Dissident families
Colossians 3:18-4:1
If you read what the papers say about families today you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world’s coming apart. Maybe it is. There’s certainly a loss of confidence in our ability to create happy marriages, homes and even workplaces. We all know what we want, it’s just we don’t know how to get it. The same was true in Paul’s day and here he offers an illustration of how Jesus can create what the empire can’t if we trust and follow him.
1) Proper understanding
Paul shows how his teaching on dissident relationships works itself out in the key area of most people’s lives: home and work (remember that this was same place for most of his original hearers; people lived and worked in a household).
i) Christ-focused: seven times in 8 verses Paul talks about ‘in the Lord’ or ‘pleasing the Lord’, thereby setting these instructions firmly in the context of 3:1-4:
ü Jesus is the model for what Paul teaches here. He was submissive and obedient to his Father – so we should copy him.
ü Jesus is the image in whom we’re being remade (3:11) – so we need to allow the Holy Spirit to do this rebuilding work in us.
ii) clothes: what we wear in church (12-17) we wear in the world (18ff): there’s no place for a Sunday best wardrobe. And every household member wears the same wardrobe that Paul has outlined in 12-17.
iii) context: the household is a picture of the key relationships of most, though not all his hearers (some would live alone, working as day labourers – but even they were very likely to be members of a family). The household was the basic building block of society and the empire regulated it and emphasized that it was where Roman values would have their greatest effect. So Paul is here engaging in careful social theology. Without upsetting the applecart too publicly, Paul shows how Jesus creates what the empire can’t – despite all Augustus’s family legislation! Jesus does it not by coercion but through the cross, not by force but by love (3:14).
2) Practical outworking:
So here we have examples of how 12-17 transforms our key relationships: husband-wife, parent-child, master-slave. Now it’s important to note that in each pair he discusses, Paul names the legally weaker partner first – wives, children and slaves – and establishes their equality as responsible and accountable human beings. This is pretty revolutionary since Roman law did not grant such status to any of them.
i) spouses: Paul urges mutual respect (better in this context than ‘submission’) and love – in Ephesians 5:21 Paul calls us to submit to one another before he spells out similar rules for happy households to here. In law the husband owns his wife so Paul warns him not to be harsh; this could be a conscious echo of Jesus’ word in Mark10:5 where he says that Moses allowed divorce because of men’s hardness of heart – implying that divorce sometimes protects women from harsh husbands.
ii) sons & daughters: C.S. Lewis said ‘if the home is to be a means of grace, it must be a place of rules…the alternative to rules is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member’:
ü Rules enable children to grow up making sensible independent choices; but parental expectations should be limited while parental encouragement should be liberal in the extreme.
ü Parents need to beware of working out their anger or disappointment about their own upbringing on their children! We need to model faith to them, especially 3:12-14 – if we do that our kids more likely to obey us gladly!
But we need to note that nothing works out perfectly – everyone sins and screws up; our children are influenced by people and forces beyond the home – and hence we need to model and practice forgiveness, patience and support for one another; for many the church is all the extended they have.
iii)
slaves & masters: this
pair gets the longest of the
instructions possibly indicating that Paul was well aware of the high number of
slaves from both believing and unbelieving households in the churches in
22-23 is a direct outworking of 3:17 applied to the slave’s attitude to his or her master. Paul possibly majors on how he expects slaves to live out the instructions of 3:12-17 because many of them were from households where their master didn’t share their faith and Paul is keen that they see it working in their believing slave.
But he stresses that slave and master are equal in Jesus (3:11) hence he says to masters (who are part of the church) that they should treat their slaves correctly and ‘equally’ (4:1 where he uses same word as in 2 Corinthians 8:12, 14 which the NIV correctly translates ‘equality’). Remember that both Philemon – who gets his own letter on this subject – and Onesimus – a runaway slave, now member of Paul’s team (4:9) – were members of this community
Are there any lessons for today’s workplaces – very different from an ancient household? Almost certainly: everyone matters wherever they are in the corporate hierarchy; no one should be paying poverty wages or enjoying lavish board-room bonuses; there are no easily expendable people who aren’t worth investing in. Every believing employer and employee has to work out how these few principles apply to their workplace – and we need to help each other to do that.
Note that 4:1 brings us full circle back to 3:1: we have a master in heaven, so we need to have a kingdom perspective on how we live at home and work, recognizing that we’re all accountable to the same master.
So, who are we when we’re not in church? What values are we modeling to a world that is longing for an ethic that works? 3:12-17 creates dissident relationships that commend the good news to world; and 3:18-4:1 show how those principles create dissident families and how those families ought to be living in the real world. Is this a picture of us?