Wives and Husbands, Slaves and Masters: Holy Family
Colossians 3:12-21, Luke 2:22-40
“You who are in committed relationships, be submissive to each other.” Colossians, chapter 3, verse 18. Or so the “Inclusive Bible” translation we use would have us believe. The New Revised Standard Version, which is far more faithful to the original sense of the text, has instead, “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” I’m afraid to look, somebody tell me if Shannon [my wife] has walked out yet. But, my friends, this is what the author of Colossians intended to convey in this passage, and I think we have to come to terms with that. I understand and sympathize with what the editors of the Inclusive Bible are trying to do. The biblical texts emerged in a patriarchal context, and while much of the scriptural witness offers a deeply countercultural egalitarian vision, some portions simply reflect the cultural landscape in which they originated. The aim of the Inclusive Bible, then, is to update those unsavory time-bound parts so as to preserve what is timeless in the text – thus, we modern liberals with feminist sensibilities can hear the words “be submissive to each other,” and faithfully respond “Thanks be to God!” when we are told that this is God’s word for us.
Still, I worry that we do ourselves a disservice in covering over what the text is in fact saying. For those words, “Wives, be subject to your husbands,” are being preached in their original form this morning in Catholic and other Christian churches all over this city. Right at this moment, an old man in a collar, and somewhere else, another old man in a necktie, and surely somewhere a hip young man in jeans and a crew neck sweater, with a five-o-clock shadow and a cool wooden cross necklace and maybe even a tattoo or two, are all uttering those words: “Wives, be submissive to your husbands.” And when they have finished reading those words they will proceed to claim Colossians 3:18 as an irrefutable divine sanction of the subordination of women. This is God’s word for us, they will say, and it is our duty as Christians to joyfully obey. And right now, a young girl is hearing those words for the first time, and she is learning that she must not imagine herself as a whole person, but that her life has meaning only in relation to her future husband. And right now, a young boy is hearing those words for the first time, and he is beginning to piece together a core identity based on masculinity which, he is learning, he is expected to perform by exercising power over others, especially women. An adolescent boy hears the same message and learns that in order to be a real man he must take a wife, even though he has already discovered that he is attracted to guys. And another young child, who has begun to sense that the binary categories “man” and “woman” do not adequately describe their gender identity, sits in utter confusion.
If, meanwhile, we close our ears to this message that is being spread in the name of Jesus Christ, at this moment, in churches all across our city, our nation and our world, we risk making an active choice to withdraw from the conversation. I do not think as Christians, parents, or responsible citizens we should do this. Not when three of our last five American presidents, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, stand accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Not when about a third of men who responded to a recent New York Times survey admitted that in the past year they had done something at work that would qualify as “objectionable behavior or sexual harassment.”[1] Not at a moment when so many courageous people, mostly women, are exposing a culture of sexual violence by telling their #metoo stories. And certainly not when, in churches, in Alabama senate races, in the halls of Congress, men are defending that culture of violence by invoking the name of Jesus Christ.
Even more troubling than what our scripture passage says today is what it leaves unsaid – or rather, what the designers of the Catholic lectionary leave unsaid in their decision to select these particular verses. As feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza explains in her book In Memory of Her, these verses from Colossians are a restatement of the “household codes” that date from the post-Pauline community of the late first century. The codes, which can also be found in the “pastoral epistles” such as 2 Timothy, were meant to adapt the Christian community to prevailing Greco-Roman social mores. In each case, the codes address the relationships between wife and husband, children and father, and slaves and masters. The former members of each pair are enjoined to be subordinate to the second. And that is the case in our reading today – or at least, it would have been had not the editors of our lectionary decided that Catholics only need to hear verses 12-21. So, we heard about wives and husbands, and children and parents. But curiously, we don’t hear verses 22-24, the passage which immediately follows our reading for today. It says, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.” I don’t need to tell you that, just as Colossians 3:18 continues to be used to justify patriarchal structures, verses 22-24 and passages like it were preached for centuries to enslaved black people in America, to form them as docile and productive chattel. So I find it profoundly interesting that the crafters of our lectionary saw fit to invoke the authority of sacred scripture to teach the faithful that wives should submit to their husbands and children to their parents, but cut the reading off abruptly before we have to deal with slaves. What would have been our response if our reader today had continued, telling us, “slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything?” Would we actually have said, “Thanks be to God!”? Incidentally, the Inclusive Bible translates that passage “Workers, work diligently in everything you do.”
I think we have to bluntly acknowledge that our Christian tradition has served for much of its history as the central ideological warrant for the domination of women, people of color, and all colonized and oppressed people who have fallen under the reaches of Christendom. This irrefutable fact has led many to conclude that the only ethical choice is to renounce the Christian tradition altogether. This was the solution offered by post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly, who argued in her book Beyond God the Father that “patriarchal religion is patriarchal”[2] to the core, and that women should leave the church and seek to recover pre-Christian goddess traditions.
