Saving Face

A recent 60 Minutes show provided an update on the Lost Boys of Sudan, whom the program covered many years ago. These boys fled their villages in South Sudan, fleeing those who had murdered their parents and captured their sisters into slavery. They were faceless--no documents, no legal rights, really nonexistent--and/or persecuted wherever their existence were discovered. One of these boys, who eventually became an Episcopal priest, said even then: “They call us the lost boys. But I’ve never been lost to God.”
    Now, of course, I don’t share this to gloss over the horror of lives lost or to assume this faithful account somehow dismisses the questioning of this woefully disturbing violence. However, it is interesting (and touching to me) that America stepped in and transplanted some 4000 of these lost boys to cities across America in what one interviewed professional on the program considered the most successful transplant of foreign peoples in American history.  We were moved by facelessness. We wanted them to have a face, to become citizens, to have rights.  It’s a powerful, invigorating vision. 
   
    We liberally apply the term “person” to everyone, and rightly so, for person is the equivalent of having a face. Yet even for us, history has shown that we’ve not been too willing to extend the notion of facefullness to everyone. The powerful typically have it and the powerless never seem to have enough face, sadly.
    Still in the Greco-Roman world, the facelessness of some, if not the majority, of the populace was assumed and justified. David Bentlley Hart’s Atheistic Delusions (so called because he challenges the arguments of some atheists who question the role of Christianity in history) discusses that for those of the “lowest stations--slaves, base-born non-citizens and criminals, the utterly destitute, colonized peoples--legal personality did not really exist, or existed in the most tenuous of forms” and of course, those tenuous forms applied also to the limited extent of women’s possessing “face.”  Even the esoteric philosophies of the times were not interested in extending personhood to the masses. The philosopher’s facefilled pensive leisure was purchased by the sweaty brow of the faceless.
    In Jerusalem, correct religiosity added to the addenda of acquiring a face. And in order for there always to be a hierarchy--whether in religious circles or otherwise--it was essential that only a powerful few access face and the rest are left faceless.
    Yet it is to the faceless that Christ comes. The Gospel accounts are rife with his intentional engagements with the faceless, to the perpetual chagrin of the face-filled powerful. I think that is one of the key characteristics of Jesus’ life to which I’m so drawn. He was so perpetually free from and therefore, dismissive of human power. He talked to whom he wanted when he wanted, was entirely unmoved by human praise or criticism. I believe he has been the only human who was ever only genuinely himself, defined by his capacity to live totally, entirely free from the confining responses of others. He calls us to a similar freedom, but that’s a topic for a different day.
    In fact, it was this absolute freedom to love, to grant face to the faceless that made him such a threat to the religious of any type as well as political authority, for earthly authority typically always gathers more face for some and less for others. Christ created the fissure of facefulness that is still rupturing our preconceived notions of face today. Bentley continues: “Conscience, after all, at least in regard to its particular contents, is to a great extent a cultural artifact, a historical contingency, and all of us today in the West, to some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral ideals. For this reason, it is all but impossible for us to recover any real sense of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition, and of either sex.”  Consequently, the merging into one community of people previously separated by clear strata became the key challenge of the early church: how does a community consisting of sharply divided personhood designations become unified and cohesive?  For now the “literate, accomplished, propertied and free had to crowd in among slaves, laborers, and craftsmen, and count it no disgrace” (Hart 2009).
    The letter writers of the New Testament, of which most are in Paul’s hand, reveal the challenges of merging these previously faceful and faceless communities together. Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (2010) is a refreshing text in that it reveals the culture in which these efforts were taking place. Of particular interest to me in this text was her discussion of Paul’s intentions in regards to the sexually objectified, women (also, of course, sexually objectified), and slaves.  In these we see the Spirit of Christ breaking the fissure of facefulness opened wider.
    Ruden’s contention is when Paul addresses homosexuality, he is indicting the prevalent pederasty of the Greco-Roman world, wherein manhood was not only proved by family and offspring but also by one’s ability to dominate other, weaker men via forced sexual penetration: “The Greeks and Romans thought that the active partner in homosexual intercourse used, humiliated, and physically and morally damaged the passive one.”  Therefore, you did not want to be the passive recipient, so you had to prove yourself the brutal, aggressive one: “society pressured a man into a sexual brutality toward other males.” So when Paul takes on homosexuality so aggressively, it is likely he’s referring to this brutalization and the surrounding culture’s encouragement of it. Indeed, Paul is quite clear that sexual intimacy is to be preserved for the marriage bed, wherein your spouse’s face is most intimately honored.  No one is ever to be defaced sexually: “and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister” (I Thessalonians 4:6).
    And in regard to “sisters,” it is probably discombobulating to some that Paul actually encouraged more rights, more freedoms, more honor than women certainly possessed at that time.  When Paul directs all women to be veiled during worship, he is actually seeking to honor all women who attend, regardless of previous “face” status--prostitutes, the discarded, and the otherwise abused. Esteemed women--matrons and widows--wore veils in this culture: an ironic way to feature their facefulness, whereas other women did not merit such honor. However, Paul directs all women to be veiled during worship, so that all will be equally honored, so that all have equal face because that’s their reality before Christ, what Ruden terms “an outrageous equality.”
    Of more intriguing controversy in the early Christian era within the Greco-Roman world was Paul’s affirmation that men AND women could decide whether or not to marry. All the sudden the enforced hierarchal, determined role of marriage could be freely entered into or not. Of course, Paul encouraged celibacy for both: the persecution at the time was so intense, he felt it wiser. Still, it was up to them. Much more could be said here: his contention that both should please the other in marriage, not just the woman to the man would also have been revolutionizing in this time period. Yet our culture now assumes it, but its roots are here.
    The early cracks of institutional, government ordained slavery appear in the early days of Christianity as well. While Paul could never have conceived of a culture devoid of slavery--it was so ensconced, his following of Christ lead him to conclude that slaves are brothers and sisters to their masters. That in and of itself was a revolutionary thought. Unfortunately, it took us a couple thousand years to carry it to its logical conclusion. Ruden feature Paul’s brief letter Philemon, to whom Paul is writing in regards to Philemon’s escaped slave, Onesimus. Paul encourages Onesimus to return to Philemon, holding Philemon accountable to receiving his former slave as a brother in Christ, an unheard of request in a culture that would have cruelly punished such an offense. Yet Paul desires the Christian community to live out its new reality: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). 
   
    The most beautiful Face condescended to give each of us a face, regardless of our face-status in this world. Our love for him is measured in our ability to see his face in every face and love them accordingly: “Truly, I tell you whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). Because of him, our present culture understands some of this, but we have miles to go for its realization. Indeed, may his kingdom come, his will be done. Amen.