some secrets…about the siblings…

Sib­ling Solidarity

How, then, can we best posi­tion our­selves to “get” what Paul sought to com­mu­ni­cate? First we must put aside our “com­mon sense” views of fam­ily life. For exam­ple, it is widely assumed in mod­ern West­ern fam­ily life that the adult indi­vid­ual will usu­ally expe­ri­ence her or his deep­est sense of emo­tional bond­ing in mar­riage. In sharp con­trast, the tight­est unity of loy­alty and affec­tion in the world of the early fol­low­ers of Jesus was found among broth­ers and sis­ters. It is exceed­ingly sig­nif­i­cant, there­fore, that Paul chose to regard even mar­ried fol­low­ers of Christ first of all as sur­ro­gate broth­ers and sis­ters of each other, rather than sim­ply wife and hus­band. For exam­ple, his line of rea­son­ing in 1 Corinthi­ans 7 repeat­edly empha­sizes that the “sis­ters” have their iden­tity pri­mar­ily “in Christ” rather than in their blood fam­i­lies or in a sub­or­di­nate rela­tion to their hus­bands. As such they are declared the sex­ual equals of believ­ing hus­bands (7:4–5) and the spir­i­tual “pow­er­houses” in mar­riages to non­be­liev­ers (7:13–16). As such, Paul iden­ti­fied “our sis­ter Phoebe” as a leader of the house church in Cenchrae, with no men­tion of any male fig­ure except Paul, who calls her his “patron” (Romans 16:1–2).

Such rad­i­cal social con­se­quences of the gospel met seri­ous resis­tance among his con­verts. Why?

The par­ents of these fol­low­ers of Jesus cer­tainly had taught them how bio­log­i­cal sib­lings should relate to each other—with fair­ness and gen­eros­ity. At the same time, the par­ents had raised them to regard every­one out­side the blood-related fam­ily as a poten­tial chal­lenger of the honor of the fam­ily and of every indi­vid­ual within it. Thus, if those respond­ing to Paul’s mes­sage had sim­ply been peers from one social group or class, Paul’s house con­gre­ga­tions already would have been tension-filled, because these peo­ple had pre­vi­ously regarded each other as com­peti­tors for recog­ni­tion and honor.

Yet Paul’s chal­lenge was made sub­stan­tially greater by the fact that he had pro­claimed a rad­i­cally inclu­sive mes­sage, result­ing in an aston­ish­ing diver­sity in his house con­gre­ga­tions. They con­founded con­ven­tional Mediter­ranean group expec­ta­tions because of their cross-class social makeup, embrac­ing men and women of every eco­nomic sta­tus and all local eth­nic back­grounds. This ques­tion­able melange was not acci­den­tal, as if Paul had to set­tle for what­ever response he inspired. Rather it seems quite inten­tional, as a direct exten­sion of the his­tor­i­cal Jesus’ prac­tice of rad­i­cal inclu­siv­ity (see 1 Corinthi­ans 1:26–31). Paul’s state­ment that in Christ there was nei­ther Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free (Gala­tians 3:28) meant both that every man and woman was wel­come with­out dis­crim­i­na­tion and that these sta­tus indi­ca­tors were to play no role in the every­day life and rela­tion­ships within his groups.

So Paul made a dar­ing and risky move when seek­ing to per­suade per­sons from such dis­parate back­grounds to think of them­selves as “fam­ily.” Yet it was log­i­cal, bril­liant, and true to the Jesus tra­di­tion for Paul to chose sib­ling lan­guage to describe the rela­tion­ships among the fol­low­ers of Christ.