys of Hades, for Him alone to open the door of her sepulchral prison and resuscitate her dormant life and restore her to her ordinary place in society. When all hope was gone, He took her by the hand and bid her arise, and at the sound of His voice and the touch of His hand she arose and walked, and the world was astonished with a great astonishment.

II. A social revolution.—We ourselves are so familiar with the results, the position of woman is so fully recognised by us, it is bearing so abundant fruit every day and everywhere, that we overlook the magnitude of the change itself. Only then when we turn to the harem and the zenana do we learn to estimate what the Gospel has achieved, and has still to achieve, in the emancipation of woman, and her restitution to her lawful place in the social order. To ourselves the large place which woman occupies in the Gospel and in the early apostolic history seems only natural. To contemporaries it must have appeared in the light of a social revolution. Women attend our Lord everywhere during His earthly ministry, and as it was in Christ’s personal ministry, so it is in all the Apostolic Church.

III. The order of deaconess.—But it was not only desultory, unrecognised service, however frequent, however great, that women rendered to the spread of the Gospel in its earliest days. The Apostolic Church had its organised ministrations of women, its order of deaconesses, its order of widows. Women had their definite place in the ecclesiastical system of those early times, and in our own age and country again the awakened activity of the Church is once more demanding the recognition of the female ministry. The Church feels herself maimed of one of her hands. No longer she fails to employ, to organise, to consecrate to the service of Christ, the love, the sympathy, the tact, the self-devotion of women. Hence the revival of the female diaconate in its multiplication of sisterhoods. But these, though the most definite, are not the most extensive developments of this revival. Everywhere institutions are springing up, manifold in form and purpose, for the organisation of women’s work. It is the province of the Church, when acting by the Spirit and in the name of Christ, to develop the power of women, to take by the hand and raise from its torpor that which seemed a death, but which is only a sleep; and now, as then, revived life and beneficent work will amaze the looker-on—‘they were astonished with a great astonishment.’

IV. The secret of effective work.—Do you ask how women’s work may be truly effective? I answer you in the words of the text, ‘He took the damsel by the hand.’ There must be—

(a) An intensity of human sympathy; and,

(b) An indwelling of Divine power.

—Bishop Westcott.