Hope Blog

▶ 0:55:49

This message exists because of a calendar problem. The Good Friday service at Hope
is given to reflection rather than teaching; the Sunday before it is Palm Sunday, which deserves
its own attention; the Sunday after it is Easter. That left this Sunday as the only place a message
on the crucifixion could reasonably go. “Unlike last week, I’m not going to do anything granular or
academic,” Matt said. “I want to talk about really regular basic stuff today. You’ve got to major
on the majors.”

The version of the cross he wants us to delete

▶ 0:57:29

He started with something he does not believe, because the true thing is easier to see against a
contrast. The familiar presentation runs like this: God cannot bear to look on sin, so the Father
turned his face away; therefore Jesus was cut off from God; and Jesus’ finite suffering of that
separation roughly equates to the infinite separation we deserved, which is what he means by “it is
finished.” Four ideas, each leaning on the one before it.

Matt’s objection was not that the picture is thin. It is that the Bible says the opposite of
much of it — and that what it actually says is, in his words, “much more glorious, much more
beautiful,” and reveals the Father’s love in a way the other version cannot.

1. God has never been unable to look at sin

▶ 0:58:58

The idea has one address in scripture, and it is a complaint:

Notice that the sentence collides with itself. You cannot look at wrong — so why are you
looking? Habakkuk is working through his own confusion about a God who presides over a dark
moment without, as it seems to him, being angry enough about it. “Is this one half of his confusion
a good foundation to build a belief about God?” Matt asked. Especially when other texts say the
reverse:

Those roaming eyes are not avoiding people. “Is it like a desktop screensaver? He’s just looking
at dolphins?” No — he is looking at cities, at population centers, at us. In
Jeremiah 7:11
God says of people who live however they like and then put their church clothes on, “Behold, I
myself have seen it.” Seeing is not the problem.

▶ 1:03:40

And it goes further than seeing. The stated aim of the Exodus was proximity —
“that I might dwell
among them” — among a people who were emphatically not free of sin, and God was not caught off
guard by that. He converses with Satan in
Job 1. Every
interaction Jesus ever had with Peter, or James, or either Judas, was an interaction with a
sinner.

The temptation, Matt said, is to solve this by demoting Jesus: “We’re tempted to think of Jesus
as a rubber glove that the Father uses to touch gross humanity — and Jesus can do that because he’s
something different, something lesser. But that’s so wrong.” He is God from God, of one being with
the Father, including in his earthly ministry —
the Christ, “who is God
over all, blessed forever”. And that matters at Calvary specifically: “If we don’t have God on
the cross, then we’re not saved.”

2. Psalm 22 does not end at verse one

▶ 1:06:29

The second idea rests entirely on
“My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me” — which is a quotation. So the honest question is what David meant by it. This
is one of those places, Matt said, where somebody quotes the Old Testament and going back to read
it looks like a chore, so we skip it and assume we know.

Read it, and David is being hunted by men with swords. He rehearses God’s past faithfulness
(verses 4–5). He is
scorned and mocked — by people, not by God. And then the psalm turns prophetic in a way that is
hard to read past:

▶ 1:09:40

Which is a remarkably good psalm to quote while dying by crucifixion, with soldiers gambling
for your clothes and a crowd saying let God rescue him if he wants him. But the same psalm settles
the question the popular theology gets wrong:

David was not relationally abandoned and he knew it. He was physically unrescued, which is a
different grief. Jesus, quoting him, is saying the same thing — and in his case the failure to
rescue had a purpose David could not have seen. The psalm turns outward where the purpose lands:
the afflicted shall
eat and be satisfied, and all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.

▶ 1:11:35

And the song does not stop at vindication. It keeps going, out past David’s lifetime
entirely:

“Does this have anything to do with people trying to kill David?” Matt asked. “Is there
something prophetic happening?” A man who could not keep himself alive; every family of the nations
bowing; his righteousness announced to people not yet born; and the whole thing signed off with
he has done it. “I wonder if that has anything to do with what Jesus is doing right now.
That might have been a real head-scratcher for those watching — or it made perfect sense.”

▶ 1:12:31

The crowd at the cross knew this song far better than we do. “This was their catechism at
church. This was probably devotional family stuff at home. It’s in the top 40 station.” In that
culture, quoting the opening of a text points at the whole text — and, as Matt noted drily, a man
suffocating to death is not going to recite all thirty-one verses.

3. Where the Spirit and the Father actually were

▶ 1:13:59

If there is a separation in the Trinity that afternoon, we have to say where each person was.
Start with the Spirit:

The Spirit is not a bystander; he is inside the offering. “It looks like the Spirit is an
accomplice with Jesus, a co-conspirator on this salvation thing.” Which produces an absurdity: if
there is a rift, the Father is the odd man out, cut off from both the Son and the Spirit. Jesus
never qualified
“I and the Father are
one” with usually, or most of the time. And in
John 8:28–29, lifted
up is precisely the moment he says the one who sent him is with him.

▶ 1:15:36

You could call that poetic — except John hands us a passage where the disciples themselves say
he has stopped speaking figuratively, and this is what he says next:

The window he is describing —
struck shepherd,
scattered sheep — is the betrayal, the arrest, the trial and the execution. That is the exact
stretch of hours in which he says he will not be alone. “Now we’re being told explicitly, when
Jesus is not being poetic: you’re all going to leave me alone, but I’m not going to be
alone, because my Father is with me.”

