Irritating, Fascinating, Familiar
Reflections on the Lectionary for February 4th
As readers of this newsletter might know, I have a complicated relationship with Paul. On the one hand, Paul’s writings are the source of a lot of the things that are troublesome about Christianity. On the other hand, a close look at Paul’s writings suggests that the troublesome parts belong more to other people—including later interpreters—than to Paul himself. But one of the biggest sources of my complicated relationship with Paul is Paul’s personality itself, which I find irritating, fascinating, and more than a little bit familiar.
The epistle from the lectionary readings for February 4th include a section of 1 Corinthians 9 that serves as a pretty good example of all three of these things: irritating, fascinating, and familiar. The lectionary includes 9:16-23, but I think it’s more useful to look at all of chapter 9, which is a thematic unit. This chapter is titled, in one of my bibles “The Rights of an Apostle,” and that seems like a good summary to me. Here, Paul is defending his own apostolicity (the sense in which he rightfully fills the role of apostle). He’s running through a list of things that seem to be normative for apostles, and checking his own life and career against it.
I absolutely love these passages from Paul’s letters—the ones where he is angry and defensive. I love them because I feel like they are a window into the psyche of another human being, one who lived a long time ago, but whose mind somehow feels familiar. Which of us doesn’t know the feeling of being maligned by someone, and trying to defend ourselves against that person’s characterization? It has probably happened to all of us, and probably all of us have launched into just this kind of self-defense, either in public, to trusted friends, or in our heads. In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul seems to be responding to just this kind of criticism. Someone, it seems, has called Paul’s professionalism into question, casting aspersions upon his ethics and status, and Paul just couldn’t set his pen down until he responded.
We don’t know what this person (or these persons) said about Paul, because all we have is Paul’s letter. But we can intuit some of what they might have said, based on the defenses Paul is raising. In this chapter, Paul is insisting that he has a right to subsistence—to a kind of wage that would make it possible for him to survive—even if he does not avail himself of that right. “Do we not have the right to our food and drink,” Paul asks in a rhetorical question. “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (This last question is a bit different in the Greek, where it reads something closer to “a sister as a wife,” suggesting the fictive-kinship language of “sister” as it describes religious affiliation, and the relational language of “wife.” Together the NRSV translates these as “believing wife, which seems right to me). Again, Paul does not avail himself of having a wife, but he wants to be sure that everyone knows that he could, if he wanted to. The subtext here is that Paul seems to feel like he is held to a different standard than other leaders in the movement, and criticized for less than others get away with.
The lectionary portion picks up at 9:16, where Paul turns philosophical about things. In a very Paul-ish sentence, Paul boasts about how unboastful he is; he is faithful to the gospel not because of how good he is, he says, but because he is so obligated to be faithful because of God’s call. His payment, he says, is that his work is free of charge. Such a humble guy.
What follows is one of the more self-reflective parts of Paul’s corpus. He points out, beginning in 9:19, that he is a bit of a chameleon, changing his ways and his patterns to fit in with whomever he is trying to influence. The two major categories here are Jews and gentiles, though he describes the groups in different ways. Jews he describes as “Jews,” but also as “those under the law” (or “those in the law,” to choose a different translation for the preposition), and by inference, as the strong (which we might also think of as “the insiders” or something like that, pointing toward privilege of place within God’s family). Gentiles, meanwhile, are described as “those outside the law” (because they were not party to the covenant God made with Israel through Moses), and “the weak” (which we might gloss as something like “the outsiders”). Here I think Paul might be responding to accusations that he is inconstant, a flip-flopper, or an insufficiently observant Jew. His defense of himself and his inconsistency is that he is taking on the trappings of whichever group of people he is trying to win over at a given time. When he is among his fellow Jews, Paul says, he respects the shared customs that derive from their shared covenantal relationship with God (like dietary laws). When he is among gentiles, who are not party to that covenant, he lives as they live, the better to make himself known to them. To his detractors, this seems like inconsistency or even hypocrisy, and perhaps this is what Paul has been accused of. But to Paul this behavior is evidence of his own faithfulness.
The last section of this chapter, verses 24-27, are not included in the lectionary reading for this week. But there are sentences in that section that are among the most famous of Paul’s words, and also some that are among the most infamous. Although I struggle to figure out what they have to do with the rest of the chapter before them, verses 24-26 have been on a million evangelical t-shirts, and have adorned a million inspirational Instagram posts, presented as evidence that Paul (and by proxy God) endorses athletic achievement. As a high school and college track and cross-country athlete, I saw these verses about running races everywhere. They were the kind of thing that seemed to authorize the self-discipline and try-hard nature that leads one to excel in athletics competitions. Here, Paul is probably trying to appeal to the hometown pride of his Corinthian audience; Corinth hosted a biannual athletics competition called the Isthmian Games, in which the grand prize was indeed a “perishable wreath” as Paul notes in 9:25. (The wreath was made of pine in later years, and celery—yes, celery—in earlier years).
The payoff for his argument, Paul seems to think, can be found in 9:27: “I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.” I always remember this verse in the NIV translation in which I first learned it: “I beat my body and make it my slave.” This sentiment strikes me as problematic in at least two ways. First, it deploys the language of slavery and its violence in a way that valorizes it; it makes slavery into an object lesson for durability, obedience, and faithfulness, in a way that we obviously would not endorse today. Second, Paul’s language here reeks of self-loathing and self-harm, and a stark dualism between mind and body. The Christian tradition has a long history of thinking about the body as something alien from and even opposed to the mind or spirit or soul, to be controlled or subdued. Paul certainly seems to think that this is true, and his analogy relies on that kind of thinking. In my opinion, we ought to reject it, especially when it is entangled with the language of enslavement.
Irritating, fascinating, and familiar: I feel aspects of all of these perspectives on Paul while reading this chapter. I can identify with his pique and anger; who among us hasn’t felt the way he seems to feel, misunderstood and wrongly accused? I think his arguments are fascinating, as he lays out a kind of professional ethics and describes how he seems himself not only conforming to those standards, but exceeding them. And still, Paul is irritating—if not something worse—when he shows how prideful he can be, and when he uses the language of slavery to make theological points. In this chapter Paul is, as ever, complicated, in all the best ways and all the worst ways, and in ways that keep many of us returning to (and fleeing from) his ideas again and again.