Gentleness

Let your gentleness be evident to all. Philippians 4:5

We were reflecting the other day, my wife and I, on the meaning of this verse in Philippians 4 – especially, on what the word “gentleness” means.

I remember, as a small child in Sunday School, singing about “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”. I remember too that once I had become a grown up Christian I learned that while this was fine, it was by no means the whole truth: it could give the impression that Jesus was weak as well as meek, and the Gospels make it clear that he was anything but! His action in “cleansing the temple”, for example (Matthew 21:12-13), and his ferocious words to “you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites… you snakes, you brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:13-33) make that very clear indeed.

Yet of course there was a gentleness about Jesus, for which, as sinners saved by grace, we can only be thankful. Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 10:1 of “the humility and gentleness of Christ”, using the same word as here in Philippians 4.

Language is a wonderful thing. How would we communicate without it? But it can be very frustrating too. Some words are virtually impossible to translate straight from one language to another – there just isn’t a word in the other language that conveys exactly the same meaning, so you have to be a bit flexible.

A quick glance through various Bible translations in this case makes this clear: I took “gentleness” from the New International Version, and the New Revised Standard Version is the same: but the Living Bible has “consideration”, the English Standard Version has “reasonableness”, and the King James Version has “moderation”.

And who would dare say any of those options are wrong! (The Message takes the one word and expands it into a whole sentence in order to cover every possible shade of meaning. And who would dare say that is wrong either?)

Confused? I don’t think we need be. The fact is that exact word-for-word translations are just not possible. But if we take all those possibilities and roll them, so to speak, into a ball, we get a pretty good idea of what Paul is getting at: that the Christians of Philippi should display calm, peacefulness, quietness, fairness, dignity, a willingness to forgive and forget, to see the other person’s point of view, to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Will that do?

Do you ever wonder how your church – not to mention yourself! – comes across to the non-Christian world?

To some of our neighbours we may be a bunch of weirdos; to others, completely irrelevant and out of touch; to others, perhaps, bigoted and narrow. Hopefully too there are those who, while they don’t understand us or particularly want to, feel there is something worthy of respect about the way we go about our lives.

The reason I ask this question is that Paul says explicitly that our gentleness (or whatever) should be “evident to all”. In other words, he isn’t talking about how we relate to one another within the body of the church – yes, of course the church should be a community of love and commitment to one another, that can be taken for granted. But how we come across to the outside world is vital too: our “image”, if you like, to use a bit of a cliché.

You could put it another way by asking if we are a good advertisement for the church, or if we are something of a turn-off. It’s a disturbing thought… could it be that something I have said or done, or something about the way I said it or did it, has in fact put somebody off turning to Christ? Have I ever caused someone to say, “Oh well, if that’s their Christianity, they can keep it. Include me out!”?

We must, of course, be careful not to display to the world a false gentleness. If we  do indeed have the kind of Christlike gentleness that Paul is talking about, well, it will simply be part of who we are through the work of the Holy Spirit within us. What Paul is urging upon his readers is pretty much the same as what Jesus told his disciples: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Those last five words are vital! – any goodness we may display to the outside world is for God’s glory, not our own. (Lord, save us from any hint of hypocrisy!)

Sometimes when we’re trying to sum up the meaning of a particular word we might say, “I’m not sure how to pin it down – but I know it when I see it”. I suspect that the gentleness Paul is talking about in Philippians 4:5 is exactly like that.

I invite us all to respond to the challenge of this tiny verse.

Loving Father, help me to make it the top priority of my life to show the gentleness of Jesus to everyone I meet – to be humble and holy, considerate and sensitive, godly and Christlike; and may all the glory go to you. Amen.

Keeping up appearances?

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. Isaiah 53:2b (NIV)

There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. Isaiah 53:2b (The Message)

The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. 1 Samuel 16:7

Have you ever wondered why the New Testament nowhere tells us what Jesus looked like? We have four Gospels, and sometimes they overlap and repeat one another; but never do they find space to satisfy our curiosity… Was he tall or short? Slender or stocky? Good-looking or ordinary?

