I use the Presbyterian (USA) lectionary website every day[1]. It contains two sets of readings, the Revised common lectionary — which is shared by all seasonal churches — and the daily readings. I want you to look at today’s daily reading.
23One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” 25And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? 26He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” 27Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; 28so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”
1Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. 2They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. 3And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” 4Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. 5He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
Did you notice the word humankind? Well, let’s look at that verse a bit more.
New International Version (NIV)
27 Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
Mark 2:27
King James Version (KJV)
27 And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:
Mark 2:27
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
27 Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath;
And finally, interlinear Gk.
Mark 2:27
Mounce Reverse-Interlinear New Testament (MOUNCE)
27 And kai he said leg? to them autos, “ The ho Sabbath sabbaton was made ginomai for dia · ho man anthr?pos, · kai not ou · ho man anthr?pos for dia the ho Sabbath sabbaton.
Modern translators are fairly uniformly translating this has humankind, humanity, because the old term mankind, has been deemed by many to be (ahem) sexist: to refer to men only. Which it did not: the scholars who translated the KJV were poets, writing in the time of Shakespeare and Dryden, and they knew the meaning of that they wrote.
Back to the text. Firstly, Jesus is neither breaking the laws of theft nor the sabbath. Gleaning — picking food from the edge of the field — was allowed in the law of Moses, and farmers were told not to pick up to the edges of their fields so there would be food for the stranger, the poor and the sojourner. (Victor Hugo is right to see that a man stealing a loaf of bread being damned as unjust but for the wrong reason — the waste should be shared, not thrown away. Particularly when we have homeless: many restaurants do this automatically, and good on them).
It is good to heal on the Sabbath. I know observant Jews, who, like me, are on call, and the Rabbinical teaching now is that of Christ — that doing good on the Sabbath is not to break the law. You should save a life regardless. There has always been a controversy among Rabbis on boundaries — and this issue, like divorce, was being debated at the time.
So the main issue of this text is fairly simple. We should not regulate our lives and our society to enslave, starve, or oppress, for the sake of law, or for species, This world was made for man, man was not made for this world.
However, that is not what is happening.
I am going to use a post from Judgy as an example, and it is about as ugly as it gets.
Look around you. There are very few black men who wield real power. They are barely on the margins of discourse, never mind occupying the center. Where do you get this idea that black men occupy space at the center of the discourse? It certainly isn’t from your lived reality. Unless you last name is Obama, of course.
According to the African American Policy Forum, black girls are suspended at a higher rate than all other girls and white and Latino boys. Sixty-seven percent of black girls reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness for more than two weeks straight compared to 31 percent of white girls and 40 percent of Latinas. Single black women have the lowest net wealth of any group, with research showing a median wealth of $100. Single black men by contrast have an average net wealth of $7,900 and single white women have an average net wealth of $41,500. Fifty-five percent of black women (and black men) have never been married, compared to 34 percent for white women.
Here is the ugly harsh truth, Brittney: black women are little more than slaves.
Your role in contemporary, liberal, feminist society is to do all the shit work rich white women think beneath them. Someone still has to raise the children, change dirty diapers, wipe snotty noses, cut up apples so no one chokes. Someone has to clean house and fetch dry-cleaning and pick the kids up from school. Someone has to wash dishes and do laundry and scrub the toilet.
Guess who that someone is?
It’s you.
Those well to do white ladies with $40 000? That money has been stolen from black women in the form of third world wages paid for domestic labor. White women have no interest in paying fair wages or offering benefits to the mostly black and Hispanic women they hire to raise their children and clean their houses and provide their husbands with sexual services. What would the net worth of those groups look like if white women had to pay a living wage to their nanny or housekeeper?
Rich white women have a deeply vested interest in making certain that the black community remains fractured. Why do you think they gerrymander their school districts to keep black children in inferior, underfunded schools while their own children go to state of the art institutions built with the money they have stolen from black women?
I do not think that “wiping snotty noses and cleaning the toilet” is “shit work”. Yes, I have a cleaner, generally one of my friends children, who gets paid about what I pay for tutoring — above minimum wage. And I have cleaned up enough puke and poo over my years. It is called loving your children.
And Ladies, that is something you should never delegate.
There’s a love that grows slowly; there’s that initial one that is all at once and attractive and you want to be with that person all the time. But while you aren’t paying attention, there’s a second love that grows. It grows unnoticed through the painful times, it binds two people together in ways they can’t see. It’s the loving that happens when someone is unlovable, but you do it anyway. It’s the patient love that hopes. I’m not sure something can be called love unless it happens when they don’t feel like it, when it’s not self-serving. We can take encouragement when we are in a relationship and it doesn’t feel like love because that is proof a real love, a deeper love is happening.
We are not here for ourselves: we are here to glorify God. To do good, within our family, within our neighbourhood. To neither oppress those who work for us nor exploit those we do business with.
