Building Card Houses

I had an illuminative experience earlier today. My sons sent me a link to a sermon unlike any I’ve previously encountered and, believe me, I’ve had some interesting Sunday mornings over the years. This particular well-meaning culprit will remain nameless in order to protect the guilty. Hopefully, his more senior colleagues in his local church will encourage him to go a different direction with his next effort at expositing the word of God.

Hey, I’m proud of my boys. Far from being mean-spirited or hypercritical, they simply showed a little appropriate caution, discernment and a Berean attitude to the word of God. That will serve them well.

As I watched the sermon, I realized the story the speaker was constructing for his audience was not so much deliberately contrived false teaching as just bizarre and unsupportable guesswork. That too is misguided, even if the man did not intend to mislead. He was building card houses, not teaching the Bible.

The High Priest’s Slave

The subject of his sermon was a little-studied New Testament character called Malchus. By little-studied, I mean that I’ve never heard a single message dedicated to the man in my sixty-plus years, probably with good reason: there’s simply not much material in the scripture to work with. If you want enough content to fill a forty-minute speaking engagement with the story of Malchus, you’re almost compelled to make the vast majority of it up.

According to the consistent testimony of the gospels, Malchus was the slave of the Jewish high priest who played a major role in the conspiracy to have Jesus arrested. Presumably, Malchus went to the Garden of Gethsemane to ensure that the great crowd with swords and clubs took Jesus captive successfully, or perhaps to witness the proceedings. The high priest himself was not present, possibly to preserve his deniability if the arrest went badly. You can find everything scripture has to say about Malchus by putting together information provided in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22 and John 18. It’s not until John’s account, written many years later, that we even find out the man’s name. The synoptics are silent on that.

Alternative Ways to Go

That’s a grand total of seven verses across four gospels, none of which gives us all the relevant information about the man and what happened to him. I have no doubt his story is present in all four gospels for some spiritual reason. Equally, I have no doubt that whatever the reason may be, it’s to be found within the pages of scripture, not in the fantasyland between someone’s ears.

Anyway, this brother in Christ went to work mining seven verses across four gospels for a lesson that might encourage or challenge his congregation.

Hey, it’s not like he lacked defensible, demonstrable scriptural options. He could have chosen to dwell on what the incident tells us about the Lord in his darkest hour, determined to trust the will of his Father to the very end right after agonizing over it in prayer repeatedly. He could have chosen to meditate on our Lord’s compassion for others, displayed in miraculous healing of an enemy. Alternatively, he could have considered Peter’s impetuosity and determination to keep the Lord safe from harm notwithstanding numerous prophecies that it must be so, and how that went horribly south only a few hours later when cowardice overwhelmed Peter’s fighting spirit. There are many lessons in the passage, but they all have to do with other people. About Malchus, we know only that he was a slave, that Peter cut off his right ear, and that our Lord healed it. About the man personally and historically, we can only speculate.

I actively dislike speculation. I avoid it wherever possible. Here, it’s certainly possible to avoid provided we don’t make any of the above passages try to say things their writers didn’t intend.

Five Assumptions

Nevertheless, this speaker was determined to find us a lesson or two in the backstory of Malchus. Here’s the scenario he constructed for his audience, in which he makes five unsupportable and extra-scriptural assumptions:

1. That Malchus was not merely any old slave, but a willing Hebrew slave after the manner described in the Law of Moses in Exodus and Deuteronomy. The slave in these passages has fulfilled his six years of obligatory service to his master and under law has the right to go out free. However, because he loves his master and his job, he refuses to take advantage of this legal right, and binds himself voluntarily to his master as a slave forever. Upon insisting he remain on the job, his master is to take an awl and pierce his ear against a door as a visible sign of his willing perpetual servitude. This, said our pastor friend, was Malchus’s choice.
2. That the law of Exodus 21 was still in force in Roman-occupied Judea roughly 1,500 years after being given.
3. That the ear Peter cut off was Malchus’s pierced ear, the evidence of his slavery.
4. That the Lord restored the ear to mint condition, not just unsevered but also unpierced, removing the evidence of Malchus’s slavery.
5. That Malchus thus became a free man and a Christian, effectively enslaving himself to the Lord.