▶ 1:17:10

And Paul names what the Father was doing in them: “All this is from God, who through Christ
reconciled us to himself… in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself”
(2 Corinthians
5:18–19). “The Father is not like ew. The Father’s not cut off — the Father is right
there actively participating.” What you get, Matt said, is the whole Trinity in a unity of power,
purpose and love. Not recoiling. Participating.

4. What actually atoned

▶ 1:17:49

So if the punishment was not separation, what was it? Peter is specific:

Death in the flesh. And the reason blood is the currency is stated in the law itself:
“the life of the
flesh is in the blood… it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” Shed the blood and
you have poured out the life. Matt’s phrase for it: Jesus was a divine blood donor. Isaiah says the
same —
“he poured out his soul
to death” — and Paul closes it:
“the wages of sin is
death.” It was painful, and
by his stripes we are
healed, but we are not saved by the quantity of his pain, and we are certainly not saved by God
giving him the cold shoulder on our behalf. As Matt put it: the wages of sin is not passive
aggression.

The one time the Father did not step in

▶ 1:18:59

There is a real abandonment here, and Matt was careful about what kind. Was Jesus abandoned?
“Yes, in a sense — because God the Father let him die.”

▶ 1:19:30

Then he ran the near-misses, one after another, and the refrain never changed. The crowd at
Nazareth who tried to throw him off a cliff
(Luke 4:28–30) —
but they couldn’t, because the Father protected him. The withered hand healed on the Sabbath
(Matthew
12:9–14). The lame man at the pool
(John 5:16–18). The
argument in the temple over whether he was the Christ, where they wanted to arrest him and no one
laid a hand on him
(John 7:25–30).
“In John 8 — I know this is getting boring”: he claims equality with God and they pick up stones
(John 8:58–59).
In John 10 he equates himself with God and they pick up stones again
(John 10:31–39).
After Lazarus, when it is getting totally out of hand, the men in charge formally decide to kill
him (John
11:45–53) — and they still can’t, because the Father protected him. The boredom is the
argument. Seven times, the same ending. This time the Father does not intervene. Why?

▶ 1:20:01

Not withdrawal of protection as an insult, then, but as honor — the very thing the Father says
he loves about the Son. “When the time was right, when Jesus laid down his own life on his own
terms, the Father says: good. I won’t intervene.” And so: “We shouldn’t think for one moment the
Roman centurions had him in their control,” Matt said. Jesus laid his life down when he was good
and ready, and the Father let him.

▶ 1:21:46

He gathered it up before landing it. God clearly does look at sin, and Habakkuk’s confusion
should not be treated as a great foundation for belief. Christ is God; the Father and the Spirit
are God; all of them are able to look at sinners, be with them, talk to them and hang around them
— “otherwise we’re all doomed.” David, who wrote the psalm Jesus quoted, knew the Father was not
abandoning him relationally; he was scared of dying, “but maybe not even all that scared,” because
he was still rallying the assembly to worship while expecting to die. And then the sentence that
holds the whole message: “Jesus was experiencing scorn like David was, but it was the scorn of man.
Jesus was experiencing a punishment on our behalf, but it wasn’t being cut off from God — it was
death, the death we deserve. No one took his life. He gave it, and when he gave it, the Father let
that happen.”

Why any of this matters on a Monday

▶ 1:24:16

This is where Matt said the bad theology does its damage. If you believe the wages of sin is the
silent treatment, and that God cannot stand to be near you while you are sinning, then at the exact
moment you are breaking down — in the addiction, in the fear, in whatever has you — you have no
reason to reach for him. He would not answer. It would be weird. He would have to get his rubber
glove out.

▶ 1:24:52

Underneath that sits a rage fantasy we assume the Father is running, and a picture of the family
most of us recognize: one parent enraged, the other smoothing it over. “Jesus is definitely trying
to smooth things over, the Father definitely wants to smash you — that’s the kind of weird stuff we
believe deep down.” And it only holds together if Jesus is somehow lesser, which is the nonsense
from point one. “Jesus doesn’t coerce the Father into loving us,” Matt said. “He demonstrates the
Father’s love.” We are not watching the Son talk the Father into a relationship with us —
okay, I’ll come around, if you and the Spirit are going to gang up on me. “If you’ve seen
Jesus, you’ve seen the Father”
(John 14:9) — “you
see how he acts toward sinners. Jesus giving himself up completely, that’s how committed the Father
is to you too.”

▶ 1:26:20

Which means you can go to him with a half-finished repentance — “ad hoc, almost done,
half-baked,” in Matt’s words — because he is already coming. The prodigal’s father
runs while the son is
still a long way off, before the speech is out of his mouth. Tying it back to what the room had
sung an hour earlier: “His goodness is running after us — not running away from us.” Picture the
alternative, he said: the goodness and mercy of the Lord trying not to touch you, actively avoiding
you. Nobody reaches for that. But if you know his character, you go back eagerly, with joy, on the
prodigal’s own arithmetic —
even the servants in his
father’s house eat better than this.

▶ 1:26:51

And the commitment is not provisional. “He’s all in. He’s fully committed. All the chips are on
the table — because he’s not gonna undie for us. He’s not going to unincarnate. When he did that,
he was saying: I am fully committed. I’m not going back.”

▶ 1:27:32

He closed by praying it rather than arguing it one more time: “Father, I ask that your Holy
Spirit would reveal the love of God for us, and help us by the power of the Spirit to really
believe it.” That is the assignment coming out of this message. Not to hold a tidier diagram of the
atonement — to actually believe that the Father standing on the other side of it is the one running
toward you.

