Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (17 page)

But thus, paradoxically, can customs begin; and this passage from Paul, misinterpreted by centuries of earnest literalists, is the source of the convention about hats in church (always for women, never for men). The earnest misinterpreters have managed, however, to slide over the most important—and only ageless—point that Paul has to make in this whole business about dress: “In the end—and in the Lord [that is, from the Christian point of view]—woman is not otherwise than man, and man is not otherwise than woman; and though woman came from man [since Eve came from Adam’s side], so does every man come from a woman—and everything comes from God.” More radical feminists may take exception to the sexual complementarity that may seem hinted at in these words. But equality, not complementarity, is Paul’s subject: what he is doing here is taking the Genesis account of the Creation, which was the aboriginal Jewish
locus classicus
on the
inequality of women, and turning it on its head by subtly reminding his readers that even the Messiah needed a mother. Most of us should be cheered that here, plunk in the middle of this old-hat stuff about what to wear, we have the only clarion affirmation of sexual equality in the whole of the Bible—and the first one ever to be made in any of the many literatures of our planet.

If Paul insists (the first person in history to do so) on the essential equality of the sexes, he is downright rabid on the subject of economic equality. He is not so unrealistic as to expect that all members of the community should have the same income, but he will have no part in treating anyone
according to income.
“In the Lord”—that is, within the community of believers—everyone is to be treated equally. But the
Corinthians have taken the
agape
, the “love-feast” that was held in the local house-church prior to the
Eucharist, and turned it into a textbook demonstration of economic inequality. The
agape
was meant to serve as a Christian version of the Greek
symposion
¹⁰
(and its Roman equivalent, the
convivium
): a convivial common meal for sharing food and thoughts and strengthening the bonds of community. But the Corinthians, in their positive genius for getting things back-to-front, have made the house-church
agape
into an opera house of economic distinctions—from elegant box seats for the well-heeled to out-of-the-way railings for the standees. “I cannot congratulate you,” says Paul between clenched teeth, “on the meetings you hold, which do more harm than good.… When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat, since each one of you brings his own supper first, and while one goes hungry, another is getting drunk. Don’t you have homes of your own for this sort of thing? Or have you such contempt for God’s church that you can parade shamelessly in front of those who have nothing? What do you expect me to say to you? ‘Congratulations’? Not this time.”

Despite his agitation, Paul, calming himself, attempts to make the Corinthians
see why their “
Eucharist” is a mockery by recalling one of Jesus’s most sacred discourses, preserved with a hushed solemnity equaled by few other aspects of the emerging Jesus tradition:

These are tough words, and who knows whether they sank in. But Paul uses here a phrase that is not immediately explicable: what does it mean to
recognize the Body?
The elements of the Eucharist—the bread and wine—are
somehow
Jesus’s body and blood; but the Corinthians already know this, and long before Paul gets to the inexplicable phrase he has made this point. The
Body of Christ, the Body that suffered, died, and rose, is now the mysterious Eucharist—but it is also the Church, the gathering of God’s people. No one knew this better
than Paul, who had been given a privileged insight into this metareality: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”—me Jesus, me the Church. But it is one thing to have an insight, another to express it. Over the course of his many epistolary instructions Paul will attempt to communicate his insight about “the Body” to his many and varied converts. He recognizes the Body, and they must, too:

In
First Corinthians, the earlier of Paul’s two surviving letters to the crazy Corinthian church, this passage on what has come to be called the
“Mystical Body of Christ” is followed directly by the “Hymn to Love.” In other words, those who recognize the Body—and therefore recognize that everyone they meet is part of Christ—are obliged above all else to charity, to the selfless love of everyone who falls across their path, for this alone follows as the necessary moral consequence of “recognizing the Body.” Those who recognize this obligation
fully are likely to be already a conscious part of the Church. But everyone, whether he knows it or not, whether she wishes it or not, is “of the Body.” For whatever a human being’s disposition, he “does not belong to the Body any the less for that.” Individual believers in Jesus, gathered together in their weekly meeting, sharing the bread and wine of Christ, should be—consciously—his Body. But even the unconscious, even those who have never heard of Jesus, are part of the Body. The Jesus who suffered and died, now raised and exalted by the Father, has (as Jesus will say in John’s Gospel) “draw[n] all people” to himself. He has, in Paul’s vision, drawn all things
in
to himself, which is why the inanimate realities of bread and wine can be his body and blood. But if all Creation is now identifiable with the glorified Body of Christ, how much more than inanimate matter are Jesus’s sisters and brothers, the adopted children of the Father—the peak of Creation—to be identified with Christ. All humanity—“all flesh,” in the ancient Jewish formulation—is subsumed into this cosmic Christ. For “the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” This enigmatic prophecy, delivered so long ago to the exiles in Babylon by the Second Isaiah, has, like all the prophecies, come true.

