Compromise - courageous stand or cowardly defeat?

The brothers at Lystra spoke well of Timothy. Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so they circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. Acts 16:2-3

Not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. Galatians 2:3

How good are you when it comes to compromise?

For some people compromise is almost a dirty word - once they’ve made up their mind on something, that’s it; they refuse to budge an inch. Others seem to belong to the “anything goes” school of thought. They are happy, as the Americans say, to bend every which way. 

As usual with extremes, both are wrong. Compromise, you could say, is almost an art, and you need real wisdom and skill to know when to exercise it.

At first sight the two verses above, one from Luke’s account in Acts of Paul’s activities, the other by Paul himself in his letter to the Galatian churches, suggest that Paul was hopelessly inconsistent.

The background, very briefly. Please hold on tight...

In Acts 16 Paul, visiting the town of Lystra, meets a young Christian called Timothy, and is obviously impressed by him. He spots leadership potential and asks him to join his missionary party. 

But there is a snag. Paul, of course, was a Jew, and he made it his practice to start his work, wherever he was, in the local Jewish synagogue. Fine. But... if you were a man, the sign of being a Jew was, of course, circumcision. 

So? Well, the Jewish people that Paul and his party were preaching to would not be at all happy about receiving somebody who, although also a Jew, had never been circumcised; and this was Timothy’s situation. Yes, he was Jewish, because his mother was (that’s what qualified you); but he had never been circumcised, because his father wasn’t.

So Paul decided to do something which I’m pretty sure must have gone against his grain. His great doctrine, remember, was “justification by faith” - we are put right before God purely on the grounds of our trust in Christ, and things like circumcision just don’t matter any more. 

But he decided that in this case it would be sensible, given that Timothy was a Jew anyway, to go ahead and make that status official, so to speak. Then there could be no quibbles, no distractions from what really mattered. In a word, Paul decided to compromise.

Go now to Galatians 2. Here Paul is talking about an occasion when he visited Jerusalem in the company of another young man, Titus. Now Titus was “a Greek” - that is, a non-Jew. And Paul, in tune with his conviction that circumcision was no longer necessary for salvation - and certainly wasn’t obligatory for non-Jewish converts! - explicitly spells out that “not even Titus... was compelled to be circumcised”. No compromise!

So... two young men... two roughly similar situations... yet in one case Paul acts one way, willing to bend, while in the other he acts the opposite way, digging his toes in. 

Was he being inconsistent? Was he right to compromise in the case of Timothy: “Yes, we should do it to smooth the way” - but not in the case of Titus: “No! Titus is a Gentile, and he doesn’t need to become a Jew in order to follow Christ!”

You can make up your own mind. But the point of this long story is simple. Life is messy! Often you just can’t see clear blacks and whites. And so compromises sometimes have to be reached.

Compromise, certainly, can be seriously wrong. If it means sacrificing a vital principle, then of course it must be resisted. Paul found this to be true when he stood up against Peter in Galatia because Peter - Peter of all people! - had withdrawn from eating with gentiles (see Galatians 2:11-21). 

But what work-place doesn’t require compromise that is good and wholesome? What school? What club or organisation? What home, what family? What marriage?

And - what church? It’s a happy church indeed where the members are mature and gracious enough to yield to one another in areas which are not of vital importance. As Samuel Johnson said, “Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.”

Are you in a situation where perhaps a “reciprocal concession” or two might be called for?

Lord God, help me to see the difference between essential principles on the one hand and things that are negotiable on the other, and to react accordingly. Amen.

Two quotations about compromise:

The person who never bends will break. Anon.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last. Winston Churchill.