▶ 1:04:38

This message was an accident of the calendar. Hope was working through 1 Corinthians,
landed on the head coverings passage the week before, and rather than wait, Matt pulled the
“women should keep silent” section of chapter 14 forward so the church could take both at once and
then return to communion and resurrection theology after Easter. It arrived, unplanned, on the
morning Amy Diosima opened her testimony with, “I’m a woman, I’m going to speak at church.”

Laying the cards on the table

▶ 1:08:08

Before reading anything, Matt named his own commitments. “Generally I approach the scriptures
conservatively” — and he meant it in the preservationist sense, not the political one. “I want to
find things as they were and just kind of dust lightly and not change things too much.” Much of the
work behind the message came out of a seminary paper he wrote for Reformed Calvinist professors,
who returned it without correction or reprimand. The point of saying so was to remove one exit
from the room: nothing that followed could be waved off as a progressive reading.

1. The text, and the problem the text creates

▶ 1:08:37

Matt read the New King James alongside it and pointed at the seam. That translation starts a new
paragraph at “Let your women keep silent,” and adds the word your; the ESV runs “as in all
the churches of the saints” into the sentence and has no your. The committees themselves
disagree about where the thought begins — whether it closes the preceding discussion about weighing
prophetic words, or opens something new.

▶ 1:10:41

Then the collision. Only three chapters earlier Paul assumes women are speaking in the assembly
and regulates the manner of it (1 Corinthians 11:5).
And prophecy, unlike uninterpreted tongues, is for everyone else’s benefit — which requires it to be
audible. “How can they be silent and speaking? Thus the confusion.” The church is not a building; it
is an assembly. “So we know that the absolute silence view is silly. There’s got to be something
contextual here, but we just don’t know how far and where’s the cutoff.”

2. The other passage — and the first preacher of the resurrection

▶ 1:11:58

Set that beside John 20:16–18,
where the risen Christ sends Mary Magdalene to the disciples, and Matthew 28:10,
where the instruction includes a command: go to Galilee. You can answer that Mary was conveying
rather than teaching — but Matt refused the escape hatch, because the same move excuses anything.
“I generally like to solve problems with word games. Genica pricks my conscience — that’s why.”
If it was an exception, then the never-under-any-circumstances position is already gone.

3. The pattern across both covenants

▶ 1:14:27

Here is the shape Matt kept returning to. Under the old covenant leadership tended male by
default — and God raised up women whenever he pleased. Miriam led. Deborah judged, and the verb is
the ordinary one for sitting in judgment; men came to her to settle disputes
(Judges 4:4–5).
“It’d be odd to say, Lord, you cannot use Esther. I don’t know if you noticed, she’s a lady.”
How much of the default was culture, Paul never says; he was not in the habit of flagging which
percent of his instruction was culturally rooted, and his readers would not have known what he
meant if he had.

4. Five reasons to scrutinize one verse

▶ 1:18:38

The deep dive was on 1 Timothy 2:12,
and Matt was careful to say this is not fringe: there are objective measures of how hard a verse is
to translate, and this one rings nearly all of them.

First, the early church shows real tension about women’s influence — the Gnostic Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, John Chrysostom complaining in the 300s that women could
get a man hired or fired as deacon. Yet searching the index of everything the church wrote before
the year 350, Matt found not one Greek-speaking father who so much as mentioned this verse. “If
they didn’t even care about this verse, why would they not care, if this was a tense topic? Is
this verse about something different than I think it is?”

Second and third, the harshest reading — that women are constitutionally more deceivable, case
in point Eve, case closed — would forbid a woman even to serve as deacon, and grounding it in Adam
and Eve leaves no room for the exceptions Scripture plainly contains. Fourth and fifth are grammar,
and they are where the message earns its keep.

5. One word, used once

▶ 1:26:02

Paul’s usual word for authority, exousia, appears over a hundred times in the New
Testament. It is not the word here. The word here is authentein — the only occurrence in
the Bible, from anyone, and the only time Paul uses it. There is no parallel passage to check it
against. And it sits in the infinitive, so “I do not permit a woman to teach authoritatively” is
not what the grammar offers.

▶ 1:27:46

The case rests on a spelling. In Greek the ending of a noun tells you what it is doing in the
sentence. “Man” here is andros, not the form that would make it the direct object of
“teach.” So it belongs to authentein — which leaves the second verb as the object of the
first, an ordinary construction: teach us to pray
(Luke 11:1),
teaching them to observe
(Matthew 28:20).
Matt cited a discussion between Tim Keller and Don Carson — hardly progressive credentials — landing
where he does: one prohibition, not two. The doubled negative is no obstacle; Greek uses it for a
single idea, as when Jesus ate nothing
in the wilderness, or the tax collector would not so much as lift his eyes.
The closest parallel of all is Acts 16:21
— customs “not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice,” two verbs, one idea.

Which puts the whole weight of the sentence on a verb nobody else in Scripture uses.

6. What the neighbors were doing with it

▶ 1:30:58

Published glosses run from “to have authority” to “to domineer” to “to murder.” Matt wanted
sources close to Paul in time, on the reasonable grounds that you would not hand someone the Magna
Carta and ask what a word means today. Polybius in 150 BC and Josephus both use the noun for the
one who did a deed — a perpetrator, when the deed was a crime, but at root simply the doer.
Clement of Rome, forty years after the New Testament, calls Christ authentēs where the
translation reads “Creator.” Eusebius uses it three times of Christ as the author and originator
of the gospel. Athanasius and Chrysostom use the verb for instigating and being responsible.
Grudem’s objection in Countering the Claims of Evangelical Feminism was that no ancient
evidence supports this sense; the studies since 1980 say otherwise.

