Sermon of the Month - August 2009
Fruit of the Spirit #8 Gentleness
Bible Readings:
Isaiah 44, verse 24 – 45, verse 5;
Galatians 5, verse 22 – 6, verse 10.
1. Gentleness
We’re looking at what it means to grow as a Christian. Paul talks of the fruit of the Spirit – those things that grow and mature in our lives as Jesus changes us, through his Spirit at work in our hearts and lives. Today we’re looking at one those towards the end of Paul’s list of nine fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5: gentleness. What does it mean that the mature Christian shows gentleness?
The word we have in our modern translations as ‘gentleness’ is in earlier translations the word ‘meekness’ – in Greek, prauthV. But there’s a real problem with this word. Some older members of the congregation might remember Charles Wesley’s children’s hymn on this theme:
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.
But most of us find a huge difficulty with all this. It sounds like a call to spinelessness: “Jesus make me a doormat!” Oh yes, it has certainly loads of questions – but perhaps not as many as the poster on our screen (pictured right, [from the Churches Advertising Network; Easter 1999]).
Do you remember this? “Meek, mild? As if!” – with an extra caption: “Discover the truth this Easter at a church near you.”
Jesus is pictured rather like the famous poster of Latin American guerilla Ché Guevara, which is ironic in a kind of way, because the original Ché poster kind of impersonated Jesus. And people protested it, how can Jesus be like him?! The poster makers wanted to say, Jesus is not some soppy, mushy charater in a white night-dress, but a revolutionary figure: Jesus is strong, not weak. He was not crucified for being ‘meek’ in that sense of being weak, but for his electric challenge to the powerful authorities of his day.
Well that’s fine. But there’s a snag: the Scriptures call us to be meek, to be gentle. So does that mean we are called to be weak – or strong?
2. The example in Isaiah
In Isaiah 45, we heard the Bible speak of Cyrus. Cyrus was the Persian leader who overthrew the Babylonian Empire, so he was actually the strongest person on the planet at the time, with the largest Empire the world had seen, to date. But the ancient Greeks wrote about this man. And the Greeks had no favours to give the Persians: they fought long and bloody wars with them in later centuries, so they were obviously not biassed in favour of the Persians! Far from it! But when they wrote about this man, Cyrus, they actually used the same word Paul uses for this fruit of the Spirit – prauthV – meekness. They said that Cyrus was gentle and forgiving of human errors. In other words, he was not a tyrant. Gentleness is not weakness, but conduct from a position of strength which does not exploit or abuse that power. It is the opposite of tyranny.
We can this just a bit earlier in Isaiah – in chapter 42, where the prophet first raises the brilliant picture of the Servant, and we see that the true servant of God does not abuse power. Indeed God himself, the all-powerful One does not abuse his power, he does not force us to obey him. He will not shout or cry out or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out. In other words, the true Christian leader acts with gentleness, he or she leads by encouragement, leads by enabluing others. The true Christian leader does not forge ahead, trampling over others to get to his or her goal. The true Christian leader does not say, “We’ve got to make the church more effective, and so people who get in the way will have to be sacrificed!” The Christian leader will not abuse power against people. The true leader, the servant of God, will not break the vulnerable person, the bruised reed, but will bring forth justice – in other words justice for the poor. True leaders will use their power, their leadership, to empower the poor, to liberate the needy, to free the oppressed, to bring hope to the despairing. And you and I are called to be gentle in this strong way, if we are leaders in any way, we are called to be servant leaders.
The word ‘gentleness’ is not used frequently in the Bible, but it is a common word in everyday Greek of the times of the New Testament, and in those Greek writings, it means being soothing, it means gentleness of conduct, fairness in argument and discussion, accepting difficulties lightly and so on. It is in many ways the opposite of the typical media interview (at least in the British media, anyway) where some formidable anchor, like Jeremy Paxman.or John Humphreys, sets about trying to detroy the person they are interviewing every time they ask a question. We all know why they do it: they suppose the truth will come out that way. But actually all we see is how brilliant and clever the interviewer is, always going for the kill and getting the knock out blow, or else how skillful the politician is in surviving the attack. By contrast, gentleness does not mean spinelessness. We seek the truth, not the destruction of everyone who might have something interesting to say about it.