Untold numbers of paintings of him have been done; films and plays about him have been made. Until comparatively recently they have tended to portray him as tall and impressive in build, and very likely with flowing hair and a European complexion; more recently (and, I suspect, more accurately), he has appeared as swarthy and clearly middle-eastern.

But the fact is that we just don’t know; it’s all guess-work, and based, one can’t help but wonder, on religious sentimentality, even superstition.

The nearest we get in the Bible as a whole is Isaiah 53, where the prophet devotes just half a verse to the appearance of the mysterious figure whom he calls “the servant of the Lord”, and whom the early church quickly identified as the Messiah sent by God. I like the way The Message translates this: there is nothing about him “to cause us to take a second look”. Pass him in the street and he could be any man of similar age.

You may find these comments unsettling, possibly even slightly blasphemous. But facts need to be faced up to, and they really aren’t open to dispute. When we say that Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine (apart from sin) we really do mean it; so let’s get used to the idea!

Where is this taking us? To a very simple observation: that our modern obsession with physical appearance is totally misguided. I read a newspaper article not long ago which calculated the staggering sums of money spent per year, especially in the western word, on grooming products and cosmetic procedures; not to mention, of course, the amount of time devoted to prettifying ourselves in accordance with the expectations of modern, supposedly “civilised”, society. (We don’t hear much about the sin of vanity these days, do we?)

There are times when the Bible speaks to us most clearly by saying precisely – nothing. And this surely is such a time. By its silence about physical appearance, the Bible is shouting to us “Listen, it just doesn’t matter! Drop it! Don’t go with the crowd! You’re just wasting time and money which could be so much better spent”.

What matters about each of us is the inner you and me. The word of the prophet Samuel concerning the boy-king David puts it perfectly: “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (I Samuel 16:7).

So… if the Lord isn’t bothered about the outward appearance, why should we be? There surely is no answer to that question. (True, the same passage describes David as “glowing with health” and of “a fine appearance and handsome features”, but that is to stress the contrast between his youthfulness and his bigger brothers’ comparative maturity.)

Let’s dismiss two possible misunderstandings…

First, this isn’t about health. To look after our bodies is part of Christian discipleship – they are, after all, temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), so over-eating and over-drinking, plus any other forms of indulgence - things treated so casually by so many people - are simply forbidden. Is this something we have ever taken seriously?

Second, nor is it to suggest that we should go around looking like a lot of scruffs and weirdos. No: there is nothing wrong with looking after our appearance within reason – but each of us has the personal responsibility of deciding where reason begins and ends for us individually. Is this something we have ever taken seriously?

Perhaps now is the time to do just that. It may be that little change will be called for, but, well, who knows? For some of us, we may even find some relief in realising that we really don’t have to keep up with what’s expected of us by a materialistic and godless society.

Is it time to snap our fingers at such expectations? We’re going a bit grey? Who cares! Not God. We’re getting a bit wrinkled? Who cares! Not God. Our bodies aren’t quite as “beach-ready” as they used to be? Who cares! Not God.

And how much valuable time might be freed up for prayer, or evangelism, or service for others? Even more, how much precious money might be freed up for charitable giving?

The Bible tells us that a day is coming when we will have brand-new bodies – resurrection bodies – which fit us for eternal life in all its fulness. When that day comes, any curiosity about Jesus’ bodily appearance will be fully satisfied. Why? Because “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s why!

Father, please deliver me from a false need to satisfy the expectations of a corrupt and shallow society. Help me to make it my truest ambition to be like Jesus in every respect. Amen.

Who is my neighbour?

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” Luke 10:25-37

A pet hate of mine is when people refuse to answer a plain question. I think of it especially in relation to politicians who, to my ear anyway, often seem to squirm and wriggle their way out of a straight answer when interviewed on radio or television. So annoying!

But perhaps I need to be careful. First, because no doubt there are times I do the very same thing myself. And second, and far more important, because Jesus often seems to do it too.

The wonderful story of “the Good Samaritan” is a case in point. An expert in the law asks Jesus a question: “Teacher… what must I do to inherit eternal life?” That seems straight and direct enough, doesn’t it? But does he get a straight answer? No: he gets another question in reply: “What is written in the law?... How do you read it?”

As if to say: “Well, given that you are an expert in the law and I am just an unqualified wandering rabbi from Galilee, that’s a very strange question to ask! What do you think, Mr Lawyer?”