7. The reading that makes the paragraph flow

▶ 1:35:22

Matt’s proposed adjustment is small — keep everything the ESV has, keep the infinitive, choose
the other well-attested sense of the verb: I do not permit a woman to teach to author a
man. Suddenly verse 13 stops being a non sequitur and becomes the reason: for Adam was
formed first, then Eve. And verse 14 stops being a slur and becomes a deflating aside to
anyone claiming spiritual superiority by sex — and by the way, Eve was deceived first, so nobody
is arriving here undefeated.

▶ 1:40:21

Is there anything for such a correction to correct? Ephesus sat in Anatolia, where Herodotus
reports the Lycians traced descent from their mothers and put their mothers’ names on their
tombstones. Ancient revisionist retellings of Genesis circulated — Lilith made at the same time as
Adam; Gnostic accounts descending through Sophia, in which the material world is the botched work
of a lesser god and enlightenment comes by partnering with the feminine. Irenaeus complains in
Against Heresies about people expressing the divine as overly feminine. And it flows with
the letter itself: Timothy is charged to stop “certain persons”
teaching a different doctrine and devoting themselves to myths and endless genealogies, and by
chapter five
the problem has a face: younger widows going house to house saying what they should not.

8. The extremes on both ends

▶ 1:45:33

Both edges fail. Reading Galatians 3:28
as erasing sex proves too much — being in Christ does not delete your ethnicity either, and Paul
clearly still thinks the difference between a man and a woman matters. What the verse removes is
the barrier to entry. At the other edge, Matt described a conference where a woman was brought up
and the leader publicly laid a hand on her back to confer permission to speak. “Didn’t you give
the last guy authority to speak? Everyone is speaking with permission. Why the dog and pony show
about the lady?”

▶ 1:48:42

And the ordering is strange for anyone insisting teaching is the closed door. Paul ranks the
gifts — apostles first, then prophets, then teachers
— with the church built on apostles and prophets. “Sad for me to say as a teacher, prophecy
outranks teaching. I’m in third place here.” Yet prophecy is the gift Joel promised on sons and
daughters alike:

Matt also flagged Romans 16:1,
where Phoebe is called a diakonos — rendered “deacon” by the NIV and NRSV, “servant” in
most others, though the same word is translated “deacon” everywhere else. Which fits the deacon
qualifications in 1 Timothy 3
read as a template rather than a fence: pressed literally, husband of one wife would disqualify
Paul from his own churches.

9. Why the default might be male at all

▶ 1:51:24

Matt gave the common answer without endorsing it — men score higher on assertiveness, so they
make better leaders — and then took it apart. We lead from weakness as much as strength, and in
this kingdom the high go low and the great serve. “Would this not make Goliath a bishop? Should
Shaquille O’Neal be the next Pope?”

▶ 1:53:22

His own answer, offered as a suggestion, is about revelation rather than ranking. Strip away
chromosomes and sonograms and stand where an ancient reader stood: in procreation the male
initiates, the woman receives, carries and gives birth. That, he thinks, is why God chose to
reveal himself as Father, Son and Spirit, and why the church — half of it male — is the bride and
never the groom. Not a statement about male superiority; a parallel God selected on purpose.
“He didn’t say, I reveal myself as your gender-neutral employer.”

10. Which is the point of the whole morning

▶ 1:56:13

Matt suspects the early church wrote less about the roles of men and women than we imagine
because it was busy with the imminent return of the bridegroom and with preaching Christ. That is
where he landed. “Women are not exempt from the Great Commission — I was going to say we need you
in this, but actually we’re not the ones pulling it off anyway. Christ is.” He named the desert
fathers’ deep respect for the desert mothers and their own communities, and Heidi Baker and Mother
Teresa: “Who’s going to say no to that?” Then the charge, which was for everyone in the room and
not only for women: “If the Lord did raise you up, ladies — preach him, not your abilities. It
shouldn’t be about breaking a glass ceiling. It should be about revealing the risen Lord.”

He was open about where this leaves us. Translating committees know everything he laid out and
move slowly by design. He can find no solid argument against rendering authentein as
“author,” and he still will not call it settled. “When you don’t know, you kind of have to be less
dogmatic — which is kind of odd, why we get super dogmatic about stuff that is genuinely
confusing.” He revealed himself as Father because he wants to be family to you, and the way in is
through his Son. “I never want to get too close to the steering wheel and just start
man-mangling it.”

▶ 1:01:50

Matt opened with an apology to anyone who had been invited that morning by a friend. “They probably didn’t know I was going to preach on head coverings, so don’t blame them.” Hope was working through First Corinthians a passage at a time, and this was simply the Sunday it landed on.

1. Before the hard passage: a word about Lent

▶ 1:02:58

He wanted to rephrase what he had been asking of the church through Lent. There are many ways to feel opposition — ideas, people, evil itself. “But there is one opponent you cannot withstand and you will never overcome, and that is God himself.” God opposes the proud, so walking in arrogance is picking the one fight that cannot be won. His proposal: “One thing we can do as we engage in spiritual warfare is to wrestle with God and to let him win.” Name an area of failure or weakness and hand it over. Not incantations and spinning three times — less creepy and spooky, more walking in victory by faith. Fasting was his suggested on-ramp, with the ordinary sense that nobody nursing or on prescriptions that require food should attempt it.

2. Why not just skip it

▶ 1:06:33

He admitted he wanted to skip the passage. What stopped him was that he asks people to read their Bibles: “It would be weird if I never lifted a finger to exert any effort to teach on weird stuff” and left the congregation with nothing but themselves plus the internet. He also asked, before anyone got triggered, what the room’s commitments actually were — how willing are we to let the beauty of a text speak when it collides with our preferences.

