Colossians 3:18-4:1

05/01/11

Colossians 3:18-4:1

Hudson UMC

I had a professor of New Testament who would begin each course he taught by asking his students what they thought about the apostle Paul.  He has found that many mainline students, and especially female students, are not all that fond of him and his writing and this is for many reasons. In light of today’s context and debates, Paul is seen as affirming and strengthening traditional family roles, especially as it has, unfortunately, tended to keep women in a purely secondary status.  Today’s women are often intensely aware of the fact that, in passages like ours for this morning, Paul requires obedience of wives over and over again, but does not require it of husbands, or at least, does not specifically name husbands as needing to focus on obedience.  When we view these statements about obedience through our Western framework of thought and interpret it within it, we have no choice but to do so in strictly hierarchical terms, where one party is higher and the other is lower.  If we then take this twisted interpretation of Paul and then apply the fact that this isn’t just some random teacher who said this but an apostle of God and that these words are found in Scripture, it seems as though an appeal to Paul is an appeal to the suppression of women.

This does not make many women in our modern society very happy.  I would imagine that, even the women in this congregation who identify themselves as conservative would not be happy with returning to the kinds of cultural roles for men and women defined as they were back after the industrial revolution, where men and only men were allowed to work and women were only allowed to stay home, care for children, and were seen as helpless unless they had a man to take care of them.  In fact, some of the very most conservative politicians in the country today are women, something that would have been impossible a hundred years ago.  Surely, not even the more conservative among us want to bring back what Paul seems to be saying.

Is there any way to look at these kinds of household instructions that might do justice to the love, grace, and liberating power of Christ?  Rebecca D. Pentz, a self-identified feminist thinker, suggests that, perhaps, we could speak of “male” sins and “female” sins.  For example, she speaks of the story of Mary and Martha as an example of how Jesus turns the values of the time on their heads.  Jesus tells Martha that she should stop worrying so much about all the cooking and cleaning and should instead sit, like her sister Mary, and listen to the teaching of a Rabbi, something that was traditionally limited to only men.  In other words, Jesus told her to stop doing what society told her she must do, and instead told her to do what society told her she must not do.

I think that Pentz is on to something here, that Jesus does indeed take our social norms and radically transform them, in some ways so much so that those who have not had the framework of their thought transformed might think that we are overthrowing the way we’ve always done things or even, astonishing as it may sound, going against God’s will for humanity.  However, in spite of the fact that I think that she has a very important point to make, though I don’t think it should be limited to its application to feminism, but to all of our social norms, I don’t think that this way of looking at things helps us all that much to interpret this particular text and those like it in our modern times.  After all, in a world where husbands beat their wives into submission, which is surely evil, do we really need such people appealing to the authority of the Bible that submission is a problem that women have but men don’t?

It is my considered opinion that this entire way of thinking is wrong.  I think that it misses Paul’s whole point to read him this way.  Every time I hear someone interpret this passage along hierarchical and patriarchal lines, I cringe because such an interpretation, discussed within the context of social debates and not within its context within the book, that is to say, its specifically Christian context, has more to do with secular politics and power struggles than it does the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

One of the main reasons that I think that the way we often hear passages like ours for this morning is unhelpful, and even destructive, is because it simply ignores a large portion of Paul’s writings.  We are talking about a Paul who said, in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  This is the Paul who, in his letter to the Romans, asked that people would greet the leaders in the Roman church, about a third of whom were women, women who were full involved in leadership.  This is the Paul who said, to the Philippians, “I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche,” (both women) “to live in harmony in the Lord.  Indeed, true companion, I ask you also to help these women who have shared my struggle in the cause of the gospel, together with Clement also and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.”  Here is Paul, affirming that these two women, who are likely the missionaries who are delivering this letter to the people, as companions in the gospel, doing the same kind of work that he is.

The point is that, if this is the Paul that we are talking about, we simply can’t interpret these so-called “household instructions” as rigid, hierarchical rules that gives some people privileges at the expense of others.  We need to remember that, for the first two and a half chapters in this letter, Paul has been focusing first and foremost on the fact that God has come among us in Jesus Christ and that it is Christ that needs to be the center of everything, and not some human made system or ideology, no matter how much sense it seems to make.  If that is the case, it seems to me that, before we start speculating about how we can make the text fit our agenda, we ought to look at the text through Christ and see if that gives us any help.

As it turns out, it does.  If we look at the instruction that Paul gives and take those instructions more seriously than worrying so much about which subgroup it is directed to, we start to notice a pattern.  There are three pairs of advice.  The six things we see Paul telling people to do are:  Subject yourselves to one another, love one another and never treat them harshly, obey the people who are in authority over you, do not provoke or recklessly anger those over whom you are in authority, in all your actions, do what you do, not because you’re being watched, but wholeheartedly.  As Paul says, “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for” human authorities.  Finally, treat people justly and fairly, for we, too, have a master in heaven.