The lawyer comes back with two quotations from the Jewish law: Love God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and Love your neighbour (Leviticus 19:18). Upon which Jesus congratulates him on a correct answer and says, in effect, “Well, just get on and do it, then”.

But the lawyer is a little miffed (perhaps a bit like me) at not getting a straight answer. He’s wanting to “test” Jesus – to catch him out – and Jesus isn’t rising to the bait. So he puts a second question: “And who is my neighbour?” Again, does he get an answer? Again, no, he doesn’t. What he gets this time is… a story.

And what a story it is! “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers…” (Luke 10:30-35). Yes, the “Good Samaritan”, surely one of the greatest stories ever told. It forces the lawyer to answer his own question, and as a result it is he and not Jesus who is “tested”; he ends up embarrassed and looking rather foolish.

The story depends on a fact that no Jew of the time would have been comfortable with: the man who showed compassion to the victim of the attack was… a Samaritan. And the Samaritans and the Jews were, to put it mildly, enemies. Jesus, by coming at the debate in this rather roundabout, indirect way, leads the lawyer to a point where he is forced to admit that it is the Samaritan who stands out as the hero, not his fellow-Israelite priest or Levite.

But he can’t bring himself to acknowledge this openly: when Jesus asks the innocent-seeming question “Who was a neighbour to the victim?” he chokes on the honest reply, “The Samaritan, of course”, and mumbles instead, “The one who had mercy on him”.

By not answering questions directly, and by posing questions of his own, Jesus has forced the lawyer to face up to a truth which he would much prefer to brush aside: God recognises goodness and compassion in anyone, not just among his own chosen people.

We can’t help noticing, too, that Jesus even declines to answer the lawyer’s second question “And who is my neighbour?”

That is where the punch of this parable lies. He is saying to the lawyer, in effect, “You are asking the wrong question! What matters is not ‘Who is my neighbour?’ What matters is ‘Who can I be a neighbour to?’ And that is a very different question!”

By asking “And who is my neighbour?” the lawyer was probably wanting to know who he could safely ignore – who he didn’t need to bother about. And probably he was assuming that the gentiles as a whole, and the hated Samaritans above all, would fall into that category: “Surely God doesn’t expect us to show kindness to them!”

I find this enormously challenging, for if I’m honest with myself I have to recognise that I have an inner list - if only a subconscious inner list - of people I’m not responsible for, people I can “pass by on the other side” with a clean conscience. That woman in the shopping centre selling the Big Issue magazine… that homeless man sitting with his dog under a huddle of blankets outside the tube station… that starving child staring at me from the charity poster…

An uncomfortable memory comes back to me…

I was visiting friends in Texas, and I took a walk along the San Antonio river. It was a pleasant day, so when I came to a seat I decided to sit down and enjoy the scene. I was joined by an elderly man who obviously enjoyed chatting to people he met. That suited me fine, and we got along well.

A young woman came up behind our seat and started to talk: “Sorry to bother you – I promise I won’t ask for money…” She looked very ill; her eye were strange and I suppose she had a serious drugs problem. But my neighbour - my friendly neighbour - turned on her with a truly shocking, vicious ferocity: “Clear off! Or I’ll call the cops!”

And clear off she did. She slunk away, shoulders bent, like a whipped dog (not that I’ve ever seen a whipped dog, but you get the point). It had all taken just a few seconds, and I was in a bit of a daze. It was only a few minutes later that guilt kicked in…

Why hadn’t I chased after her, if only to offer a word of kindness, to let her know that I felt for her? Why did I make excuses for, in effect, being hard-hearted? - I was a stranger in their country… It was none of my business… I didn’t want to offend my new-found friend… I didn’t have any means of offering the practical help she obviously needed… I was out of my depth in a totally unexpected situation… Above all, that young woman was no neighbour of mine, was she?

And I knew – What paltry, shabby excuses these were! No, she was indeed no neighbour of mine. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I couldn’t help but hear the voice of Jesus: “Who acted as a neighbour to that young woman?”

Not my friend, that’s for sure. But was I any better?

