Let Your Light Shine
Day 260 – 17 September
Patient When Wronged
And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth. (2 Timothy 2:24–25, NKJV)
The Dog That Snaps
In October 1860 a middle-aged woman in Holloway, north London, took in a starving stray she had found and tried to nurse it back to life on teaspoons of warm port wine. It died anyway, and Mary Tealby, grieving, opened her scullery and then some nearby stables to the lost and hungry dogs of the city. The Times mocked her for it, sneering that she had let her zeal outrun her discretion while there were homeless people on the streets; Charles Dickens defended her; and the Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs became, in time, Battersea, the oldest animal shelter in the world, which has since cared for more than three million dogs and cats. Anyone who has worked with the animals that arrive at such a place knows the pattern. A dog that has been beaten or starved does what fear teaches it to do: it cowers, it bares its teeth, it snaps at the hand that reaches for it. And the one thing that never wins it is force. Shout at a frightened dog, strike it, jerk its lead, and you have proved it right about people; its fear deepens and its bite comes sooner. What wins it is the opposite. Someone sits on the floor at a distance, day after day, speaking low, taking the snarl and the flinch and the occasional nip without ever answering in kind, until one afternoon the dog crosses the room and leans against a leg. Trust is won by the person who can be bitten and stay gentle. Paul, writing his last letter to a young pastor surrounded by hostile people, asked for exactly that quality, and he reached for a word nobody else in the New Testament used.
Gentle to All, Able to Teach
Timothy was leading the church in Ephesus, and it was full of quarrellers, people who loved a fight over words and who set themselves against sound teaching. Paul’s advice runs against every instinct a cornered leader has. “A servant of the Lord must not quarrel,” he writes, “but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition” (2 Timothy 2:24–25). Four qualities, and three of them are soft ones. The servant is to be ἤπιος (ēpios, gentle, mild), a word that carries the mildness of a nurse with the children in her care, the picture Paul draws elsewhere; διδακτικός (didaktikos, able to teach), which is to say patient enough and clear enough to explain a thing again; and then, at the centre of the list, ἀνεξίκακος (anexikakos, bearing evil without resentment), the word we will come back to. Even the correcting is to be done ἐν πραΰτητι (en prautēti, in meekness, in gentleness), the quality Jesus claimed for Himself when He called Himself meek and lowly in heart. The people being corrected are τοὺς ἀντιδιατιθεμένους (tous antidiatithemenous, those who set themselves in opposition), and Paul’s phrase is exact: they are opponents by their own choice. Yet the servant is to treat them as the patient handler treats the snapping dog, with a gentleness that refuses to take the bait.
A Word for Being Bitten
The word in the middle repays the closest look, because English has no single term for it and the translators have struggled. The King James says patient and offers forbearing in the margin; the NIV says not resentful; the NASB, patient when wronged; the ESV, patiently enduring evil. The Greek is ἀνεξίκακος (anexikakos), a compound of ἀνέχομαι (anechomai, to bear, to put up with) and κακός (kakos, evil, ill), and it appears only here in the whole New Testament. The lexicon defines it as bearing evil without resentment. That is a different thing from the ordinary word for patience, μακροθυμία (makrothymia, long-suffering), which is about being slow to anger in general. ἀνεξίκακος (anexikakos, bearing evil without resentment) is narrower and harder: it is patience specifically under ill-treatment, the capacity to be wronged, insulted, slighted, snapped at, and to carry it without the slow burn of resentment settling in. One commentator says the servant must be able to take insult and injury the way Jesus took them, and adds that there may be greater sins than touchiness, but there is none which does greater damage in the church. It is the handler’s word. It is the ability to take the nip and keep your hand where it was.
Why Gentleness Wins
This leaves the question of why it is a beautiful work, and why Paul puts it in a letter about winning opponents, and never only surviving them. The shape of the sentence answers it. Gentleness, forbearance, meekness in correction, and then a purpose: if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth. Paul’s hope is that the opponent will come round, and he knows one thing for certain about how that happens. It never happens by force. Quarrel with a quarreller and you have handed him what he wanted; strike back at a snapper and you have confirmed his picture of you. What disarms an opponent is the thing he cannot account for: a person who is wronged and stays kind, who is insulted and answers with teaching instead of temper, who takes the bite and keeps the hand steady. That is beautiful in exactly the sense we met on Monday, goodness so unexpected that it stops the watcher and makes him wonder where it came from. And it is the most watched of all the beautiful works, because everyone knows what they would have done. Here the deepest reason appears. The servant of the Lord bears wrong without resentment because that is precisely what his Lord did. Peter says of Jesus that “when He was reviled, He did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23), and that when He suffered He made no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to the One who judges justly. And Paul, elsewhere, says it is the kindness of God, His forbearance and patience, that leads people to repentance. God has been ἀνεξίκακος (anexikakos, bearing evil without resentment) towards every one of us for a very long time. He has taken the snarls of a world that feared and hated Him, and He has kept His hand where it was, until, one by one, we crossed the room. The servant who bears wrong gently is only doing to the opponent what God did to him.
Where the Steadiness Comes From
The steadiness to be bitten and stay gentle has a source, and it is worth naming, because willpower runs out by lunchtime. It comes from having been borne with first. A person who knows how much of his own snarling God has absorbed, how many of his own bites were taken without a flinch, finds it hard to stay resentful about the smaller nips he receives from others. The measure of forbearance you have received sets the measure you can give. And there is a second source: Peter’s line about Jesus entrusting Himself to the One who judges justly. You can afford to take the wrong without answering it because you were never appointed the judge. Someone else holds that office, and holds it justly, which frees your hands for the only work left to you, which is gentleness. Forbearance is what a person can afford when the verdict is safely in better hands.
The Bite You Take Today
Somewhere in this Thursday there is an opponent. It may be the colleague who undermines you in meetings, the relative who keeps a running list of your faults, the person online who has decided you are the enemy, the customer or client who is rude on principle. The beautiful work of the day is to be wronged by that person and to stay gentle. That means declining the quarrel, however good your comeback is. It means answering with an explanation where you could have answered with an edge, correcting, if you must correct, with a meekness that leaves them their dignity. It means taking the bite without letting the resentment take root, and keeping your hand exactly where it was. You will feel the snarl rise in you; let it pass, remembering how many of yours have been absorbed without a word. And do it with Paul’s hope in view, that the person who has set themselves against you might yet come round, and that your steadiness might be the thing God uses to bring them across the room. It will feel like the weakest thing you do today. It is one of the strongest, and one of the loveliest, and it is the mark of a servant who has learned it from the Master who bore far more from us.
Declaration
Someone will wrong me today, and I have already decided what kind of person I will be when it happens. I will be the one who can be bitten and stay gentle. The snarl will rise in me, quick and clever, and I will let it pass unspoken, because I know what a quarrel wins: nothing, and a harder heart on both sides. I have been on the receiving end of a patience I did nothing to deserve; my worst was absorbed for years without a flinch, until I crossed the room and leaned in, and that is the whole reason I can absorb the smaller wrongs that come my way. I was never made the judge of the one who wrongs me. That office is held by hands better than mine, and held justly, and knowing it frees mine for kindness. So I will bear today’s wrong without resentment, and I will hold the hope that my steadiness might be the very thing that brings a hostile heart across the room, the way a patient hand once brought me.
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