10 May

Dear Friends,

Someone once said that, “if you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.”

In many ways, it can seem as though this is the message of the First Letter of Peter: keep your head down, do what you know to be good, and be a quiet, law-abiding citizen, even in the face of dehumanisation. Don’t go against the grain of society! Slaves, don’t question your masters, and women, don’t question your husbands. This becomes especially problematic in this week’s reading from the third chapter of the letter. Peter boldly proclaims: “wives, be subject to your husbands.” Continuing to read does little to ease how jarring these passages sound to our modern ears. But shouldn’t we sometimes be bold enough to read these passages against the grain of their usual interpretation, and perhaps even against their intended meaning? 

The feminist New Testament scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza proposes such a way of reading chapter 3 of 1 Peter – what she calls “reading against the grain”. She does so not because it is a political fad or because she simply wants to reconstruct her own beliefs using the biblical text. Instead, she argues that we should at times read against the grain in order, on the one hand, to let the often inaudible voices in the Bible be heard (including the voice of the Spirit), and, on the other, to let the radical equality present in other parts of the New Testament shine through. In this way, we read against the grain exactly because the New Testament allows and invites us to do so. When reading against the grain, she argues, we discover a three-dimensional instead of a two-dimensional text. All of a sudden, we do not only listen for Peter’s words, but for God’s word – and, by extension, the voice of the voiceless. So, may I invite you to read against the grain with me this coming Sunday, as we explore these more difficult texts in the New Testament.

Marius Louw