And worrying about the ‘sexism’ of language, or language itself, is more than a waste of energy. It takes away the ability of people to speak plainly and true.
And that, Ladies who think that your feelings can become some monstrosity called Feminist Theology, will damn you.
________________
Notes.
1. Will asks in the comments why I don’t use the RCL from one of the more orthodox churches in the comments below. Well, the classical reformed way of reading the bible is continuously. I know how to do this in an analogue system.
- Get out your bible.
- Find three bookmarks
- Put one on Genesis 1, one on Psalm 1, one on Matthew 1.
- Read two to five chapters OT, one Psalm or Proverb, and one Chapter NT a day. Mark up your bible with notes.
- When you have read through five or six times, get a new Bible.
From the Orthodox Presbyterian Folks.
Question:
I am currently having a discussion with a Methodist friend of mine and I would like to give him a good solid answer as to why the Orthodox Presbyterian Church is not bound to the Revised Common Lectionary. Would you please help me?
Answer:
Thank you for your question. The Revised Common Liturgy (RCL), specifically, as I am sure that you are aware, is an ecumenical product emerging only in recent decades, in the aftermath of liturgical revision at Vatican II and is used widely by a plethora of (generally liberal) Protestant churches (as well as a version that is used by the Roman Catholic Church).
Historically, a wide swath of Reformed and Presbyterian churches have had no commitment to the observance, at least in the stricter sense of that word, of a liturgical year. To be sure, more and more have begun in recent decades to observe such. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) has no such commitment as a denomination and its Directory for Public Worship (DPW) is not set up with such specifically in view. The DPW does require painstaking preaching of God’s Word and much preaching is done as some form of lectio continua.
What is lectio continua? Hughes Oliphant Old, scholar on Reformed worship, defines it in an article entitled “Preaching by the Book: Using the Lectio Continua Approach in Sermon Planning” in Issue #8 (June 1988) of the periodical Reformed Worship:
You may recall that lect comes from the Latin word that means “to read” and that it refers to the Scripture lessons (or lections) that are read on a given Sunday [by those churches which follow a lectionary]…. Lectio continua refers to another scheduling structure—that of preaching through a book, verse by verse or section by section.
Here’s the Reformation background (quoting again the article by Hughes Oliphant Old):
Almost five hundred years ago in the city of Zurich, Ulrich Zwingli, inspired by the preaching of early church fathers Augustine and John Chrysostom, preached through the gospel of Matthew. Reformer John Calvin enthusiastically adopted Zwingli’s lectio continua approach to preaching. In fact, during his long ministry in Geneva, Calvin followed this ancient liturgical practice, preaching through most of the Bible.
So, in answer to the question “Why is the OPC not bound to the RCL?” — I would turn it back and ask, “Why would anyone think that they are bound to the RCL?” Orthodox Presbyterian churches, generally, would want the freedom to select texts with a view to what the Session thinks is most edifying and to addressing needs in the congregation. Our Scottish forbears, especially, resisting the imposition of forms for worship, insisted on simplicity and the freedom of the local session to follow the DPW and not to have human authority unduly imposed on the people to the detriment of Christian liberty (the liberty to be free from the commandments of men in worship, particularly).
2. This begs the question, why do I follow the Lectionary at all? Well, I do not lead the kirk I go to. And the session there has chosen to be seasonal and follow the lectionary. I began doing this to fit in with that congregation. The lectionary has one virtue, it makes you read everything.
3 I thus use the PCUSA text for one simple reason I can get hold of them on anything that can connect to the web. I have posted, daily, for a couple of years now: in airports, in hotel rooms, at times on my phone because that was the only thing that would connect to the internet on that day.
If anyone knows of a internet based lectionary that is up and works, let me know… two or three sources of these things help.
Why don’t you use the PCA or OPC or other confessional Presbyterian or continental Reformed lectionary, instead of one from that half-apostate denomination, anyway? The PC(USA) sucks.
I will add something to the OP about this.
Ah.
I am moved to write in order to say a small thank you. It is only a small thank you because I haven’t read much of your writings, so I am unsure how much this post is indicative of others. I am saying thank you for the section of the post that touches on race. I am a christian (conservative leaning) black male. As I was reading that section, I was waiting for the punch in the gut I usually experience when I read posts by other supposed christian bloggers such as thinking housewife or oz conservative who use their forum to disseminate, if not hate, then contempt for those of my race. The punch never came. “Thank you.” Something told me to give it chance (as in don’t stop reading) and I am glad I did. It gives me hope for my kind, and by that I mean the christian kind. I actually don’t have much of a comment on that section(other than thanks), because I kind of missed the point. It seemed a little out of place, but that might just be my lack of understanding. I do have a comment on your lager point.
