Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 2/3/08
Approaching Scripture
Colossians 3:18-4:1
What do we do with a text like this – a text that seems to support not only the subordination of women but the institution of slavery? We know, historically, that it and others like it have been used to argue that slavery was part of God’s intended order. We know that even today there are parts of the larger church that still use this text to teach that women should submit to men. The very questions this text raises, then, offers us an opportunity to explore the way we approach Scripture and the way in which we interpret and apply it.
If one temptation is to take this text at face value, the other (and equally in error) is to ignore it altogether. Our understanding of Scripture doesn’t let us go there. While Paul was certainly human, and his epistles are going to reflect that; at the same time we also believe that God was working through him. We believe that what he wrote was “God-breathed.”
So while we don’t necessarily take everything at face value, we don’t discard a passage like this one either. God is speaking to us here; that is where our understanding of inspiration takes us. The question, rather, is how do we get at what God is saying?
We begin by asking what this text would have meant in Paul’s own time. It is worth noting that the very parts that cause us to stumble are the parts that people in Paul’s time would have taken as a given. Women had no rights in that era. They were essentially a possession. A man, for example, could divorce his wife for virtually any reason, but a woman wasn’t allowed to initiate divorce. She was stuck in whatever marriage her parents had arranged for her.
Children didn’t have any rights either. A father of that time could sell them into slavery or have them killed. Children lived under the complete control of the father. The same would have been true of slaves in relation to their masters. Slaves didn’t even possess the right to marry. So telling a woman to submit to her husband, or a child to obey his or her parents, or slaves to obey their masters – that was exactly what everyone of that era would have expected.
No, the part of this passage that would have surprised Paul’s readers is the very part that we take for granted. It is Paul telling husbands to love their wives (the word he uses “agape,” is the highest form of love, the kind of love that Jesus showed to us). It is Paul telling fathers not to provoke their children, and telling masters to treat their slaves justly and fairly.
This was a whole new ethic that he was lifting before these people. This text, then, really wasn’t about women or children or slaves. It was about the husband, the parents, the masters – it was speaking to the people who held all the power in that culture. And what was Paul doing? He was calling them to give up that power. He was calling them to seek the good of these others instead of simply using them for their own benefit. Can you begin to see just how radical this message would have been?
But now let’s take this a step further. We’ve already established that what he says to women and children and slaves here wasn’t really the point of this passage, but does that mean that we should simply ignore it? To put it differently, how should we respond to someone whose understanding of Scripture leads them to believe that a woman’s role is subservient to that of men?
Scripture is both self-validating and self-correcting. It is self-validating in the sense that when you get it right and apply it you will find that it is always true. It is self-correcting in the sense that the whole informs the specific. It is the whole of Scripture that can correct our understanding of a specific passage.
What happens when we look to the whole of Scripture? On the one hand, we find evidence that Paul really did think in terms of a hierarchical relationship between men and women. Take a look, for example, at Ephesians 5:22f:
Wives, be subject to your husband as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.
We could certainly cite other passages that reflect a similar perspective. But then, on the other hand, we find Paul writing in Galatians 3:28f, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Here, in other words, is the very same Paul suggesting that in Christ the hierarchy has broken down; that in Jesus all of us are now equal.
What does that bring to mind? Remember Genesis? Remember the very beginning? Genesis 1:27, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Scripture itself is clear: it is as male and female that we stand in the image of God. Not one above the other, but the two together; equal and as a whole.
What, then, of the hierarchical relationship? Those same first chapters of Genesis reveal that the hierarchy wasn’t part of God’s design, but a consequence of the fall, Genesis 3:16, “To the woman [God] said, ‘I will great increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’”
Do you know that there was actually a time when anesthesia was first being developed that some doctors argued that it was wrong to alleviate a woman’s pain in childbirth? They believed the pain was part of God’s order. This idea that women are somehow subservient belongs in that same category and has the same biblical roots. They both go right back to the fall. They aren’t part of God’s intent. They are, in fact, a contradiction of God’s intent. Jesus didn’t come to perpetuate the consequences of the fall. He came to overcome and reverse them.
Well, I could go on and on about the ways in which Scripture itself corrects our understanding here – the role of Deborah in the Old Testament, the way Jesus treated women in his own time, the place of women like Priscilla in the early church.
What I wanted you to see this morning is the way in which our understanding of Scripture informs our approach to a difficult passage like our text. Understanding that the biblical writers were human beings influenced and informed by their own culture means we don’t necessarily take everything at face value. Yet at the same time, our understanding of inspiration means we don’t just skip over it either. Put the two together and we conclude that there is always truth in these pages, but sometimes we need to dig beneath the surface in order to find it.
What is God saying to us this morning? How about this: the call to be faithful begins in that place where it is often hardest. It begins in our home, and begins with the choice to love those with whom we live.
In practical terms that means taking this power that each of us has and letting it go. It means no longer trying to use others – no longer trying to manipulate them or control them – to serve our own ends. Instead, it means making the choice to serve them, to put their needs first, to love them as Jesus loved us.
Make that choice and we will find the self-validating dimension of Scripture coming into play. Make that choice and our families will become the source of joy and blessing to each of us that has always been God’s intent.