Then he set expectations honestly with another verse from the same letter: “why are people baptized on their behalf?” Nobody knows what that practice was. And that is fine, because where there is no clarity there is not much obligation to act, and with clarity grows an obligation to act. Some of this passage may stay in the first category.

3. The text, read straight through

▶ 1:08:30

He read 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 in one pass, then went back through it slowly. The hinge is verse 3:

He dealt first with the two escape hatches. Some argue Paul is quoting the Corinthians back at themselves, as he does with “all things are lawful” and “food is for the belly” — but this would be an enormous quotation that he then declines to answer. Others argue it was inserted later, since some manuscripts place it elsewhere in the letter. The trouble there is that it is always in them; the only question is where. “If I had to say, with academic honesty, I don’t think those are the best responses.”

4. Does “head” mean source or authority?

▶ 1:15:32

Source is a real option, and English does the same thing — a trailhead is where a trail starts. Read that way, the source of every man is Christ, the source of a wife is her husband. It works for the first clause and strains at the second, unless you are thinking of Adam and Eve. Authority is also attested in Greek, sparsely but genuinely. Matt’s conclusion was that the choice is false: “It could just be both.” And then, with a shrug: “Probably what you don’t want it to be is probably right.”

What makes source-only hard is Paul’s own balancing. If source were the whole of it, every man would have his mother as his head, and Paul plainly is not saying that:

You balance in the opposite direction from where you have been leaning. The fact that Paul feels the need to say we need each other tells you what the previous sentences weighed. And the same author uses the same four words — Christ, head, husband, wife — somewhere he cannot be quoting anyone:

5. What was cultural, and what was not

▶ 1:20:40

Context first. This is not a veil or a burka — a piece of fabric at the back of the head, the sort of thing you see on Roman women. It is not general public conduct either; Paul specifies praying and prophesying, which is to say church. And it is not simply Roman practice, since Roman men sometimes covered their heads to sacrifice.

Then the tell. Paul argues that an uncovered head is “the same as if her head were shaven” — logic that worked for them and does nothing for us, since short hair on a woman shocks nobody here. That is a cultural argument reinforcing a theological one. And the appeal to nature is the same move: Paul is not denying that hair grows, he is pointing at male pattern baldness and beards as a real and visible difference.

▶ 1:22:34

Which leaves the strangest line in the passage.

Matt laid out the options without picking a winner. The word means messenger, so it could be human visitors from other churches — don’t be strange in front of the guests. It could be the reading current in Jesus’ day from the Book of Enoch, where angels lust after women. It could be that angels are present in worship and want to see propriety, which he thought was probably the best of them, since nothing in the text pushes away from the plain celestial sense. Or it could be another baptism-for-the-dead: “You can ask God when you meet him.”

6. Adam, Eve, and a marvel

▶ 1:25:34

He was candid that verse 9 is “a serious buzzkill to every progressive interpretation of this passage,” and equally candid that he had gone looking for one: “I’m rooting for that team sometimes.” What he found underneath the argument was not a ranking but a creation account. Adam is made first and stands as a type of humanity — the point Paul makes explicitly in Romans. God glories in Adam; Adam is astonished at Eve, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. Glory here is the pleasure of companionship, not a rung on a ladder. Eve is the mega-mom, Adam the first man, and neither is a comment on anyone’s brains.

The mystical part, as Matt called it, is where she came from: a woman made from a man’s opened side, exactly as the church is made from the broken body of Christ. “We don’t repeat these phenomena. We represent them. We reflect them. We act them out like a skit.” If someone has to play the bridegroom in that skit, it makes sense that it is the husband. His wife is two days older than he is; he could not possibly be her source.

7. The other reading, and who actually wore it

▶ 1:28:48

Before leaving the cloth he took the popular alternative — that Paul means hair worn up rather than fabric at all. Convenient, as he noted, because “I already wear a ponytail, so it doesn’t matter what he’s saying, I’m good, check.” The trouble is the word. When Paul calls long hair on a man a covering, and a disgraceful one, he says nothing about whether it is up or down; he is talking about length. On the done-up reading, long hair covers a man but somehow does not yet cover a woman until she takes a further step — same word, two different meanings, in the same breath. “So the done-up view is self-contradictory.” Then Paul finishes it off:

Which is a problem for us rather than a solution. The appeal is to what everyone does, and this is no longer a universally embraced practice; “guys, so just keep doing it” would now offend the very people it once reassured, because most of America does not do this.

▶ 1:30:18

So he went back to his questions. Who was supposed to cover, and with what? Tertullian, a North African writing in the 200s, shows a church already confused about it — certain that married women should, unsure whether widows and unmarried women were included. That, plus Paul’s own wording, where the word is her man and means her husband, points to married women. When? At church, praying or prophesying publicly. With what? Probably real cloth, not hair pinned up. And it read as respectful behavior in a religious context — “whole other sermon, which I won’t do.” Was the covering a cultural tradition or a timeless principle? “Yes to both.” The fabric is cultural; what the fabric showed is not — Adam made first, Eve taken from his side, superimposed onto married couples, with Jesus and his church superimposed on top of that in Ephesians 5. “Even though my wife wasn’t made from my side. Neither was your wife made from your side.” All of it, he said, resting on a much longer study he did not share: “this is just all Cliff’s Notes — well, Matt’s notes.”

