“If we could get back to personal names it would do a lot of good…” wrote J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Christopher. “The most improper job of any man,” he went on, “...is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it. Least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
In a scorching discourse against the sorts of men who like to place themselves at the head of every table, Jesus said similar things. Away with titles! Call no one teacher, because there is only one teacher. Call no one father, because there is only one father. And call nobody master, because there is only one master. We, on the other hand, are all siblings.
I sometimes ran into this rage against titles as a young person, because we were protestants and a command against calling anyone father seemed a good text with which to ward off the Catholics. I sensed there was a limit to how seriously these messianic discourses ought to be taken, however. I didn't try calling my father, “John.”
When Jesus rails against titles, there is a certain line of thought at work. It's a way of thinking that has rested easily enough in Judaism and Islam, but not so well in the western imagination. I'll call it the Otherness of God. Because God is father, you, in some sense, cannot be. Because God is Master there can be no masters among us. Because God is king, all human sovereigns are imposters. We here are all siblings, creatures, relatives. God is entirely Other.
The Western imagination, however, has tended to think of God, not as sheer Otherness, but as the pattern upon which we model ourselves, and vice-versa. If God is a King and a ruler then we shall have kingdoms and rule. If God is a father then we will establish our patriarchal authority. If God is a master and a teacher, we will take on the onerous task of managing the world and explaining it to itself. The Western god is anthropomorphic, often straightly depicted as a Western human being. This idea has not entered the minds of other cultures. The reasoning Jesus gives for the scrapping of hierarchical and patriarchal titles inevitably passes us by, almost without registering. Western history has proved demonstrably odd in its not knowing when to stop.
The corresponding principle to the Otherness of God, is not a religious principle. It is the creatureliness of us all. “You are all siblings,” says the messianic figure, in this iconoclastic discourse. And so, the various titles that map our hierarchies and ensure we all know who's who, are fictions that we create, or consent to, or submit to. When Jesus points out that we are all siblings, it is to say that all hierarchies of importance are untrue. More still, they are power relations where one is held in a debt of deference to another: a debt economy of social capital. There is a redrawing of the social imagination in this messianic disregard for titles and mastery. We are adelphoi—relatives who have shared the same womb of creation. There are other ways to live than by social arrangements based on these kinds of power relations.
My apologies, all, for the silent voice-over. See if I can work out what's awry..