Sermon of the Month - March 2009
Jesus: Transvaluation
Reading: Matthew 19
Introduction
Nietzsche the atheist philosopher and inspiration for far right fantasies of supermen and the super-race, famous for his declaration that ‘God is dead,’ once complained about Jesus, showing just why he disliked Jesus and the impact he had made on our civilisation so intensely. Nietzsche loved the old pagan world, and complained that Jesus had effected a “transvaluation of all ancient values”. In other words that Jesus changed the old pagan values, turning them upside down. Of course it’s the same observation that leads us to hail him. Jesus did not proclaim the merits of the will to power, but the power of love, and in his demonstration of God’s love we discover the secret of the Universe.
‘Transvaluation’, the turning of the old values upside down, this we see in Matthew 19. He changes the nature of relationships between husbands and wives, between adults and children and between rich and poor.
1. Marriage
Too often we look at what Jesus says about marriage and often tie ourselves up in knots. We turn what he says into a new rabbinic game of rules. If we are to recognise what Jesus is doing and how radical he is being, then we will better see how to respond to him in faith.
The ancient world was patriarchal, that is to say, men were in charge. This was as much true of the Jewish world as it was of the pagan world. The ancient prayer of a Jewish man gave thanks to God that he had not made him a woman, a Gentile or a slave! The classical world in its domestic ethics, gave duties to women, children and slaves, the duty of obedience. Christian faith undermined that, not by a call to revolution, but by a call to reciprocal responsibilities. Paul in Ephesians 5 and 6 balances those ancient duties with new responsibilities for the Christian man, the Christian father, the Christian master. He said Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Matching the well-known call for wives to submit to their husbands, he calls on husbands to love their wives in the same radical way Christ loves us – and he died for us: his love was unbounded. This is no misogynist’s charter. It is the exact opposite. It renounces the abuse of power and calls for its replacement by love.
And in the teaching of Jesus we see this same radical approach in his relationship with women. Of course we could illustrate that with the many accounts of Jesus’ extraordinary dealings with women, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Joanna, Susanna and many others, named and unnamed. Perhaps that would be a good idea, if we need convincing that Jesus was the Liberator of women.
The debate about divorce in Israel concerned men, and the circumstances in which they were permitted by the rabbis to divorce their wives. The relevant text was Deuteronomy 24:1, which allowed but limited divorce. The phrase stated, If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, the text then says he may write her a certificate of divorce.The question men asked was just how serious this ‘indecency’ had to be. Some rabbis, like rabbi Shammai, restricted this to adultery; other, more liberal rabbis, like rabbi Hillel, widened this to include anything the man might find offensive. That effectively gave the men following such rabbis divorce on demand. Now the problem was that being divorced left a woman powerless and vulnerable in ancient Israel. Many would decline into prostitution as a means of survival. These divorce laws – particularly when applied in this liberal way – were an abuse of power, an abuse of male power.
Matthew 19 starts with Jesus being challenged on this thorny and topical issue. The question is put in terms of the approach by rabbi Hillel and others: Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason? Jesus, they are asking, do you interpret Deut.24:1 as allowing divorce on demand, or do you restict it? But Jesus does not answer it simply by reference to current debate, or by attempts to unlock the textual interpretation of Deut.24:1. Instead, he goes back to first principles – and I think he gives us a vital clue here on how to tackle challenging or unclear biblical texts, not to mention how to apply our biblical norms to new questions and new situations: Go back to first principles. Here Jesus goes back to creation, in particular the foundational comment about the significance of marriage in the creation story of the creation of Eve, of man and woman: For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is the foundation: God made us for relationship. And it is his intention that these relationships should work, that we should be committed to them, that we should love each other and stick with each other. The only reason he says that Moses – in other words Deut.24:1 – permitted divorce was because people’s hearts are hard. It regulated life and tried to restrict the damage of those situations when we have already moved out of God’s will for our lives. God’s will is that husband and wife should love each other and remain committed to each other. It is not his will that we should commit adultery and divorce each other. He made us for love, and made us that our lives might be based on the same committed love for each other that he shows in his love for us.
Now the effect of Jesus’ radical teaching is that it blows away that excuse of men to abuse their power, and throw their unwanted wives on the scrapheap. In a patriarchal world, Jesus tells men that the abuse of their power to dispose of the wives they want to divorce is not in line with God’s call for committed love. He overturns the values of the ancient world, Jewish even more than pagan in this context, and challenges men to replace abuse of power with the challenge to love their wives.
2. Children
Matthew 19 moves straight on from marriage relationships to the relationships of children and adults. In a different way, and perhaps more so, children were also powerless and vulnerable. In the well-known episode where Jesus rebukes his disciples for trying to dismiss what they see as a tiresome annoyance. The disciples assume Jesus cannot possibly be interested in such trivia. After he is the one who heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, even raises the dead. The disciples must protect him from time-wasters: his time – valuable! Jesus’ very rarely showed outrage. I can only think of his denunciations of the Pharises in Matthew 23, his turning of the tables in the temple, and his anger here. And this is the only time he shows such rebuke to his own disciples. The children are important to him: very, very important.
Children in the ancient world were considered an irrelevance to adult men. So many children died, and even when alive they could not make a contribution to working life. Only when sons are old enough to begin learning from their fathers, such as their trade as fishermen, carpenters or whatever, do men begin to engage with their sons.
But Jesus turns these ancient values upside down too. No one is too small, too young, to uneducated, to illterate, to vulnerable, fragile or weak to be significant to Jesus. Care for children is so natural to us that we can overlook just how radical Jesus was.
3. Rich and poor
Finally we have the account of the rich young ruler. Of course there are many things we could take from this sparkling and challenging encounter. But I want us just to recognise one of them. This man was a rich man, and in the Israel of Jesus everyone would consider him blessed by God on that account. We may recoil at – or at least struggle with – the prosperity theology beloved of some. But it would have been the norm in Jesus’ day. A man could not only thank God he was not born a woman, Gentile or slave, but if he was rich, he could thank the Lord he was blessed with wealth.
Nor is this man smug or materialistic in the normal sense of the term. He seems to be a good, sincere, decent, honest, God-fearing, caring man. He is a man who has honoured the Ten Commandments since a child. One thing you lack comes Jesus’ devastating rejoinder, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor. Jesus shocked all, including his disciples, as the dialogue which follows shows very clearly. Jesus turns the normal human presumptions about wealth and poverty upside down too – and this is even more of a challenge to us today than the other two challenges.
Blessed are the poor, said Jesus. I know this is ‘poor in Spirit’ in Matthew 5, but it seems likely that both phrases blessed are the poor and blessed are the poor in spirit are two different translations of the same Aramaic phrase. The poor and the poor in spirit were not so different then as they sound today: those who know their need of God, spiritually and materially poor, dependant on God; they are blessed. While those who say, I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing are actually wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked (to quote Revelation 3).
4. Conclusion
Jesus turned ancient values upside down: challenging the abuse of male power, adult power and the power of wealth, calling on us to sacrifice power in the name of love.