Jesus and honour-reversal Apparently in the ancient Mediterranean, the table was where it all happened. It was the place to be. You see, honour was the most important value in that culture, and the table was the place more than any other where honour was sought, reasserted and attained. Who you ate with and who sat where were all part of the drama of honour and its enemy, shame.
I've just been reading an intriguing essay by the New Testament scholar S Scott Bartchy (yeah, I hadn't heard of him either) entitled "The Historical Jesus and Honor Reversal at the Table", one of a series of essays by different authors in the extremely insightful The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels (ed. Stegemann, Malina & Theissen). Bartchy defines honour in this context as "the claim to social worth, especially by males, based on one's birth and one's subsequent performance, that has been and continues to be publicly acknowledged." As well as being the "pivotal cultural value", he identifies four other characteristics of honour in the ancient Mediterranean:
Seeking greater honor for oneself and one's family was the fundamental life task of every adult ... Young males learned very early that they symbolized the honor of their households, and that they were obligated to defend that honor on a daily basis ...
Among strangers and men from other families, honor could be acquired only at the expense of someone else's honor, since honor was a good in limited supply ...
Correspondingly, retaliation was the only honorable response to any challenge to one's personal honor ... To lose honor was to be shamed, resulting in diminished worth and reputation in the eyes of one's peers ...
Meals were an especially prominent venue for the reassertion of one's honor and for seeking to acquire more.
It is probably becoming obvious already how Jesus turned the tables -- pardon the pun -- on the cultural value of honour. But let me summarize some of Bartchy's conclusions, in his own words:
Honor is still a pivotal cultural value, but now both birth honor and acquired honor have been made irrelevant. For in the nam of Israel's God, Jesus gave honor to everyone, without regard for social status, personal accomplishment, purity or health. Jesus' behaviour provided the experiential base for the later Jesus-group [see, he does know how to use hyphens sometimes!] teaching about the "grace of God."
Instead of seeking honor for himself, Jesus was prepared to be humiliated rather than to play the traditional male game of one-upmanship. He announced that, in his fellowship, honor is given to the merciful, the peacemakers ...
In contrast to the prevailing assumptions about life, honor was not in limited supply for the historical Jesus. His God offered an unlimited supply of honor; in turn, those honored by God had the social resources to give honor to others without fear of diminishing their own. Jesus apparently envisioned a world of human relationships in which competition would be expressed paradoxically by seeking to excel in giving honor to each other ...
Nonretaliation thus became the only honorable response to a challenge to one's personal honor ... Attempts to undermine one's honor were to be ignored or trumped by returning honor for dishonor, even by blessing and praying for those who had abused and cursed you (Luke 6:28) ...
Meals became an especially prominent venue for this outrageous giving of honor to all, around a radically inclusive table.
He then quotes Bruce Chilton:
Meals in Jesus' fellowship became practical parables whose meaning was as evocative as his verbal parables (which have consumed much more scholarly attention). To join in his meals consciously was, in effect, to ancipate the kingdom as it had been delineated by Jesus' teaching. Each meal was a proleptic celebration of God's kingdom.
It's common to think of Jesus as first and foremost a teacher, as if it were his words that were the most important part of his ministry, but we often fail to realize just how significant his actions were. Could it be that it was at the table where Jesus was at his most radical, his most subversive, where he made his most dramatic statement?
Dave
10:38:55 AM 
|