Father in heaven, please help me to absorb and act on the great lesson that there is no person on the face of the earth to whom I don’t have the responsibility to be a neighbour. Amen.

How to make yourself miserable

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”  Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’  “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’  “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:13-21

What words might you use to describe the rich man in Jesus’ story? Greedy? Yes. Short-sighted? Yes. Self-centred? Yes. Foolish? Certainly; that is the word Jesus himself uses, and he pulls no punches: “You fool…!”.

Such words sound a warning to us about the peril of putting all our eggs in an earthly basket, so to speak. This short earthly life is not all that there is, and it is wise to live each and every day in the light of  that fact. Who knows? - this very day our lives may be “demanded from us”! That day will come!

The tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17) tells us not to “covet”, not to lust after what belongs to others. It’s a word very closely related to greed. And it’s a negative command – something not to do. Paul, writing to the Christians of Philippi, puts the same truth more positively. He thanks them for their generosity of spirit towards him, but tells them not to worry too much about him. Why not? Because “I have learned to be content” (Philippians 4:12). That word “learned” is important, for it suggests that it didn’t come quickly or easily.

Contentment, I suspect, almost always needs to be learned, and sometimes we only learn things the hard way – but blessed indeed is the man or woman who has reached that settled state of mind! (I read a book once, dating, I think, from the eighteenth century, called “The rare jewel of Christian contentment”; I remember now nothing of its content, but the title has stuck with me as rather beautiful… and rather sad.)

These warnings against greed and self-absorption are the lessons which jump out at us from this short story. I must have read it hundreds of times, and imagined I had nothing new to learn. But the Bible has a way of yielding up new truths we have previously not noticed, and that happened to me just this week…

I was browsing through a commentary on Luke, and the writer drew attention to a very simple fact it’s easy to miss: the man in the story was lonely. Or, if not actually lonely, certainly solitary. Reading the story again, I was struck with how he seems to exist purely in the bubble of his own little existence.

He’s got a big decision to make: what to do with all the surplus crops his fields have produced. And Jesus says that in order to resolve this question he conducts a discussion in his own mind: “What shall I do...?... I’ll say to myself…” (verses 17-19).

The commentator I was reading describes this as “very sad”, because in the world of Jesus’ day villages were extremely close-knit, almost like extended families, and such decisions would normally be talked over at great length. But the man in the story has no one to talk to – or perhaps simply chooses not to talk to anyone. He reminds me of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in his story A Christmas Carol: so fixated on his wealth that he has become reduced to a miserable husk of a human being.

Some people, of course, are happy with their solitude. I spoke to a friend recently who had spent Christmas Day on his own – “and that’s how I like it”, he said. Fair enough: I have no reason to doubt what he said, but I wouldn’t know him at all if he didn’t take the time and trouble to mix with others, and good company he is too. But the fact is that we human beings are social creatures: when God says (Genesis 2:18) that “It is not good for the man to be alone” I don’t think he is talking only about wives!

Misers (surprise, surprise) tend to be miserable. Of course, we all like to be comfortable, and little treats and luxuries are nowhere deplored in the Bible, nor is sensible “me-time”. But once we make them the be-all and end-all we are in serious trouble.

As the man in the story demonstrates, we shrivel as people: his internal conversation makes that clear - it’s all about my crops, my barns, my surplus grain. But what about his servants, who no doubt did the donkey-work? What about his family? his neighbours? He thinks he will spend the rest of his life “eating, drinking and being merry”. But does he in fact have anybody to eat, drink and be merry with? Or, has he, like Ebenezer Scrooge, alienated them all?

Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in north Africa (354-430), wrote these splendid words about the rich fool: “He did not realise that the bellies of the poor were much safer storerooms than his barns”.

Worth thinking about! But it must be right to leave the final word with Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Do we believe that? Really believe it?

Dear Father, please forgive my me-centred self-obsession, and please release me from it. Bring me to a point in my life when I can say cheerfully with Paul that I have learned to be content. Amen.

The massacre of the innocents

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Matthew 2:16-18

I’ve just finished a book about twentieth-century tyrants, and pretty grim reading it was. They’re all there, the people you would expect - Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin – plus several others from beyond Europe and therefore perhaps less well known to many of us – Kim Il-sung, Mao Zedong and “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

The tally of people massacred, killed in war, tortured or starved to death and generally treated with gross injustice and sheer cruelty is simply staggering. You find yourself shaking your head… How can human beings do such terrible things to their fellow-human beings?

