Visible Goodness
Day 279 – 6 October
Lent Without a Ledger
“But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.” (Luke 6:35, KJV)
A Box on a Post
Most lending comes with a memory attached. We remember who borrowed the ladder, which friend still has the casserole dish, and how many weeks a book has been missing from the shelf, and somewhere in the back of the mind a small accounts department keeps the figures up to date. That is why a little wooden box in a Wisconsin front garden caught the imagination of so many people.
In 2009 Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a box shaped like a one-room schoolhouse, mounted it on a post on his lawn and filled it with books, a tribute to his mother, a teacher and a lover of books who had recently died. Passers-by were welcome to take a book and leave one for someone else, with no card to stamp and no date to return it by. The idea spread far beyond his street: by August 2019 there were more than ninety thousand of these Little Free Libraries in ninety-one countries, and by 2020 one had been set up in Antarctica.
The box is only a box, and a book is a small thing next to the love of God, yet it shows a habit of the heart most of us find hard to keep: letting something go without writing it down. Jesus asked for exactly that habit, and He asked for it in a sentence that begins with one of the hardest words in the Sermon on the Plain.
“What Thank Have Ye?”
That word is “enemies,” and Jesus led up to it by describing ordinary decency first. “For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye?” He asked, and then, “if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again” (Luke 6:32, 34). Lending to people who will pay you back is perfectly fair, and plenty of people manage it without any help from faith. It runs on a ledger, and a ledger, however honest, is the very thing Jesus asked His hearers to put down.
Then the sentence turns: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again.” The goodness Jesus described goes beyond the circle of people who can return the favour, and the word He used for the lending holds the whole surprise of the verse.
Nothing, or No One
That word is apelpizontes (giving up hope of a return), from apelpizō (to give up hope), a verb that appears only here in the New Testament. In ordinary Greek it meant to despair, and Meyer and Vincent both note that older sense. Here it takes a pointed turn, and the King James translators, like most since, rendered it “hoping for nothing again,” the lender giving up any expectation of seeing the loan return, while Ellicott preferred “in nothing losing hope.” On the familiar reading, the lender lets the hope of getting it back go on purpose, and the loan becomes a gift.
A second reading sits in the manuscripts, and it is worth knowing. The Received Text behind the King James reads mēden (nothing), which yields “hoping for nothing again.” A handful of manuscripts, as Ellicott notes, have mēdena (no one) instead, which Meyer explains as “causing no one to despair by refusing aid.” The study follows the received reading, as the King James does, and yet the two readings point in exactly the same direction. One asks you to keep no account of what you are owed. The other asks you to give up on nobody. Put them side by side and you have the shape of goodness that goes about: hands that lend without a ledger, and a heart that writes no one off.
Like Father, Like Children
A heart like that sounds beyond any of us, so Jesus gave the reason it is possible: “ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.” The word for “kind” is chrēstos (kind, good to deal with), and the people it describes the Most High as kind towards are precisely the ones who never say thank you and the ones who do harm. His kindness keeps no ledger either. Matthew records the same teaching with the sun rising on the evil and the good and the rain falling on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), a goodness poured out on every field without checking the names on the gate.
The “reward” Jesus promised, then, is the joy of a family likeness, and nothing in it is a wage. Children who lend without counting are simply looking like their Father, who has always been this way towards them. They became His children by grace, and every unrecorded kindness lets that likeness show a little more clearly, which is why the next verse reads, “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful” (Luke 6:36). The resemblance was given first; the lending lets the neighbours see it.
A Tuesday Without a Ledger
The neighbours will see it most clearly in small things. Today, lend something you never expect to see again, the book you keep meaning to pass on, an hour of your time, the benefit of the doubt, and resist the urge to note it anywhere. Then do something harder and close one account you have been keeping in your head, the favour never returned, the thank-you that never came, the loan someone conveniently forgot.
And remember the other reading, the one that asks you to give up on nobody. Somebody in your life has probably been written off, a relative who keeps letting you down or a friend who drifted away. Keep the door of your hope open for them today, because the Most High has never closed His towards the unthankful, and that includes every one of us on our ungrateful days.
Declaration
Whatever leaves my hands today leaves without a label. I lend what I can spare and release it the moment it is out of my hands, because my own life has been one long loan from a kindness that never sent me a bill. I close an account I have kept against someone, and I strike out the figures. I reopen my hope for the person I had privately filed as a lost cause. Every unrecorded kindness I give lets the family likeness show, and I am content for it to show without anyone keeping score. I despair of no one today, because the One I belong to has never despaired of me.
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