I just got Kenneth Bailey’s “Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes” in the mail today. I love Kenneth Bailey. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of his work. I’ve been preaching through Luke. Central to Luke is Jesus’ manifesto in 4: 18-21.

Spirit of the LORD is upon me,
for he has anointed me:
To preach good news to the poor he has sent me:
To proclaim for the captives release,
and to the blind sight
To send forth the oppressed in release;
To proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.
He rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant, sat down, all eyes fixed on him…
“Today is fulfilled this scripture in your hearing”

When I read passages like this I am always dumbfounded at the audacity of Jesus. Bailey suggests that the crowd was irate right from when Jesus began to read. The reason? Nazareth was a settlement with a purpose not too distant from what Jewish settlements attempt to do today. This was a Jewish community attempting to “take back” their God given land from Gentile overlords and intruders who were filling the region. “Galilee of the Gentiles” as it was called. They had Jesus the Isaiah scroll with a highly passage that they have understood to be highly nationalistic as the Targum reveals. What does Jesus do? He edits the text, audibly deleting the anti-Gentile zingers that the crowd was anticipating. They are furious. Jesus is betraying their culture war! What’s even more audacious is that he declares that this edited text was fulfilled in him. This left the crowd to chose between two alternatives. Either this text was fulfilled in him and he should be followed (something their Nationalistic interests would not permit) OR he was an arrogant, dangerous young man, a traitor to the cause, and a man to be silenced. According to the story they opt for the more realistic option B.

This Jesus is well embraced today. The captive freeing revolutionary that speaks truth to power.

Why would Paul then later write “slaves obey your masters with fear and trembling in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ…”? Doesn’t this seem wrong compared to the pronouncement that we find from Jesus in Nazareth? But wait, this pronouncement is in Luke, the friend and possibly even disciple of Paul? How could these seemingly contradictory messages come out of the same source?

But wait, it gets weirder. Paul formerly was a culture warrior of highest degree in his persecution of the Christians. Some who sought Jesus death were clearly motivated by the culture war. How many of the conflicts talked about in the Gospels that seem so out of place for us (Sabbath observance, dietary laws, fasting, taxes, etc.) were clearly centered on the fear of Jesus being soft on the Roman occupation and Gentile influence in the holy land? (Imagine Pharisees as softer versions of Osama Bin Laden.) Was Paul’s conversion a switching sides in the culture war?

If Jesus was merely a Roman sympathizer it would explain his visible embrace of others hated by the culture warriors, prostitutes, tax collectors, etc., but it would not explain his refusal to cozy up with the power structures aligned with Rome. Herod wanted to see Jesus, but Jesus clearly rebuffs Herod. Jesus helps a generous Roman centurion (a slave owner whose slave was ill) but hardly plays his cards right with Pilate, even as Pilate is practically begging Jesus to go along to a certain degree assuming Jesus wants to save his own skin.

So Jesus declares release to captives, and Paul tells captives to obey their masters, and the reason isn’t simple Roman sympathy. What else could it be? It’s ironic that we put the bite on Paul for what he says about slavery but we let Jesus off the hook when he heals the Centurion’s slave without chastising the Centurion a bit, healing the slave to continue in his slavery, and in fact praising the Centurion? Was Jesus inconsistent with his desire to free the captives? We see Jesus doing all kinds of miracles which are jaw droppers, but we have not a single story of Jesus accomplishing a relatively easy thing to do like freeing a slave. In fact we have a story of Paul possibly freeing a slave girl by healing her of an evil spirit infuriating her owners. Is Paul inconsistent?

We might say that some other first century believer wrote Ephesians and they included the bits we find objectionable about women and slaves along with other passages that talk about submitting to governing authorities too. But what kind of motivation would first century believers have for this? They were hardly the powerful elite in their culture and they were soon to be persecuted by the very same government they admonished their followers to obey? Furthermore, you also have the strange letter to Philemon where Paul does this strange dance around this one particular instance of slavery.

Jesus doesn’t say to slaves “cast off your chains and slit your master’s throats in their beds!” Words like this might have been welcome in Nazareth, as long as the masters were Roman or Gentiles. In fact it was because he didn’t say such a thing that they were angry.

The most reasonable way to figure all of his out, it seems to me, is to imagine that Jesus declaring a path that would achieve the ends of his manifesto but in a way that was in fact not nationalistic (Jew vs. Gentile) nor was it along the conventional lines of violence (“he who lives by the sword dies by the sword”).  He believes this path will result on all of those good things he mentions, not just for Jews, but for Gentiles. Not just for slaves, but for freed people too. Not just for men, but for women too. In this particular situation he won’t submit to the desire of his town elders by allowing them to throw him off a cliff (stone him) but he will allow the national leaders in collaboration with the Romans to do so later. He asserts that the way will be extraordinarily costly, to himself, but that he will embrace this cost willingly, voluntarily, in hope of a greater freedom even for his captors, which will in fact not be guaranteed. Not all of his captors will be wowed by his meekness, many will mock, and he will face the very real consequence of his submission. It will in fact cost him his life.

Could it be that Paul is in fact, giving the same advice to slaves that Jesus followed himself? Practice costly submission with no guarantee of “pay off” (masters realizing that slavery violates the law of love, freeing them at great economic cost to themselves). How could it be responsible to make such personal sacrifice with no guarantee of a preferred outcome?

Paul does so, and lives so (his discipleship was also enormously costly, at the cost of his life, which no one disputes) because he believes that like Jesus, he, the slave, and all who follow in Jesus’ brand of costly discipleship in fact will be vindicated by tomb walking.

What do we know? That masses of Christians practiced such with a hope of resurrection. When plagues hit and pagans fled Christians took in the families of pagans and nursed them, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. Pagan plague victims who recovered, as you might imagine, would be powerfully drawn to this strange Jewish religion, and it would be easy to imagine what they would think about those who abandoned them. In fact pagan leaders began to complain that Christians fed not only the Christian poor but the pagan poor as well. Their generosity was so costly and seemingly irresponsible that pagans complained it wasn’t fair. The math for Christians only works out if you imagine that the cost in their flesh, of no current security given the age of decay, was a terrific exchange for flesh that would not decay (Paul’s “imperishability”). Jesus himself was simply giving sound financial advice when he recommends not investing in the age of decay where you can’t keep your investment, but invest in creation 2.0, the resurrection, which will be tangibly witnessed to in his scar marked flesh.

I would suggest that Paul’s advice to slaves is not an endorsement of the slave-holding-establishment, but rather a subversive recommendation that not only endangers the institution of ancient slavery, but subverts the relational polarity (my wellbeing at your expense) of the age of decay and bears witness to the relational polarity of the age to come (your wellbeing at my expense) which is also the relational polarity of the trinity itself.

Matthew 5:43-48 (NRSV)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.