But the fact is that they can – and, as what’s going on in Ukraine reminds us every day, they still do. It’s a thing called sin, and all of us are infected with it, though thankfully most of us manage to contain within civilised bounds our tendencies to jealousy, hatred, vengeance, ambition and the rest.

Well, Herod the Great, whom we meet in Matthew’s nativity story, would have been very at home in their company. So we shouldn’t be surprised at the story of “the massacre of the innocents” here in Matthew 2. Hearing a rumour from the magi of a new “king of the Jews” born in Bethlehem, he goes into full paranoia mode and orders the murder of all boys under the age of two in Bethlehem. No such child will be allowed to live!

Herod is one of those Bible characters known to us also from outside the Bible, and this action is fully in tune with other atrocities we learn about elsewhere. He murdered various members of his own family on suspicion of plotting against him – including even his favourite wife Mariamne. It was said that you were safer to be Herod’s hus (pig) than his huios (son). When he knew he was dying he ordered the killing of the leading citizens of Jericho, to make sure that there would be plenty of weeping and wailing at the time of his funeral.

So killing off a few babies (Bethlehem was just a “little town”, so there wouldn’t have been a very large number) would have hardly raised an eyebrow: all par for the course.

A vivid story, the truth of which need not be doubted, even by the sceptical. Yet it doesn’t generally feature in traditional Christmas plays and other activities, does it? As so often, the Bible strikes us with its honesty, even when it comes to recording terrible things. And that should warn us about the danger of airbrushing such things out of the story: Christmas is emphatically not just a cosy, schmaltzy, sentimental tale, nor simply about presents, eating and drinking (probably too much) and all the rest we associate with a “traditional Christmas”. Far, very far, from it!

This world is full of pain. And while it would obviously be wrong to include stories like the murder of the Bethlehem baby boys in Christmas presentations, it is equally wrong, as adults, to turn a blind eye to such things. Whatever else Christianity may be, it is a serious and honest faith, looking suffering, whether man-made or “natural”, fair and square in the face. How serious are we about life in general and our faith in particular?

People ask questions about suffering: If God is a good and loving God, why does he allow terrible things to happen? Why do some of us sail reasonably comfortably through life, while others seem to be unfairly dogged by hardship and injustice? Would it have been better if God had never created the world at all? - we never asked to be born, after all. Why should the mothers of Jerusalem be picked out for such terrible grief (Matthew 2:18)? – or, today, the women of Afghanistan or Iran?

There are no final and fully satisfying answers to such questions, but that is no reason why we shouldn’t cry out, Job-style, for some kind of answers. God’s shoulders are big enough to take whatever we may feel we need to throw at him; and that includes our confusion, frustration and hurt – and even (why not?) our anger.

The story of the massacre of the innocents suggests many things. To my mind there are two which take us right to the heart of the gospel…

First, we have a God who suffers.

The whole earthly life of Jesus was bracketed by suffering, from this horror at the start, to the cross of Calvary at the end. True, Jesus himself didn’t suffer with the Bethlehem babies, but his story as a whole shows him immersed in the pains of ordinary men and women, climaxing in the cross itself. He is not a distant God, looking down on us with compassion but standing aloof.

Second, it follows that we should expect to share his destiny.

It’s a natural instinct to try and avoid suffering if at all possible. But we are called to “take up our cross” in order to follow him, to “weep with those who weep”. The joy and victory will be ours, for Jesus rose again and lives for ever more, but our present calling is to be patient and to confidently await that wonderful day.

Not an easy calling: but this, and no other, is the way of Jesus our Lord.

Father, I don’t ask to fully understand why terrible things happen. But I do ask to see them as opportunities to turn evil into good and darkness into light, to weep with those who weep - and to be indifferent to my own comfort and ease. Amen.

Soften my heart, Lord,/ Soften my heart. /From all indifference/ Set me apart./ To feel your compassion,/ To weep with your tears./ Come, soften my heat, O Lord,/ Soften my heart. Graham Kendrick.