8. So does Hope do this?

▶ 1:33:12

No — and he declined to be neutral about it. Hope has never asked women to cover their heads to pray or prophesy publicly, and adopting the practice now would be a contentious source of religious legalism. “I’m going to recommend we don’t do this. I don’t want to get culty.” Paul’s own closing appeal is to universal practice, and the practice is no longer universal; keeping the cloth would communicate the opposite of what the cloth once communicated. The fabric was cultural. The truth it pointed at was not, and it should still translate — into behavior.

9. Two objections, taken seriously

▶ 1:34:15

The first is that the whole scheme rests on a gender binary. Matt granted the premise — it does — and pushed back on the statistic usually deployed against it, that being neither male nor female is as common as red hair. Intersex conditions, where a person has neither XX nor XY, are real and extraordinarily rare; the larger figure is reached by folding in hormonal and glandular conditions that are a different category. A missing or misplaced chromosome, he noted, is described that way precisely because there is a place it is supposed to be.

▶ 1:36:37

Then he went off his notes deliberately, and asked the room to pray for him rather than defend him online if it went badly. He spoke about people who transition and later carry regret, and who have nowhere to turn because the acceptance they were promised is withdrawn the moment they change their tune. He said he could identify with feeling lost and overlooked. “There’s a great place for you here. You may not feel like the church generally will accept you, but if you come here, we will hug you.” And then, twice: “We never hated you.” What he said he hated was the false promise that this would satisfy the deep longings of a soul.

10. The oppression objection, and the christology under it

▶ 1:38:08

The second objection is that male headship is inherently oppressive. Matt said that rests on two things: real historic abuse against women, and poor christology.

▶ 1:38:57

Before either, he cleared away the crudest version of the charge: “Paul is not saying a man has inherently more dignity or brains.” The whole argument has been about Adam and Eve, and about Christ and the church — roles in a skit. And the skit has an audience, which is the part he did not want missed: “in the home we take on a preachment of the gospel with the very way we behave,” for the kids, for the neighbors, for friends and family. A theatrical way of acting out the gospel at home, which mattered most of all to ancient people who might have been literate but almost certainly did not own a Bible. None of which licenses the fabric: “I don’t recommend pieces of cloth on the back of your head. I don’t want us to get legalistic about that. We just went through how you could be theologically correct and wrong a couple chapters ago.”

▶ 1:42:37

Historic abuse he condemned flatly, and he named the appetite behind it: “I know a lot of guys want that. They want to be like, I’m the big man, I’m the man of this house, big guy, do what I say.” Jesus took that off the table with his own disciples:

“If one of you is dominating over the other — I don’t care who — that’s just stop.”

▶ 1:43:43

The second is the one he spent the most time on, because it decides everything. Between Jesus and the church, who humbled himself more? Who gets more than they deserve? Who gives more than he gets back? The answer is never the church. So a lot of men want the title, the best seat at the table — the seat Jesus made fun of men for taking — and the grand gesture that ends the conversation: I built the deck, honey, now you do all the laundry. That was not Jesus’ way of operating. “The king of glory died naked on a stick, humiliated” — and then did not check out. He continues to care, to show concern, to intercede and speak for his bride, to seek and save the lost. He does not sit in heaven with his feet propped up while the church serves him without his help. “That Jesus isn’t real.”

▶ 1:47:09

He was pointed about the difference between dying for someone in theory and living for them in fact. Men hear “husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” and land on the dying part — I would fight to the death for you, honey, so keep doing the laundry. Matt gave the wife her line: “Oh, so you would fight to the death for me? That’s awesome. Would you do the dishes for me?” Jesus took a towel and washed feet the night before he was betrayed — and Matt argued the meaning of that has been inverted by ceremonial foot washings, where nobody’s feet are dirty and the guest is doing you the favor. Jesus was doing a real chore, the kind you would hire someone to do, because dinner was on the ground and nobody wants to eat next to filthy feet. So: what is the thing in your house you are tempted to pay someone else to do?

And the assumption that a paycheck settles the account gets the same treatment. The Proverbs 31 woman is running a small business. Christ provides everything and still engages, still gives gifts, still shows patience.

11. A race to the bottom

▶ 1:50:33

The culture runs what Matt called a race to the top: I want to get more than I give. He hears it in how men describe the women they want to marry — I love the way she makes me feel — and asked the obvious follow-up: does she like being with you? What are you providing?

A Christian marriage should be the opposite, and it should be visibly strange — strange to the culture, and strange to earlier versions of Christian culture too, the ones that said man is head of the house like Christ is head of the church while quietly carrying a weird version of Jesus. A wife honoring her husband out of respect for Christ, not because of anything he is; and the husband climbing underneath her, debasing himself further, working to prop her up and present her glorious and prized the way Jesus does his church. Both of them racing downward. Anything else, he said, is not the scriptures — it is good old boy country culture wearing them. “All doctrine breaks down with bad views of Jesus, because it is kind of all about him anyway at the end of the day.”

Then he handed the morning back to the room with the question he had opened it with. “Remember at the beginning I said, what are our commitments? Do we really want to do this, or don’t we?” — and he could feel where some of the fellas had landed: I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.

