I watched my master beat my daughter
because she folded the napkins wrong.
Somehow he didn’t mind that they were spattered
with her blood and had to be washed again.
Perfection was his excuse for looking at her in a certain way,
and I knew he hid his waiting in the violence,
that it was a rehearsal for a rape.
When I heard your letter read, I raged. I cannot stay silent.
Tell me, Peter, did you walk through the sheep gate
or climb into the fold some other way
on that unthinking day when you chose to dictate
that letter to us slaves, telling us to be obedient, to behave?
As if our suffering is just a way of being polite,
as if a polite Christ died on Calvary Hill,
as if we are to wait and wait in heaven’s light
and never mind that we are killed.
Peter, you always disappointed Him.
Look at me. I am the figure making fire on the shore.
I am the one who will tell you to undo your sins
by feeding us and leading us to shelter.
Are you so ignorant of terrors?
Go away, Peter. I seek a better shepherd,
one who isn’t blithe and dismissive in his errors,
one who has already found his cross and learned.
Illumination
I have spent the week feeling very angry with St. Peter, or at least angry at the author of 1 Peter, whom many scholars think was a presbyter in Rome and not the apostle himself. I would like to believe this, as the author of 1 Peter doesn’t chime well with the apostle I have grown to know and love. The author of the letter says, plainly, in Chapter 2, verse 18, that slaves should “accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.” This injunction was one of the Biblical statements that were used to justify American slavery, and it sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of a slave-catcher rather than an apostle of Christ.
This verse rightfully embarrassed the biblical scholars and denominational representatives who created the Revised Common Lectionary, as they left it out of the reading from 1 Peter that falls on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A. But this omission distorts everything that follows. The lectionary begins with verse 19, “For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly.” This makes it sound as if the suffering in question is the kind that anyone could experience – part of the expected grief of being a human being who lives within any system of jurisprudence, where petty injustices often prosper. But it’s not. The author is clearly talking about a slave’s suffering, and his blithe acceptance of the suffering created within horrific systems of injustice does nothing to try to counter those systems. Instead, he tries to valorize that suffering by comparing it to the cross. Jesus willingly suffered at the hands of oppressors, he says, so you should, too. No wonder it became a verse that was used in support of the institution of American slavery. You can hear the justification, someone saying “by enslaving people, we’re allowing them to be Christ-like.”
Preachers who want to reduce the impact of these horrendous verses will often point to the difference between racialized chattel slavery in America and slavery in the Roman Empire. I’ve heard the arguments many times. Slaves in the Roman Empire could own property, sometimes even other slaves! Slaves were often educated! Some people sold themselves into slavery! Some slaves could be expected to be set free before they turned thirty! Slaves were of higher social status than other poor people! The subtext to all of these claims is that the author of 1 Peter should somehow be let off the hook for telling people to remain meek and mild when they are beaten and raped. And, while the differences in ancient slavery and antebellum slavery that scholars point to really existed, the fact is that many Roman slaves were worked to death in mines and quarries, and that slave revolts were very common. Hard to imagine a contented, educated, well-fed, and well-treated slave joining a slave revolt. The fact that slaves rose up again and again in the Roman Empire certainly implies that few of them enjoyed a very cushy life. If you were a free person living in the Roman Empire, you could find gainful employment as a “slave-flogger.” That fact alone should tell you everything you need to know.
The desire of preachers and scholars to somehow defend 1 Peter 2:18 is indicative of a sad misunderstanding of the very nature of scripture itself. For those who believe that scripture is a univocal, God-dictated text, the author of 1 Peter is speaking a thorny but necessary truth. If everything in the Bible speaks to some mysterious desire of God, then the horrors must be explained away as belonging to some plan that we are simply too dim-witted to understand. Such a mindset looks at the Bible’s obvious contradictions and sets to work trying to prove that they somehow don’t exist. But if you accept that the Bible is a compendium of human beings’ struggles to understand the meaning of their lives, and the meaning of God’s presence within the world, then you can begin to see the arguments and contradictions within scripture for what they are. Arguments and contradictions. Paul does not agree with James. Proverbs does not agree with Ecclesiastes. These disagreements are part of the point. The councils of rabbis and church leaders who created the scriptural canon were well aware that the texts they were considering for inclusion often wanted to argue with each other. They included them anyway. As if they thought that difference of opinion, argument, and contradiction were the point. As if they thought that we come close to truth by wrestling with its many manifestations, and by wrestling with the untruths, as Jacob wrestled with the angel.
So I feel no need to defend the author of 1 Peter. I think he’s wrong. About slavery, obviously, but also about Christ’s death on the cross. To me, Christ’s acceptance of crucifixion is a liberative act – it’s meant to liberate all of us. Not to inspire us to accept oppression as a form of imitation. As Allen Dwight Callahan points out in The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, 1 Peter 2:18 is a poison verse. But the genius of the Bible is that it holds the antidote to such poison as well. Its founding narrative is the story of a group of disobedient slaves begging God to help them to escape oppression, and God answering their pleas. Slaves in the American South understood this with a clarity that seems to escape apologist Biblical scholars and preachers. Callahan writes:
African Americans have held fast to the Bible only by holding fast to its contradictions. Indeed, the contradictions suited their condition, for African Americans themselves incarnated America’s greatest contradiction. They were slaves in the land of the free. As slaves, they were at the same time persons and property. As people of African descent, they were heirs to a noble ancient history and an ignoble modern legacy. On the margins of American society, they remained at the center of its most bitter conflicts. Long after the fall of the slave regime, slavery’s children bear the indelible marks of these contradictions.
Again and again, antebellum slaves invoked one passage of scripture to counter another passage of scripture, “calling on Jesus to witness against the Bible itself.” Black preachers argued with the apostles and the epistle writers. This wasn’t dismissive, but its own form of respect. It assumed that St. Paul, and the author of 1 Peter, and many others, were guilty, mostly, of a lack of vision and imagination, and that they could be converted into a broader understanding. Lay preacher Maria Stewart said, and said rightly, that “did St. Paul but know of our wrongs and deprivations, I presume he would make no objections to our pleading in public for our rights.”
Which brings me, at long last, to my poem. Aggy was a real woman, a mild-mannered cook who, when she saw her master beat her daughter for a minor infraction, burst out into a psalm-like denunciation, asking God to take her side against her white oppressors. In my poem, I imagine her hearing 1 Peter 2:18 and responding to it. She, like everyone at the time, assumed that the letter was penned by St. Peter himself. She denounces him for his lack of vision and compassion. She implies that this lack of vision stems from the fact that he hasn’t been crucified yet. His crucifixion will come, and then, hopefully, he will understand her suffering. And she compares herself to the risen Christ, who sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and cooked fish for the apostles, and allowed Peter to undo his three denials by thrice promising to feed Christ’s sheep.
There is something broken in us, something that blithely diminishes the pain of others. We deny the statistics, distrust the horror stories, assume that because our lives are relatively painless and easy, painless and easy is the common mode of most of life. It’s not. Many people have a more intimate understanding of the cross than we do. They understand it well enough that they know that the goal is to get off it, not stay on it. They understand that, just as resurrection broke the stone that sealed the tomb, crucifixion is meant to break the cross, showing us that God desires an end to suffering, not for it to continue as a form of imitation, or even blessing.
KPB Stevens 