The Chains God Cast Down

There is a sentence in this Sunday’s first reading that I wish more people would sit with before they open their mouths in the name of God.

Read it slowly. The chains are not loosened politely. God throws them down. And notice the reach of it. Not the chains of one people, one nation, one favored group. The chains “with which all peoples had been bound.” The net “with which all nations had been covered.” Isaiah is describing the hand of God tearing down every structure human beings have built to hold other human beings beneath them, and then setting a table on the very mountain where the chains fell.

That is the freedom this Sunday announces. It is not a freedom that arrives for the comfortable and leaves everyone else where they were. In the very next verse the prophet says the Lord God “will take away the tears from every face.” Every face. Not every face that has been vetted, approved, and found sufficiently like ours.

Which makes me want to ask an uncomfortable question. If God spends this whole passage casting chains down, what do we call the person who picks them back up and calls it holiness?

The Gospel gives us the other half of the picture. A king prepares a wedding feast. The invited guests, the ones with standing, the ones who assumed the seat was theirs, are “not willing to come.” One goes to his country estate, another to his business, and some of them turn violent toward the servants who brought the invitation. So the king sends the servants out again: “go out to the ways, and call whomever you will find to the wedding.” And they do. They gathered “all those whom they found, bad and good, and the wedding was filled with guests.”

Look at what is missing from that scene. No one is asked for a clean record, a doctrinal exam, a certificate, or a résumé. Bad and good come in together, straight off the road. The hall fills with the people nobody planned on, and it fills because the proper people were too busy protecting their own standing to come.

I want to be careful here, because this very parable has been twisted. For centuries some preachers used it to claim that God had discarded the Jewish people. That reading is a cruelty that Scripture was made to carry, and it is exactly the pattern I want to name.

There is a kind of person, and I have met many of them, who reads the Bible the way a prosecutor reads a statute: hunting for the sentence that proves the defendant was guilty before the trial began. They have already decided who is beneath them. They open Scripture to get permission.

Racism. After Noah’s drunkenness the text says, “Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants will he be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25). The curse falls on Canaan. Nothing in the passage mentions skin, Africa, or race. It was stretched across a continent anyway, and a verse telling enslaved people to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5) was preached from pulpits as though God had blessed the auction block. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 in the shadow of that argument. In 1995 it formally repented, acknowledging that slavery shaped its founding and that its members had defended the “right” to own slaves. Bob Jones University banned interracial dating on the claim that God had separated the races on purpose, and dropped the ban in March of 2000, announced on national television. Every one of those positions was defended with Scripture. Every one has since been abandoned by the institutions that held it. The Bible did not change. The excuse simply stopped being useful.

Misogyny. First Timothy 2:12 gets pulled out to bar women from teaching and leading, as though the Lord who sent Mary Magdalene to tell the apostles he was risen (John 20:17–18) had not already settled who may proclaim the Gospel. And Paul himself, in the letter to the Galatians, writes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither servant nor free; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Transphobia. Deuteronomy 22:5, a line in ancient law about clothing, is swung at transgender people like a club. The same chapter forbids wearing wool and linen woven together (22:11). I have never watched anyone picket a blended-fabric sweater. When a verse is enforced against one group of people and quietly ignored for everyone else, it is not being read. It is being used. And when Scripture actually speaks of people whose bodies and lives did not fit the expected pattern, it does not tighten the door. Jesus himself speaks of them. When his disciples are stunned by a hard teaching, he answers:

The Greek word behind “chaste persons” is the ordinary word for a eunuch, and the CPDV chooses a gentler English phrase for it. Hear what Jesus names. People who were eunuchs from birth. People who were made eunuchs by others. People who shaped their own lives for the sake of the kingdom of God. Three kinds, and Jesus condemns none of them. He names all three as people the kingdom has room for, and then he adds that those who can grasp it should grasp it.

I will say plainly what I believe. The eunuch of the Bible is the closest figure Scripture gives us to what we now call a transgender person. Some were born outside the expected pattern. Some were altered by the powers of their day, against their will. Some claimed a different shape of life for the sake of God. I believe they resemble one another in many of the ways that matter. Justin Sabia-Tanis has called eunuchs the closest biblical analogy we have to transgender people, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott read Matthew 19 and Acts 8 as biblical acceptance of them, and Megan DeFranza has argued that the eunuch is a biblical category that stretches past a strictly two-box view of humanity. The resemblance is too striking to wave away, and it carries more weight than the handful of verses swung against our siblings. Isaiah 56 promises such people a name and a place within God’s house, and in Acts 8 the Ethiopian eunuch asks what stands in the way of his baptism, and Philip baptizes him on the spot. God did not shut out the people the law shut out.

Here is what I notice about every one of these readings. They only ever point downward, at someone else. Scripture used to examine your own heart is called repentance. Scripture used only to rank other people is called a weapon. The First Letter of John does not leave room for a middle path:

If your reading of the Bible makes you feel superior to another human being and leaves your own conscience untouched, you have read it wrong, however many verses you can cite.

I know the end of the parable is where people reach to justify exclusion. A man is found without a wedding garment and thrown out, so surely the unrepentant, the unlike us, are the ones who get thrown out. I read it differently, and I want to be clear that this is my reading. Look at who is in that hall: “bad and good,” gathered off the road with no time to change. The garment cannot be respectability, or no one in the room would have it. Paul tells us what we are asked to wear: “As many of you as have been baptized in Christ have become clothed with Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and “clothe yourselves like the elect of God: holy and beloved, with hearts of mercy, kindness, humility, modesty, and patience” (Colossians 3:12). “And above all these things have charity, which is the bond of perfection” (Colossians 3:14).

If that parable points a finger at anyone, I do not think it points at the outcast dragged in from the highway. I think it points at the guest who sits at the king’s table wearing no mercy, no kindness, no charity, and expects to be treated as though he belongs. Even then, notice, the king’s first word to him is “Friend.”

This is the table we are trying to set at 557 Greene Street. A Blessing Bag handed to a neighbor who has been told to move along. A support group where transgender people are simply welcomed. An altar with no screening at the door, because the One who set it did not screen the servants’ catch.

Come Sunday. And if someone has used Scripture to tell you that you do not belong at this table, I want you to hear the other reading, the one actually in the text. The chains are cast down. The tears are taken from every face. The hall is filled with whoever the servants could find. You were found. Come in.

Pax et Bonum!
Bishop Greer