Next Sunday

▶ 1:51:40

Matt goes to 1 Timothy 2 to defend why Hope has women preach — and then, in his words, swears the subject off for the rest of the year. He called the prayer teams forward and sent the room out the ordinary way: “You’ve all been very patient. Good job. Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”

▶ 1:12:35

Hope Chapel is working through First Corinthians, and this week Matt folded two
chapters together — four and nine — because they are about the same thing: a man giving himself
away for the sake of the gospel. Chapter nine sits between the two chapters on meat sacrificed to
idols, and it is not a bunny trail. Paul is holding up his own life as the argument. You have the
right to eat that meat, he tells them; here is what I do with my rights. It ends with
“Be
imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

Because the chapter touches money, Matt named the awkwardness at the top. Giving talks go bad
in two directions: churches that abuse the subject, and healthy churches that get so nervous they
never mention it. And most people, he said, just want the number. “Tell me what percent y’all do
and I’ll get over it.” He warned that anyone in the room hoping for that was about to be
frustrated. He would rather be honest than convenient.

Where the tithe came from

▶ 1:15:04

Tithe is simply the old English word for tenth. In
Leviticus
27 the people of Israel set aside a tenth of their produce — grain, fruit, wine — and every
tenth animal, with a buy-back option that cost you an extra fifth of the value. It was granular
because it was a country. If you lived too far to haul a wagon of sheep and lettuce to the temple,
you sold the produce, carried the money, and bought the animals when you arrived.

The tithe supported the Levites, who had no land and therefore no crops, and it fed the poor.
In Deuteronomy
14 every third year a larger collection went to foreigners, orphans and widows — on top of the
standing instruction not to harvest your field to the edges, so that people with nothing could
walk through and eat. “It would stay fresh on the vine,” Matt noted. The system made sense as a
system.

Legalism, and the legalism about legalism

▶ 1:18:12

Without a temple, without theocratic Israel, without Levites, the letter of that law has nothing
to attach to. So Hope Chapel, with most churches, does not teach the tithe as a requirement. But
Matt immediately closed the other exit. “Some people get legalistic about being opposed to
legalism,” he said — where ten percent becomes the bad number, and 9.9 or 10.1 is fine, and
ten-and-a-half is better. “There’s not much spiritual improvement from just giving ten. Just saying
ten is the bad number.”

He was also generous about why the habit persists: we use a base-ten number system and mental
math is hard, there is a long family tradition behind it, and some people simply like the
continuity with the Old Testament. None of that is wrong. It just isn’t what Paul insists on with
his churches.

What apostolic ministry actually looked like

▶ 1:21:53

Matt started in chapter four, verse nine, where Paul has been contrasting the wisdom of the
world with the wisdom of the cross.

We honor Paul and Peter and John now in stained glass, inside fortress-like cathedrals, with the
empire nodding along. That is not what it was. “I don’t think he meant that metaphorically,” Matt
said of the hunger. Poorly dressed meant poorly dressed. Homeless meant there were stretches with
nowhere to sleep. He was
stoned
and left for dead, lashed by authorities, shipwrecked. Matt admitted the mixed feeling honestly:
it would be something to stand in that ministry and watch
a boy
who fell out a window raised from the dead — “but I don’t know if I wasn’t called for it, I
wouldn’t be cut out for that.”

A father, not a boss

▶ 1:25:31

The point of that list is not to shame the comfortable, and Paul says so.

He is not writing as their employer. He is writing the way a father expects to be imitated by a
child in the house. And what he is protecting them from matters: Corinth had recently been through
a famine and was still feeling it, and most of the believers there were not wealthy. There were
some — that is how house churches got large, because somebody’s uncle had a villa with a courtyard
that held a few hundred people — but the church as a whole was poor and under pressure. Paul would
rather carry the cost himself.

And when he says imitate me, Matt pointed out that he has just named the behaviors he
means: bless when reviled, endure when persecuted, keep laboring while hungry and homeless, be
treated like the refuse of the world — and go on treating everybody else as though they were the
wise ones. Even his warning about the coming visit
(1 Corinthians
4:18–21) is vulnerable rather than heavy-handed. He will come and find out not the talk of the
arrogant but their power, because
“the
kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” — and then: shall I come with a rod, or
with love and a spirit of gentleness? The Corinthians had been entertaining deceptive, polished
speakers who were seeking their own glory rather than Christ’s. That is the contrast. “That’s not
the way Paul ministered to them.”

Every right he had, and did not use

▶ 1:29:28

Chapter nine picks the thread back up as a legal defense.
Am I
not free? Am I not an apostle? Matt drew the picture: the man who terrorized the early church
and then became its greatest promoter, whose preaching the Spirit underlined with healings — and
who was so unassuming in person that polished rivals could walk into his churches, announce
themselves as super-apostles, and be believed over him.

So he lays out the rights.
The
right to eat and drink. The right to take along a believing wife, as Peter did. No soldier
serves at his own expense; no one plants a vineyard and skips the fruit; no one tends a flock and
goes without the milk. Matt put it in the most ordinary terms available: Paul plants the church at
Corinth, then moves on to a town where he knows nobody and has nowhere to sleep — couldn’t they at
least have covered a place to stay for the first week? “Y’all, I’m not even taking money from y’all
for food for the journey. But couldn’t I? Doesn’t that make sense?”

▶ 1:32:15

Then he reaches for the law —
“You
shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain” — and applies it as a principle rather
than a statute, which is exactly how Matt said we should read it now. He made the logic homely:
you feed the working animal partly to be humane, but also because a fed animal serves you harder.
“Who wants an emaciated cow that can barely move because you’re not feeding it?” And Paul supplies
his own gloss —
is
it for oxen that God is concerned? — it was written for our sake, so that the plowman plows in
hope and the thresher threshes in hope of sharing in the crop.

Notice the sting in that middle line: other people were being supported by the church
at Corinth. The man who planted it was not. And lest anyone conclude that paid ministry is the
compromise, Paul says the opposite —
“the
Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.”
Matt underlined it: “It’s not a bad thing. He just doesn’t do it.” The normal expectation was that
the churches would fund him as he planted the next one. He is the one departing from the norm.

