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 19th
century Revised Version (1885) and the mid-20th 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!
