a trajectory of hope - part 2

I’d like to revisit the “trajectory of hope” post I looked at a week or two back - the question of whether the way the Bible works through attitudes toward slavery can help us as we wade through our contemporary debates on sexuality.

There’s a passage in Matthew 8 that often comes to me as I think of this. I don't think of this passage because it resolves the whole issue. I go here because it pinpoints some of attitudes around our debates in a way that makes me think. A lot.

The words we use matter. The way we speak to each other matters.

Anyway.

Almost thirty years ago at Theological college I read ‘The Shadow of the Galilean’. Gerd Theissen’s book was the first place I came across that mentioned the healing of the centurion’s servant in Matthew 8.5-13 as a possible homosexual reference. 

From memory of what I read as I looked into this back then: Luke calls the centurion’s servant a “doulos”, a “slave”; Matthew calls him a “pais”, which could be a “boy”, or the passive partner in a homosexual relationship. In a military context, the latter is not impossible, and makes sense of a centurion making enough fuss to go see the healer despite the social boundaries that would have been arguing against him doing so for just another slave.  It’s an interesting cultural call; it’s not clear and not obvious from the text alone and yet it’s enough to make a familiar story just uncomfortable enough to grant pause for thought – and perhaps brings Jesus face to face with needing to respond to gay people. 

For a more thorough look at how this gets treated by both sides of the debate, head to Ian Paul’s blog. He has a reference (and links) to a sermon by Jeffrey John, who takes one view, and then Ian gives that position a considered conservative knock down. 

Again, I'm not going to resolve the issue here. I'm concerned with attitudes, and with the words we use to each other.

I think it’s fair to say that what we have here in Matthew 8 is generally presented as one of the kindest master/slave relationships in the Bible. This relationship lies, of course, outside the people of God. The centurion who loved his slave and comes to Jesus in Matthew 8.5-13 is not Jewish. He crosses cultural, social and religious bounds to beg for his slave’s life. Ian Paul rightly points out that all we know of the centurion’s ethnicity for sure is that he is Gentile (the Roman Legion in Judea being very unlikely actually Roman). But how lucky that slave was to have such a master! And so we honour that master - and we honour Jesus, for restoring to life someone who may have been at heaven’s door, and instead resumes a life of being -

Well, what exactly?

Because if the standard master/slave reading is true, then however kind the master, the person who was at heaven's door resumes a life of being a chattel, a thing (however prized). Legally less than a person. He's just a belonging. We are impressed by the emotion of the master; but we know nothing of the life of the slave. And is Jesus really so impressed by a foreigner, an oppressor, a master, that he commits another person to a continuing life of slavery? Does Jesus approve of slavery in healing this person?  

This is why the alternative lens begins to have a bit more focus.

Luke 7 calls the centurion's servant a ‘doulos’, a slave. Matthew 8 calls him a ‘pais’, a boy. Matthew’s word is sometimes used of the junior partner in a gay relationship in the military. Now that kind of description conjures up all sorts of worrying images - from power abuse to pedophilia. For sure it was a hierarchical relationship, but hierarchical relationships were socially normal, even in heterosexual marriage. We need to make sure our own cultural references aren’t tinting our view; and this was not a hidden relationship. Roman military perderasty might see the junior partner in his early twenties - or much younger. We don't know what this was, if it was this at all. Though consider in this case the potential depth of feelings involved that caused an army officer to risk reputation and standing by begging a religious leader from an oppressed nation to help him... 

Is it possible? Is it thinkable that Jesus restores not a ‘thing’ to be used, but a person to be loved? 

Please - listen very carefully to the point I’m making here. 

I’m not actually siding with Jeffrey John and against Ian Paul in asking that this gay-friendly interpretation of Matthew 8 be the necessary understanding of the text. I don’t for a moment happen to agree with those who argue for this being the only way to read these words. I’m an evangelical. There just isn’t enough in the words of the Scripture itself to make this the necessary way to go. Text alone - it’s a grace-note, a hint, a nod towards a possibility.

Though...

As I said, I'm interested in attitudes, and the words we use when we speak to each other, and I'm slightly forcing the case because I want us to go somewhere with this.

You see - I get why the gay Christian community need to find something positive here. I'm not totally sure it's here, in the text, but I get why the need exists. But when the conservative, traditionalist side of the debate dismiss that out of hand, sometimes they sound like they need there to be no chance of that argument being here. And I listen to that sound and I wonder:

Do you realise the implications of what you are saying?

This becomes an important passage because it reveals a lot about our emotions and our responses and things we don't know about ourselves. I think it gives away things we don't know we were saying.

Because this is the issue that this passage helps clarify for us: Not ‘is this a New Testament passage where Jesus approves of a gay relationship?’ But (forgive me, this is a bold statement) ‘which would we rather: that Jesus approve of slavery or of gay people’?

Because in healing the boy, Jesus certainly seems to approve of one of these things here. 

He certainly restores one of these things here. 

I get why gay people want to find one of those answers; I'm not always sure why those on the conservative side think that the other would be better. And I'm not always sure they realise when they dismiss the gay option how that dismissal feels to others.

Dick France, my old theological college principal, taught me that some of the words that hurt me from my fellow students at college, were totally unintended. He was absolutely right. But that means sometimes I have to stop people and say - 

Do you realise what you just said?

As a card-carrying evangelical I have heard some of my fellow evangelicals dismiss a gay reading of Matthew 8 without realising what their alternative does. It does two things:

1. It makes Jesus approve of slavery

2. It makes being a slave self-evidently a better life option than being gay. 

As I say, I think people do this without realising what they are saying. And perhaps we need to work on that. But if they do realise and still want to say these things, perhaps we need to take some time out.

Because some of us understand what slavery is, and we find choosing that as a better option pretty hard to take. Choosing being a slave as preferable to being gay - wow. 

Just wow.

A slave is a thing, not a person. 

Just wow.

We all do thoughtless from time to time, but really... Do you see why some of us might find that a little less than respectful?

It is moments like these where the Bible forces us to pause.

Where the words we use matter, and the way we speak to each other matters.

Where our debates sometimes need to pause, and where God's love needs to do some healing work.

Because actually we are family.

Because Scripturally Jesus' prays for it.

And perhaps the hope-filled trajectory of the church’s response to slavery, and the work of people like Wilberforce and Newton and Lincoln and Dr King really does exist to help us. As it still exists to help where racial tensions live on past slavery - even if, sadly, we know that all too often it goes not-heard-enough there too. As it still exists to help immigrants and foreigners in some places. And women. And divorced people. And... And... And any group that doesn't have the respect and love the Scriptures offer. 

These giants of faith made it their lives’ work we might see from the Scriptures that all people are people. Made in God’s image. Re-makeable in that image. Remarkable in that image. We are, in Bernard of Chartres' phrase, dwarves, but standing on the shoulders of these giants, we may yet see in each other more of that image than anyone has seen before. Implausibly different from one another and magnificently the same. Whether all those differences will be celebrated or even noticed in Heaven, for now it ought to be the glory of that image, not the smallness of our grasp upon it, that makes the wonder of God's love and God's word shine through.

That's a trajectory of hope.