Past Tired and Broken

Tuesday of Week 30 in Ordinary Time

Ephesians 5:21-33 (I am taking it to 6:9 for the sake of good context)

 

"It is important to acknowledge that the text presents a vision of household relationships, rooted in an ancient setting, that is considered unjust today...and in the case of slavery completely immoral." 

(Sacra Pagina, Vol 17, 341)

There is no easy way of taking the patriarchal sting out of this text.  The metaphor at work relates the husband to God, and the wife to the human community...but it is metaphorical language.  It just doesn't communicate today.  Most of us can't get past the sting.

The author of Ephesians uses the form, household codes (a standard in Greco-Roman philosophical writing) as a way of setting Christians noticeably apart from non-believers, so it seems that the most fruitful way to discern any timeless value in the text is to look for what is different.  

Today I am going to take my cue from the lines that bookend this pericope.  

Verse 5:21:  Brothers and sisters: Be subordinate to one another out of reverence to Christ.

This is something central to the Christian way of life.  It would have been noticeably different from the culture at large.

Verse 6:9:  And masters, do the same thing to them, stopping the threatening knowing that both they and you have a master in heaven and with him there in so partiality.

The implication of living in relationship with a God who shows no favoritism continues to make ethical demands on human behavior. 

The wife/husband and slave/master metaphor is past tired and broken. It opens the scriptures up to being manipulated into supporting the very thing the Gospel intends to re-imagine. 

But trying to be more like the God in whose image and likeness I am made by cultivating a heart that refuses to begin with distinctions…that is never tired or broken.