3. Jesus
Let’s turn to Jesus himself. There’s his clear teaching on this matter. In Matthew 11, verse 29, he said: Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. Follow Jesus, who will be gentle with you.
Jesus is gentle. He has awesome power, but uses it to heal, not to secure advantage. He comes, as Matthew 21 and the other gospels tell us, gentle and riding on a donkey. He does not ride a stallion, presaging military force, he enters the City as the King of Love, and will be crowned with a crown of thorns.
Indeed this characteristic of Jesus is so clear-cut that even the apostle Paul, who almost never speaks about the earthly ministry of Jesus (because he had never known Christ then, unlike his so many others who could speak from memory), even paul says this (in 2 Corinthians 10, verse 1): By the meekness and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you.
4. Strength in gentleness?
How does this question of gentleness as a feature of the life of the mature Christian work itself out. What about in church life, when we have Christian leaders, how should they lead?
Galatians 6 raises a difficult example of this. What should we do when someone has gone off the rails? And the answer Paul gives, in sum, is to disciple gently. This is what he says: Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. This final word, ‘gently’ is so important here: it is very easy for people with a modicum of power to abuse that power in such curcumstances.
Did you ever see the old John Ford film, Who Green was my Valley with its vintage black and white tableaux-like scenes of Welsh miners singing their way to the pits as full-blooded male-voice choirs? There is a shocking scene in this film. It’s set in the chapel, and the preacher is trying to tell the people about following the example of Jesus, the King of Love. And as he speaks, the deacons are pictured immediately in front of the pulpit, sat in the Sedd Fawr (Big Seat) facing the congregation, when suddenly the chief deacon sees a woman he is convinced is an adulteress. He interrupts the sermon to blaze into a tirade of abuse of the woman as a ‘Jezebel’. His lambasting against her destroys all the pastoral work the minister has been involved in, and also destroys the message he has just been preaching, on loving our neighbours.
But the problem goes back much further than that. Jesus himself was by a crowd with a similar fury according to John 8. These people wanted rough and immediate justice against a woman they had caught in act of adultery: she should be stoned to death, they said. And in fact of this mob, Jesus shows how to restore gently. First, with his memorable challenge to the one with no sin to throw the first stone, he dispersed the hostile crowd, and then he gently but clearly challenges her not to sin again.
Our gentleness needs to follow the example of Jesus. There are actually quite a few verses in the Bible to illsutrate this. For example, James 1, verse 21: humbly [gently] accept the the word of God’s teaching; meet opposition with kindness (2 Timothy 2, verse 25); our witness should be gentle, as should our whole lives.
5. The blessing of gentleness
One last thought. Jesus himself taught us, Blessed are the meek, in other words, blessed are the gentle. It’s a blessing from God for the meek. And Jesus adds, for they will inherit the earth. Jesus clearly has the words of Psalm 37 in mind here, where verse 11 says, the meek will inherit the land and enjoy great peace – and that promise comes as a counterfoil to verse 10: A little while and the wicked will be no more; though you look for them, they will not be found. What that means is the powerful, those who tried to punchj hard and punch people out opf their way, they think they rule, but actually they will not have the last word. Their day will come to an end, and God will enable the meek, the ordinary and gentle to thrive.
And on the lips of Jesus these words have great force, because Jesus speaks all these blessings as a great counter-cultural assault. He challenges and overturns all the conventional wisdom of the world. Conventional wisdom, ‘common sense’ says, blessed are the strong, the powerful, those who take and never give, those who flatten every foe and so on. But Jesus challenges us to go beyond politics and power; even to go beyond normal ethics and morality with its fine-tuned checks and balances; and to trust in God instead – not living by power, but by trusting God.
Blessed are the meek – is a call to gentleness, and so it is a call to let go of abusing power, to let go of control freakery and all the rest of it; to let go and let God take charge instead.