The scenario the speaker asked his audience to consider, then, rested on five consecutive unsupportable assumptions, each of which depended on every one of his previous assumptions proving true. Folks, that’s not exposition. That’s biblical fan fiction.

Enumerating the Problems

First, there’s no evidence Malchus was a voluntary servant in his seventh or greater year of service. The word doulos, upon which the speaker relied for the evidence of this allegation, simply means “slave”. It’s an extremely common term, occurring 127 times in the New Testament, one that modern translations prefer to render as “servant” or “bondservant” to avoid giving offense, as innumerable footnotes in the ESV attest. There’s nothing packaged in the word to indicate the attitude of the slave to his service. Strong’s Bible Dictionary defines it as “a slave (literal or figurative, involuntary or voluntary)”. The presence of the word “involuntary” in the definition tells us everything we need to know: there’s no evidence in scripture that this man’s ear had been pierced. It’s speculative.

Second, there’s no evidence first century Judeans were still practicing ear piercing in accordance with the Law of Moses. There’s plenty in their law about which the Pharisees were absolute sticklers, like keeping the Sabbath to the point of absurdity. Equally, there’s plenty in their law that they were either forbidden to practice under Roman rule, had abandoned voluntarily at some point in the past (like the practice of the Sabbath rest for the land or the Jubilee), or else had conveniently reinterpreted, inverting the spirit of the law to avoid compliance with it, as they did with Corban. Was ear-piercing a voluntary slave still practiced in the first century? We don’t know. It’s speculative.

Third, assuming against all odds that Malchus was the exceedingly rare servant who gave up his freedom and the loot that came with it under law for a pierced ear and guaranteed employment for life, there’s no evidence Peter cut off the pierced ear. The odds are 50/50. Malchus’s right ear was severed, but Exodus 21 does not specify which ear of a willing slave must be pierced. It could as easily have been his left. That’s speculation number 3.

Fourth, now assuming without evidence that Malchus had a pierced right ear and that Peter severed it, there’s still not a shred of evidence that Jesus restored it to its pre-pierced state. He may have grown him a new one, or grafted the old one back on as is. We are simply not told. This too is speculative.

Finally, even granting all the previous assumptions, there’s no reason to imagine that restoring the ear of Malchus to its unpierced state would invalidate the obligations he had voluntarily taken on, that he even wanted such a thing, or that the Lord would have found it preferable if he did. The piercing of the ear was evidence of a promise, not the promise itself, just as a sexually incontinent couple may still sport expensive wedding rings in public while being unfaithful in private. The vow and the evidence of the vow are two separate things. Losing your ring does not render you legally unmarried, and restoring an ear does not invalidate a slave’s vow. The Law of Moses took vows very seriously indeed, demanding they be kept at all costs.

Heaping Up Sentimental Whimsy

In short, then, what this speaker provided to his audience last Sunday was a fantasy atop an imaginary scenario atop wish fulfillment, speculation and an unproven assumption. It was biblical fanfic, not a lesson from the Holy Spirit. There’s no doubt this fellow went to a lot of work in contriving a sentimentally appealing story, but sentiment is no substitute for truth, and the most nifty original tale no substitute for the authoritative word of God.

In fact, constructing unprovable scenarios out of the story of Malchus is not even original. Ralph Wilson did something similar online earlier this year. Fillmore Faith has a “metaphysical interpretation” of Malchus here. Best of all, in 2024, a Catholic priest wrote up almost this exact scenario online. Scripture has been around for thousands of years. The best possible shot at biblical novelty is usually not very novel.

If the Holy Spirit had wanted us to learn lessons from the pierced ear of a first century slave, we can be confident he would have provided us with something much more substantial and authoritative than layers of sentimental whimsy.