After George Floyd, what next?

The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis leaves me with a welter of emotions: shock, horror, anger, shame, confusion… There are now so many strident voices clamouring for attention following this brutal act that I have wondered whether it is worth saying anything at all. Yet I feel I must, for silence is the greatest evil of all.

Having been brought up in a white minority of 2% in Trinidad and Tobago, I never experienced racial hatred, and for that, I want to say thank you to my friends, acquaintances and parishioners. Trinidad is not perfect; nowhere is, but the love, care and respect which I was always shown humbles me. Fast forward many years to the Vaal south of Johannesburg, in Sebokeng and Sharpeville, we were the only white people, loved, cared for, never mistreated, never laughed at or mocked. Yes, I know we were in positions of so-called authority but truly it wasn’t about power.

Why is it then that my own ‘white race’ finds it so hard to love ‘the other’, to speak with grace, to care regardless of circumstances? I know the history as well as the next person, and am not racked with liberal pseudo-guilt. It does astonish me that some of ‘my people’ can be so ignorant, so afraid of those who aren’t like them.

I was asked the other day whether I had ever preached against racism, and can truly say that I’ve done that with some frequency over the years. That doesn’t let me off the hook, for it’s easy to say that racism is wrong, evil, pointless and stupid. It’s less easy to let go of my own desire to be right, to be superior, to be in charge, to control and order others, and really hard to stop framing other people in the narrow perspective of my little insight.

So I’m not writing this to assuage some supposed human guilt lurking in the corners of my heart. I just needed to say thank you to all my friends for letting me be me, letting me be different, letting me into your lives even though you were ‘not like me’. In the middle of a coronavirus epidemic, I needed to ask why we are more afraid of dying of that virus than of poisoning each other with the virulence of hatred of the other. I needed also to say, as a Christian, that I really believe that in Christ there is no inferior other, male, female, Jew, Gentile, slave, free, but all are called to be one, in Christ.

How gentle should I be?

A few days ago I found myself thinking about how unkind people can be on Facebook and Twitter, even in these trying times. While musing on this, I thought of the word ‘gentleness’ as a possible descriptor of the tone we should adopt in our instant and sometimes unreflective comments. One thing led to another, and I found myself reading Paul’s imperative in Philippians 4.5 ‘Let your gentleness be known to everyone’. 

So here Paul is encouraging us to extravert our gentleness, to make it public, and I guess that social media are contexts as good as any for doing that. The only problem is that it’s not immediately clear what is meant by gentleness, as the range of words in English translations demonstrates:

Gentleness: NRSV/NIV

Softness: Tyndale/Coverdale

Patience: Wyclif [or temperance]

Patient mind: Geneva/Bishops’ Bible

Forbearance: RV/RSV

Modesty: Vulgate/Douay-Rheims [Latin modestia]

And to cap it all, Eugene Peterson in the Message shows the difficulty by using a sentence to translate a word: “Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.”

The next task was to turn to the Greek word. The abstract noun is ἐπιείκεια, the adjective ἐπιεικής [epieikeia and epieikēs]. In classical Greek, it is ‘an expression for balanced and decent behaviour’[1] on the part of the gods (though the Greek gods didn’t always behave like this) or on the part of human beings. You could say that it is fitting or appropriate behaviour, that matches the way the world is designed to work. In the Septuagint (Greek version of what Christians call the Old Testament) it often refers to the qualities of God’s own kingship, which caught my attention. 

One of the specific uses of the word relates to the courts of law, in which the king, or the judge, is prepared to “mitigate the rigours of justice, with its laws and claims, in contrast to the attitude that demands that rights, including one’s own, should be upheld at all costs.”[2] This links closely with the word ‘forbearance’, used in the 19^th century Revised Version (1885) and the mid-20^th century RSV and I think sadly lost in the NRSV and NIV. One of the 9 definitions of ‘forbear’ in the OED is “To abstain from injuring, punishing, or giving way to resentment against (a person or thing); to spare, show mercy or indulgence to.” It’s a rare use, almost obsolete, but it is at the heart of the English word, and perhaps of the Greek too. It describes for me a God who holds back and acts justly by not ‘throwing the book at the malefactor’. It makes space for forgiveness, and in the great dispensation of God, it makes space for the price to be paid by another.

So then I came to its infrequent use in the New Testament. In 2 Corinthians 10.1 Paul appeals to the Corinthians ‘by the meekness and gentleness of Christ’ [NRSV], implying that that is the behaviour expected of the body of Christ. Other uses reinforce this: 1 Timothy 3.3 describes the character of the bishop as ‘gentle’ among other things, and James 3.17 has gentleness as one of the features of the ‘wisdom from above’. In short, ἐπιεικής is what God is, and what we are called to be in Christ as church or as leaders in the church. 

Perhaps then all of the English words listed above work in collaboration with one another. We have an ἐπιεικής God who is always on our side. Eugene Peterson gets that right. God forbears us, bears with our sins, weaknesses and imperfections, showing mercy and at the right time sending his Son to stand in our place. This is a God who makes room for us, a ‘soft’ or gentle God, forgiving, not holding our transgressions against us.

So back to my starting point. Because God in Christ is like that towards us, so we who are now in Christ can be like that both towards our sisters and brothers in Christ, and indeed towards the whole of humanity. The gospel is acted out through us every time we are forbearing, gentle, or of patient mind. As for modesty, well, I’m not sure about that one, but there’s no harm in being modest too!

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[1]      Moises Silva, New International Dictionary of NT Theology and Exegesis 2:240-41

[2]      Moises Silva, ibid