Paul knew perfectly well that his striking analogy would invite scatological speculation (“Which part of the Body do you suppose Bibulus is?”). But he hoped that when the laughter subsided, his recipients would continue to ponder the reality that lies behind the words: that all humanity is caught up in a great cosmic drama in which each one, however humble or ridiculous, has a significant part to play—and that we cannot do without one another.

Paul’s dramatis personae of the primitive Church is most
intriguing: apostles like Paul—the traveling envoys who are witnesses to the risen Christ—head the list, followed by somewhat lesser instructors, the prophets and teachers, who, like apostles, tended to be visiting rather than permanent figures in the life of the local church. These were all offices of inspiration, certainly not of administration. “Administrators” will rise considerably in the lists of the later Church, gradually assuming the office of ruler, an office unknown to the primitive Church. Here, however, they stand just one step ahead of “those who speak in tongues,” the
ecstatics, who could only have been another headache for Paul—which is why he tries to direct everyone’s thoughts away from becoming one of them (“By all means, set your mind on the higher gifts”). Even an administrator would be a better choice.

But the cosmic Christ, whose glory knocked Paul from his horse on the road to Damascus, who sums up in himself the whole of the created universe, eventually leads Paul to thoughts that no one has ever had before—thoughts about the equality of all human beings before God. In this ancient world of masters and slaves, conquerors and conquered, a world that articulates at every turn, precisely and publicly, who’s on top, who’s on the bottom, Paul writes the unthinkable to his
Galatians, who may just have been goofy enough to receive it: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free,
male and female
, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

This list is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive, and Paul repeats it elsewhere with variations. Had he been writing to the class-conscious and conspicuously consuming
Corinthians, he would surely have included “rich or poor, well- or lowborn.” He breaks the rhetorical parallelism of “Jew or Greek, slave or free” with
“male and female”
because he is alluding once more
to the Genesis account of Creation—“Male and female created he them”—and directly contradicting the assumption of eons of interpreters that this sentence of the Torah announces not only
la différence
but the natural and necessary subordination of women to men. “In Christ Jesus”—in the ultimate cosmic reality—there can be no power relationships. The primitive Church was the world’s first egalitarian society.

N
O
ONE
“in Christ” is permitted to lord it over anyone else. “There is one Body, one Spirit [animating this Body] … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, over all, through all, and in all,” writes Paul (or, possibly, one of his companions) in the
New Testament letter to the church at
Ephesus. This great cosmic unity does not bind but frees the believer. “Christ set us free,” writes Paul to the
Galatians, “for the sake of freedom. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be bound once more to
slavery’s yoke.” The yoke is, of course, the yoke of sin, the
hamartia
, or tragic fault, that runs through all the sons and daughters of
Adam and Eve. Like
Moses leading the People out of Egyptian slavery, Christ the Redeemer has ransomed us all from the slavery of sin. We must go forward into freedom, not backward into chains.

In Paul’s radical view, this freedom has to mean freedom from all human rules and conventions. If it was more sensible for a man to dress like a man and a woman like a woman, this was nothing more than a prudent social norm. It was of no consequence to the cosmic Christ: “We don’t—nor do any of God’s churches—have such a thing as ‘custom.’ ” In nothing was Paul more radical than in separating accidentals from essentials. In part, this came from his experience with the semicivilized
gentile world where, as he saw for himself, it was all too easy for half-barbarians like the Galatians and nouveaux riches self-made men like the Corinthians—people who lacked a long and disciplined tradition capable of subtle religious distinctions—to get almost everything backward. The theology that underlay the story of Jesus, as we have sketched it, was complicated enough. The last thing Paul wanted was to add any unnecessary complications.

The overwhelming majority of Jesus’s original followers—and all the witnesses to his resurrection—were Jews, as devout about their religion as Jesus had been. In their encounters with Paul’s gentile “Jews,” they often found themselves shocked at the new converts’ blank ignorance of Jewish law and practice. How could these strange new people, admittedly believers in the risen Jesus, be admitted to the fold of Judaism? They were unclean and knew nothing of the need for ritual bathings and washings; they ate
anything;
they did not keep the
Sabbath; their men were uncircumcised,
¹²
their sexual practices unspeakable. Most of those critical of Paul’s methods of instruction had, of course, never tried to carry the Gospel beyond their own comfortable circles in
Jerusalem and
Antioch, the old capital of Alexandrine Asia. They knew and cared nothing for his trials and labors through mountains and deserts and on the high seas, nor could they appreciate how the man’s unceasing work had flowered so dazzlingly in such places as
Philippi and
Thessalonica—“the churches of
Macedon,” Paul’s favorites—“and how, in the course of continual ordeals and hardships, their unfailing joy and their intense poverty have welled up in such an overflow of generosity … beyond all their resources.”