The reward he was actually after

▶ 1:35:34

Then comes the sentence that sounds least Christian until you read the next one.

Matt did not let “any of these rights” slide by: it includes the one about marriage. “There’s
nothing wrong with getting married. He could be an apostle with a Mrs. apostle.” He set that down
too. And the disclaimer matters — “I’m not even bringing this up so that you would start giving me
money.”

Preaching is not a flex, because Paul cannot stop. It is compulsive; the encounter on the road
saw to that. So what is left that he can actually offer? The one thing he chose freely: doing it at
his own expense. “This is a crown he wants to earn in glory to lay at the feet of Christ,” Matt
said, “not just to brag.” He wants a reward — and we should want one too, for the same reason.
“I want to give him something from me that cost me.” That, Matt said, is where the New Testament
attitude toward giving starts for all of us: “I want to give him something. And I know he doesn’t
need my money — but I want to give him something.”

Run like you want to win

▶ 1:38:43

That is also why the chapter ends where it ends. Free from all,
he
made himself a servant to all — a Jew to Jews, weak to the weak, all things to all people, that
by all means he might save some.

Matt’s illustration was a camera pointed at somebody asked to pretend to play soccer — the
aimless putzing, the half-kick. Then tell that same person there is a championship on the line and
a prize at the end. “It’s totally different. You’re animated now. You’re actually running, working
up a sweat.” That is the difference between compliance and desire, and it is the whole message in
one picture. “Again, this is not about compliance,” he said. “He’s got goals.” The man was so
worked on by the Christ who gave him life from the dead that he thinks creatively, outside the box:
what else could I do to promote this?

The tentmaker who did not always make tents

▶ 1:40:35

The word tentmaking comes from
Acts
18, where Paul arrives in Corinth, finds Aquila and Priscilla in the same trade, stays with
them, works, and reasons in the synagogue every Sabbath. Read that flatly and you get a rule:
ministers should hold a job and preach on weekends. But read one verse further.

Matt worked carefully here, because the ESV’s “occupied with the word” reads oddly — Paul was
already occupied with the word, and whether he is compelled to preach cannot depend on which city
Silas is in. The NIV catches it: when help arrived, he went full time. So he did construction when
he needed to and dropped it when he could. He took nothing from Corinth, but
Philippi
did share with him, and when he
had
churches set money aside every week, he carried it to Jerusalem and kept none of it. The guiding
question was never what is the rule but how do I maximize this, and Matt voiced
him improvising: if the synagogue is going to kick me out, let’s
rent a
hall, why not. I’ll preach you by a river if I can. I can go without food — let’s talk Jesus.
“I mean, if you’ll feed me, I’ll eat it, honestly.” Most people would quit after being stoned once;
Paul’s version is “they could kill me again — I’m going to keep preaching.” “If you’re looking for
rules,” Matt said, “you’re going to get really frustrated.”

Not a rule — a ruler

▶ 1:43:30

Underneath the black-and-white question — should they tithe, shouldn’t they, who tithes whom and
how much — is a preference for being managed. “Just tell me what to do. I want to be a good
American Christian.” Matt was blunt about how marketable that is: “There are religions that take
pride in that. Here’s our book. Here’s our rule book. Next to it there’s the supplemental rule
book. There’s the extra one in the back.” What the New Testament hands you instead is a person —
“someone whose mind is awake, his eyes are open, an exalted Lord — and he wants to tell you about
him.” Not top-down management. Someone who interrupted our lives.

▶ 1:45:36

“Instead we have a ruler. Instead we have a shepherd, and he doesn’t need our help.” Earlier he
had put the absurdity in a picture worth keeping: the Lord counting the offering on a Sunday
afternoon, surrounded by the treasure of the hosts of heaven, turning to the angels — we didn’t do
well today, I don’t know if we’re going to make it. He doesn’t need it. But as his body we still
care for one another, and we still get to contribute.

▶ 1:46:53

We were dead in our trespasses; his death became ours, his resurrection put its life in us, and
that same power “pumped our hearts with his own affection. We are animated by his power.” Now the
Father is our Father. He requires no logistical assistance from any of us. What we have is freedom,
and lives we can spend promoting a message that changed us — “to our hearts’ content.” That is
worth money, and it is worth more than money; Matt listed the other currencies plainly: time,
energy, social capital, and the willingness to feel undignified.

Worth everything, kitchen sink and all

▶ 1:47:47

Which brings the answer back around to the question nobody got a number for. If you don’t know
Christ yet, he said, the arithmetic is even simpler: “It’s worth it to lay down whatever stands
between you and him. Dignity, pride, unforgiveness, hurts that you have. Nothing’s worth holding on
to death for.” And then the trade, stated as the actual bottom line of the whole message: “in
exchange for his life, it’s worth it to sell everything, to get rid of everything, throw out
everything, kitchen sink and all, for this chance, for the privilege of knowing him. That’s our
attitude about giving around here.”

He knew he had run around the question — “I know that was a little bit circumspect, but that’s
it. We get to know Jesus. Do you want to promote the gospel? We can.” Anyone still wanting the
mechanics of what Hope Chapel actually does with tithes and offerings was pointed to the
congregational meeting on March 22 at 6 p.m., dinner beforehand. (Newcomers, he admitted, tend to
notice how many meetings this church has. “We are. We are.”) He closed by praying the one thing the
message had been arguing for all along: fix our eyes on Jesus, and let us be transformed by the
interaction with our Lord.