Although I agree with your larger point, I disagree with the example you chose to make that point. The substitution of humankind for ‘man’ is the correct thing to do in that context. Sometimes even feminists get it right. My guess is that ‘man’ (in that context) was the accepted vernacular of the day to express the idea of humankind. Since today we have the word humankind, why not use? If humankind expresses the same idea and also helps some people(namely women) feel more connected, accepted and loved by the scripture, then isn’t that word the better option as it does the greater good. As christian men we are commanded to lead and love, and this is a change I would make to show love for my sisters of the faith. In this case I think you might be the one who is trapped by old conventions and missing the chance to help others. But I understand the need to be leery of the intentions of feminists. A greater issue would be if they tried to change ‘son of man’ to ‘son of humankind’ as ‘son of man’ is a title with special meaning and historic significance.
Firstly, thanks. I think you should also look at Will — who writes at patri — he’s Canadian, and not pale skinned. Alte at TC is black. Elspeth is Black.
On the issue of humankind vs mankind — the greek is anthropos which can be translated both ways. The divisions we make in English don’t quite work in other languages. So, you are correct. However the process of making things gender neutral is something we should be leery of.
For women are quite different from men, and any differences we have among men (males) between races are nothing compared with the differences between men and women. We are divergent. We are complementary.
We are not identical, but in a moral and ethical way: equally free, of equal dignity, and we have an equal need for salvation
____
Additional: Culture does matter, though. And I’m a New Zealander — over here the ethnic groups are different, and what in the US is called “Black” becomes over here “American, rare, and cool”. I do not understand the racial tensions that exist in North America at a visceral level.
My reactions are much more to Maori, Samoans, Indians and South Africans (“Yarpies”), Australians (“Aussies”) or Englishmen (“Poms”). We play the same sports… abuse each other, but in Europe and North America (where we get lumped together as “Antipodean” or “unwanted white colonials”) we back each other.
I appreciate the thought in pointing me to other not pale skinned christian bloggers, but I don’t care about having a dialogue with other not pale skinned christian bloggers. I want to dialogue with christian bloggers, true sincere christian bloggers. My faith and my family of the faith is more important than anything else…..including original culture. Matthew 10: 34-37 & Galations 3:28.
please excuse me if this response has gone a little off topic.
There is a remnant. But finding them is not easy… so yeah.
True.
Strong’s #120 and #121 are exactly the same word, adam. Why Prof. Strong chose to use two numbers for the exact same word is a mystery…or not. Perhaps it was a reflection of a bias already well established in the church. That bias being that ‘adam’ meant Adam, the first man, or simply ‘a man’, being any man. The English translations we use reflect this. Adam (#120y) is found over 560 times in the Old Testament. In these translations we see that ‘the man’ was driven from the Garden. We see that the wickedness of ‘man’ is great. We even see that ‘the man’ has become as God knowing good and evil. Thus ‘the man’ has original sin but it doesn’t say that the woman does. The Catholics make a Cult of Mary out of such thinking. The reason that the church can sell the script that men are bad and women are good is because the bias of the translators wrote that script into the bible.The Word of God is the only weapon you can use to bring people to the Truth. You would question a Jehovah’s Witness translation, or Joseph Smith’s translation. It is not a sin to question your English translation no matter which one it is. The church is where it is because it has believed the Bible it received. You cannot change or rescue the church by using the same translation the church has received. Go back to the beginning and let the Holy Spirit teach you the deep mysteries of God and God’s Word.
I had posted this comment elsewhere but it fits here. All translators have to deal with biases when they translate any type of literature. Plus, languages are ever changing. It is silly to use language from 400 or 600 years ago today. Translations need updated and you must remember; translations are just translations. Leon Podles has shown that feminist bias has existed in the church and church writings for centuries. I would claim such bias since Jerome’s Vulgate.http://www.podles.org/church-impotent.htm
Exactly how good is your Greek? Because this is the Wilson Hort Gk Text.
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Freely translated — and [he] to them the man was not given to the sabbath, but the sabbath to men. You have some fun words in this — neither elegen nor egeneto translate easitly.
But to anthropos — strong’s gives you an idea of just how this has been translated.
#444.
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anthro?pos; prob. from 435 and ??? o?ps (eye, face); a man, human, mankind:—
NASB – any(1), anyone(1), child(1), enemy*(1),
everyone*(1), fellow(1), friend(1), human(5), human judgment(1), human
relations(1), king*(1), Man(89), man(232), man’s(8), mankind(5),
men(164), men’s(2), nobleman*(1), one*(3), others(4), people(13),
people*(1), person(2), persons(1), self(4).
You have to watch translators carefully, for they date their translations by the assumptions they make on correcct language.
http://biblehub.com/greek/444.htm
What is your point? That a person must know ancient Greek and Hebrew to understand Scripture? Only if God does not exist, and then why bother? God is not limited to any language, but translations ALL have some bias of the translators and God expects a person to use their brain to challenge and approve or reject evidences presented( Not the ‘Word of God’, but the particular translation).
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