When we focus on the instructions instead of the subgroups and if we can break ourselves away from the cultural baggage, it is remarkable what we see.  If we take a moment and think about what it might look like if someone were to follow, not just one or two of the pieces of advice, but all of them, who comes to mind?  To me, the only person I can think of who really fits all six pieces of advice is Jesus himself.

I think that this is exactly what Paul is getting at.  Remember, for Paul, what is most important is not a particular set of cultural behaviors, but Christ, the Son of God, God in flesh, God with us and God as one of us.  The most common way that Paul speaks of the Christian life is that we are “in Christ.”  Second only to that is that Christians are those who have received the Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that takes the things of Christ and makes them ours, who unites us to the life of Christ.  Do you see where this is going?  Paul is not so much concerned with supporting the cultural norms of his day, so much less with supporting the cultural norms of our society today, but with getting us to take seriously the fact that Jesus is the center.  He is the center of our faith, the center of our thoughts, and not least the center of our actions.

The fact of the matter is that Paul probably did not make too much of his distinctions between who he gave each particular piece of advice to.  It was common practice for various thinkers to give lists of advice like this.  More likely than not, Paul was using a form of teaching, not because that form was inherently godly, but because it is one that would have been well-known to the Colossians.  I am more and more convinced, especially within the context of this particular letter, that Paul’s big point, the thing that we really need to hear is that, regardless of who we are, regardless of what we think we do well and what we think we need to work on, our model for everything is Jesus and, until we have been conformed to the image of Christ and live lives that are totally characterized by obedience to God and the vitality of the Spirit, we can not, we must not, sit idly by.  We always have something to learn, we always have another area to surrender to Christ, we always have sinful tendencies to be purged out of us.

We in America are extremely class-conscious.  We are intensely aware of how people perceive us and how we would like to be perceived.  We are continually reminded of our maleness or our femaleness, of our youth or our age, of our social class, whether it be high or low.  We are continually told that things like this enter so deeply into who we are that they might just be the most important things about us.  Paul says otherwise.  Paul is telling us that, even when he gives particular people specific pieces of advice, his main point is clear:  We are called to be like Jesus.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s say you are a husband; I pick this one because it applies to me as well.  You are called, according to this passage to love your wife and never treat her harshly.  It might be that you look at your relationship and say, “I do a pretty good job with that.”  What standard do we usually use when we come to conclusions like that?  Usually, it is based on what the image of the ideal husband that we have gathered from various places, from how our own fathers treated their wives, from television, from other relationships that we see and other things.  However, before we respond too quickly to Paul’s advice, we need to remember that Paul has a very different standard in mind when he says this.

A major theme in the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, is that God is bound to his people, not only in an external relationship, where he and his people agree to work together, but that he is a husband to his people.  At one point, Paul says to the Corinthians, “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.”  In a passage from a different letter, which is sometimes read at weddings, Paul gives advice to husbands and wives, specifically drawing on this image.  The fact of the matter, husbands, is that Paul is not saying that we should love our wives with just any kind of love, but with the love that Christ has for his church.  Remember, Christ died for his church, he allowed his people to stab him in the back, nail him to the cross, and spit in his face, and yet he did not hesitate to give himself up for them.  This is the kind of love that we husbands are called to have.

The big concern that often comes up is over the fact that women are called to subject themselves to their husbands, but husbands are only called to love their wives.  And yet, when we think of love as defined, not by our culture, where love is fickle and fleeting, but by Christ, it becomes clear that Paul is calling husbands to a far higher standard that he is calling wives to.  He is calling husbands to love their wives so deeply that they are to give up everything for them, to make their needs and desires more important than their own.  I have met many women who have, after realizing this, say, “What woman wouldn’t want to submit to that kind of love, to submit to be served, to submit to be treated like a queen?”

There is a certain wisdom in that, and I am convinced that we would see that our first reactions to Paul’s instructions would all be transformed when seen in light of Christ and not in light of our contemporary culture.  However, in spite of that, the context in which this passage appears in Colossians has me more and more convinced that Paul is making a far larger, far more important point here.  As people who have had the Spirit of God given to us, we are called to live lives of holiness, holiness that cannot be captured in a list of things to do and things to avoid.  What is interesting is that if we take a series of statements or moral exhortations like we have here and we hold them up to the life of Christ as born witness in the gospels, we find that the holiness we are called to bears a remarkable resemblance to the life of obedience and holiness led by Christ himself.

Paul is, by far, most concerned with our understanding that Jesus is the center and that everything we think and believe must be rooted in him if it is to be rooted in reality.  What we need to realize is that, even when Paul shifts emphasis and begins to speak of the kind of ways we ought to live, he has not left Christ behind, but has made him central, even to the moral life.  So, let us let God impart the life of Christ into us through the power of the Holy Spirit, going and doing what Christ did, just as we trust in the centrality of Christ for everything else.  Christ is all in all; let us allow him to be all in all for us.  Let us pray.

AMEN