The Theme, Just Now, is Kindness

Last updated on: March 17, 2020 at 4:38 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Theme, Just Now, is Kindness 2020-03-16T22:40:20-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you.

Times were tough for Christians in Ephesus, times were pretty bad for Christians everywhere. The wise teacher suggested that this was just the time to let go of anger and be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving.

A very good reason was that if martyrdom was coming, and in Ephesus it always might be, then one wished to face the Prince of Peace in a state of grace. The great teacher had told his followers to love their enemies and to pray for those who abused them. The hour of death was not then a good time to hold grudges.

Jesus forgave His enemies from the Cross. He did not indulge in a last minute put down. If this is to be a plague year, periodic in our past, then we should not risk going to God full of resentment for those who have slighted us.

If we, as is most likely, will not face death, then mercy commends kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness to those suffering. Does any decent Christian rejoice when a foe suffers? Time enough for hard discussions in the future when we can enjoy the dialectic together. Surely pity and mercy commend to us acts of kindness. We might pick our favorite cause and rail about it, with malice, on social media or we might be Christians and continue in our opinions quietly for now.

Is there anything more ugly than the man who must press his view of predestination at the bedside of a suffering saint?

Once I asked my dad what he did at funerals where he was unsure of the beliefs of the deceased . . . or even. . . have mercy. . . had reason to believe the deceased was (to wax Dickensian) “a wicked old screw.” Dad always told the truth, yet Dad was also kind. In such a case, Dad said what was good, whatever bit it was (“He worked hard!”) and left the rest to God. Commending the mercy and grace of God, the ability of all of us to repent to the very end unknown to anyone but God, are truths that never grow tired.

That is the sermon to preach: damnation is a warning to the healthy, mercy the balm offered to the dying. We do not know the fate of any soul (save perhaps Judas), so we can always pray “may his soul rest in peace.”

May it. God have mercy. Christ have mercy on me a sinner.

That is all very great, but kindness in hard times to the family of God is often much smaller. Kindness is deciding this is not the time to drop a mic on a fellow Christian. This the time to see the atheist interlocutor and remember the goodness in him. We live in a moment where solidarity to every human is the key note.

This image, the key note, the main underlying theme of our speech, helps us understand why there are times for other dominant passions in our discourse. We should always be kind, but in the rough and tumble of a normal election debate in a healthy republic, verbal swords may be crossed! Jesus could engage in verbal conflict with his foes: He did not crucify them.

The time will come, say in the fall, when remaining kind, we will deploy the rhetoric used by Saint Paul with some of his foes. We will disagree, strongly, passionately, knowing that in the plague year the deeper love and kindness were there after all.

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