Others, however, including, I assume, most of us, have arrived at a different conclusion. Christian feminist theologians like Schüssler Fiorenza, black theologians like James Cone, queer theologians like Patrick Cheng and Elizabeth Edman, and everyday theologians like us, have chosen instead to reinterpret and reclaim the tradition in various ways. With them, we may recognize that Christianity has been complicit in oppression – but we are not foolish enough to imagine that, in a white supremacist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, classist society such as ours, it is ever possible to wash our hands of oppression. It suffuses us; oppression hangs in the air we breathe and flows in the blood coursing through our veins. The best we can do is to recognize it, name it, reject it where we can, and point to alternative ways of being together. In this way we do not purify ourselves of sin, of oppression, of complicity, of violence. Instead, we recognize that we are finite beings shaped in complex sociohistorical life-worlds, but we are also beloved children of God and bearers of sacred collective power. And we can find assurance in the fact that this same tradition which has been claimed by agents of domination from Constantine to Columbus has also been named a sacred tradition of liberation, and was so understood by Frederick Douglass and John Brown, by Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Dr. King. Not to mention that to throw out the Christian tradition is to throw little liberationist baby Jesus out with the bathwater.
…Yes, little proto-liberationist baby Jesus, schooled by his mother Mary, not meek and mild Mary, but Luke’s Magnificat Mary – who will teach that baby that our God is a God who brings the powerful down from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty (Lk 1:52-53), – not gentle Mary, but a badass righteous woman who just pulled off an unassisted home birth in a barn! In our gospel reading for today, Mary presents her budding baby radical at the temple, where he is met by Simeon, a “righteous and devout man” (Lk 2:25), and by Anna, who Luke names as a “prophet” (Lk 22:36). A woman prophet? Shut the front door! Schüssler Fiorenza notes that Luke names Mary and Elizabeth as prophets in addition to Anna.[3] In the Pauline community, she argues, many women served as prophetic leaders; the gifts of prophecy were also held in high esteem by the gnostic-ascetic movements including Montanism. However, argues Schüssler Fiorenza, noncharismatic bishops began to assert their power in the second and third centuries, and the theologians who represented them went to great lengths to smear and discredit “heretical” sects of believers with more egalitarian power structures and mystical spiritual practices. Spirit-led prophets, including women, were a threat to growing episcopal power. In the end, the bishops won the day; the hierarchy of control and order prevailed over the mutuality of Spirit; the “patriarchal household of God” over the “ekklesia of women.”
And yet, Schüssler Fiorenza does not despair over these historical developments. Yes, she acknowledges, the New Testament’s focus on submission to patriarchal rule has won out over its vision of a discipleship of equals, because for its survival the early Church had to adapt to Greco-Roman societal norms. Yet, she insists, “this ‘success’ cannot be justified theologically, since it cannot claim the authority of Jesus for its own Christian praxis. […] Therefore, wherever the gospel is preached and heard, promulgated and read, what the women have done is not totally forgotten because the Gospel story remembers […] the discipleship and apostolic leadership of women.”[4]
As a divinity student I was fortunate to be able to take a New Testament Ethics class with Professor Schüssler Fiorenza. Although she employs feminist pedagogical methods and espouses radical democratic classroom practices, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is still profoundly German and intimidating, not least because she is among the most important Biblical scholars of the twentieth century. Whenever a student asked her for her thoughts as a feminist about a troubling biblical passage such as our reading today from Colossians, our professor would always grin, shrug lightly and reply, “this is the Word of God for our salvation.” She would not elaborate, but would instead leave the meaning hanging in the air, suspended between her and us her students. And I have since come to suspect that this suspension of meaning was a profound act of radical democracy and Christian discipleship. Professor Schüssler Fiorenza considered that it was not for her to say definitively in precisely what way Colossians might be understood as the Word of God. Instead, the meaning of the biblical witness has to emerge at each moment that the scriptures are encountered. What are we to do with this text before us? Embrace it? Reinterpret it? Place it in a broader historical context? Or, in some cases, resist it? I think we can do all of those things and still be at the same time prophetic and faithful Christians and ethical citizens. Rather than affix the meaning of scripture for all time, as pastors are doing around the world at this very moment, we might consider the possibility that Words are only Words at the moment they are spoken, read, thought about, heard. The power that they take on is not intrinsic to the text, but the power emerges uniquely each time the words are uttered in a relational context. And that means that the hearers are as much an integral part of the dialogue as the speakers, preachers, and even the authors of the text. This revelation enables a young girl to hear Colossians 3:18 and say, “no, that doesn’t sound right” – and in a similar way, it enabled enslaved Africans to hear white slave masters preaching Colossians 3:22 and to respond, “no, that is not God’s message for me.” In each case, the word of God lies not in the text spoken by the preacher, but instead emerges precisely in the moment of its rejection and in the subsequent recognition of one’s inner worth as a beloved child of God – whatever a slave master or hipster preacher might say.
“The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom” (Lk 2:40), our gospel text concludes – and Jesus was able to do so because his mother Mary taught him, by word and example, that as a human being he was a carrier of sacred power in relationship. And surely he taught her and Joseph a thing or two along the way. I know this has been my daily experience in my fumbling journey of parenthood. My prayer on this feast of the Holy Family is that all of us, siblings, parents, friends, citizens, children of God – will learn to recognize and wield the profound power of our words, a power that is both sacred and terrible, and to use that power responsibly, to work and to struggle toward a more truly inclusive circle of care.
[1] Patel, “We Asked 615 Men About How They Conduct Themselves at Work.”
[2] Daly, Beyond God the Father, 73.
[3] Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 299.
[4] Fiorenza, 334.