As a denizen of the
first century Greco-Roman world and as a popular teacher that would have been
increasingly viewed through messianic lenses, Jesus would have been quite
conscientious of the way that He was perceived by the public. That said, He appears to be almost completely
unconcerned with the honor and shame system. It almost seems as if He
viewed it as being quite backwards, with actions seen as most honorable by the
wider public, perceived by Jesus as being shameful, and vice versa.
At times, Jesus
accepts the honors being afforded to Him, but generally He only accepts
honoring or honorific statements when they come from those that do not possess
any public honor (tax collectors, lepers, those that have been possessed by
demons, unclean women, etc…). When the rich or the rulers attempt to
honor Him (and thus flatter themselves and attempt to accrue honor by their own
association with Him), perhaps by calling Him “good,” He disavows the
approbation. He routinely speaks of the first being last and the last
being first. He interacts with tax collectors, who may have money and a
measure of power, but who are not looked upon as being honorable in the
least. He touches lepers. He allows dishonorable women to touch
Him.
He is more than happy
to take the lowest place at a meal, eschewing the places of honor and instructing
His followers to do the same. He washes the feet of His disciples,
which is the role of a slave and a reminder of the slave’s shameful
place. He allows children who, being children, do not have a place in the
honor and shame pursuit (they do not have honor or shame accorded to them), to
come to Him. When they do, He tells those who are listening to Him that
they must enter the kingdom of Israel’s God as little children---unconcerned
with the pursuit of honor or the avoidance of shame (which has nothing to do
with a “childlike faith”). He ultimately ended up on a cross, which was
the lowest and most shameful place of all, and He went there willingly as He
embraced the role of Israel for the world.
These things (the
honor and shame culture along with Jesus’ treatment of this broad social
construct) would have been well understood by Jesus’ followers and those that
made up the believing communities that attempted to live out what it meant to
be the renewed Israel that represented the rule of the Creator God through the
remembrance of and reflection upon the orally transmitted Jesus
tradition. When Paul wrote his letters, especially what are considered to
be the early letters, there were at that point no known and codified written
record of the life of Jesus. There were no Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John as they exist in their present form. Paul doesn’t have his
own body of work or the letters from other apostles from which to draw, nor do
the early believers. What they had were the words of the apostles.
Those apostles shared
their stories of Jesus (a relatively unified story to be sure, though with
different emphases, as is obvious from the variety of presentations of the life
of Jesus that can be seen in the Gospels) so that those who threw in their lot
with the crucified and resurrected King (the church) might do their best to
model out the example that He provided, as the movement of the kingdom of the
Creator God began to spread through the world via the instrument of the church,
with this spread understood to have been motivated by the Spirit of God.
They too were to be motivated to eschew honor and embrace shame, especially if
such brought glory to their King and to their God and extended the reach and
rule of that Kingdom as they conscientiously strived to bring heaven to earth
by mimicking the counter-cultural behavior of Jesus.
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