The Alelyon (one another) passages in the New Testament:

Don’t bite and devour each other, or else you will end up destroying each other (Gal. 5:15), part 3

Our daughter Annie is spending most of this summer volunteering at an orphanage for special needs children. One early morning a few weeks ago I answered my phone’s “Annie signal” and listened to her calmly describe an unprovoked attack by one of the facility’s therapy dogs (it turns out that the animal needed more therapy than it was offering – but that’s a topic for someone else’s blog). The incident began with the beast’s caretaker going away for a weekend and leaving Annie and another intern in charge. At one point, one of the women picked up one of Snoopy’s (the name has been changed to protect the guilty) favorite playthings, which led to Fluffy (also not its real name) sinking its canines into Annie’s right hand. Which in turn led to Biffy wearing a muzzle, a no doubt appropriate garb for a biter.

The point of recounting Annie’s misfortune is to illustrate that biting is often an almost impulsively reactive action that arises from some kind of emotional or spiritual deficit. Snoopy/Fluffy/Biffy is not alone in the world of aggressive responses to imagined danger. But are we left only with acknowledging the universal existence of biting? The question that I opened last week has to do with curability: Does biting have an effective antidote? We’ve been looking at the biblical commandment against Fluffy-like behavior – do not bite or devour, lest you destroy. And, as we know, where there’s a precept, there is grace from the God who gave it. Grace is the Lord’s power that he gives us to communicate his will, his character, his goodness and love so that his law is not strange to us. And then grace also lifts from us the burden of trying to accomplish the commandment through moralistic bromides and our own devices. Grace will not only teach us to say “no,” but will empower us to live “no” (or “yes, as we will see later).

I think that it’s important to remind ourselves of the characteristics and effects of grace vis-à-vis God’s word to us especially when we’re in the midst of do’s and don’ts such as we read in Romans 12. Without grace, no antidote to sin can produce its intended outcome. In grace’s absence, Paul’s prescriptions for a biting-free community are like a vaccine that delivers the full virus that it is supposed to heal, rather than an attenuated form that builds immunity. Our grace-less tendency is to read the most recent article on 5 principles to prevent recurrent biting, to buy the 6 DVD “guaranteed to overcome biting” program, or go out and purchase a human-sized muzzle, none of which have the lasting gains of transformation and conversion by grace. So, with the glory of God and his grace in mind, here are four more Romans 12 remedies for us biters.

1.) V. 16b, don’t be wise in yourselves. We almost always attack from a limited point of view. We are offended, judging or feeling judged, fearful, even paranoid. Our narrow perspective prevents us from seeing what others see and experience – what others perceive about us as well as what we discern about them. If I don’t know the effect of my sin on someone else (a common occurrence); if I don’t recognize the positive or negative impact I bring to environments or situations; if I am ignorant of the blessing that God or you are in my life, then I am likely to respond to life according to my distortions. I look at the world and my log looks like a speck, while your speck appears to be a sequoia.

The serious problem with blindness is that it is not self-correcting. The same applies to the relative size of logs and specks: I need Jesus or – how painful – you to point out my blind spots and my personal planks. One of the greatest of all benefits of marriage and of living in close relationships with other disciples is that they see in me what I don’t and can’t. Lest you think that sounds pious or, worse yet, admirable, I will add that I’m not the best eye patient in the world. I can be very wedded to my own view of myself, of you, of the world. To hear counsel is crucial; to accept it is a miracle of grace intervening over many years of wearing down my resistance to discovering that I’m not always right.

2.) V. 17, don’t return evil for evil and, from 1 Cor. 13, do not keep a record of wrongs. These are two admonitions that form part of the greater counsel of Scripture, which is to forgive as Jesus forgave. The habit of forgiveness, especially when we engage it quickly and decisively (no record of wrongs) is supremely effective in curtailing our Pavlovian bite reflex. The absence of RFR (Rapid Forgiveness Response) makes every adverse event appear greater than it is due to our joining it to the large horde of complaints that we are already holding in reserve. On the other hand, the presence of RFR tends to isolate and minimize the moment’s painful experiences; makes it much easier to hand them to Christ; and goes a long way towards not thinking of others as something like permanent adversaries. The grace of “Father, forgive them,” the ultimate prayer of mercy, is a deadly counter to the long memory of wrongs (whether real or not) that plague us.

3.) V. 21, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. I would place this saying as a corollary of the two prior verses. The first half is of a piece with the proscriptive commandment, one of the “do nots.” The practice of returning evil for evil is a sure way of allowing evil to overcome us. The history of conflict often displays the pattern of vengeance: The Hatfields and the McCoys; the Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland; the Arabs and Israelis – as well as many lesser feuds involving clans, denominations, families, and maybe you or me. Vicious cycles of retaliation, even the non-violent ones, end up consuming relationships, especially because they tend to escalate, sometimes exponentially. Like me, you may have grown up around the one boy (usually) who always took a fight to the next, next, next level. One of my friends (I’ll call him Jerome) was this way. If one guy brought out an insult, Jerome reached for a rock, and the largest that he could find. If you wanted to deal with Jerome, you probably had to engage him with something illegal, like a flamethrower or hand grenade.

Paul’s counsel is not just to put down the rock, but to take up the implements of building up and serving. This is “turn the other cheek” on steroids. Paul insists, and Jesus demonstrated on the cross, that active love, especially toward  those who are at odds with us or who even hate us, overcomes the discord and hostility. To retract our teeth and offer an embrace instead of a bite is one of the true challenges to our trust that the Lord is behind, will empower, and will make fruitful these outlandish principles of his. We’re back to the Beatitudinal grace of meekness, where we relinquish control and rights and the urge to prove ourselves when life throws down its gauntlet.

4.) V. 12, rejoice in hope. If we have a problem understanding hope, I find it helpful to think of it as a species of faith. Faith claims the acts and the character of God for the past and the present. It believes the vast array of truths that have to do with divine goodness, justice, mercy, and love – that we are created to intimately know the Father; that Jesus’ death and resurrection are the means by which God’s grace most fully comes to us; that the Holy Spirit has come to make us alive in him and to make the reality of God’s kingdom alive in us; that we can hear the Father speaking to us in this very moment as we listen for him; that he has made us his friends. What faith grasps is really beyond imagining.

What about hope? Hope, sitting on the foundation of faith, says yes to all those things of God that are yet to come. Hope says yes to the promises that the Lord has made about the next hour, the next day, the next year, and the infinity of eternity. Each of the three great virtues – faith, hope, and love – conquers the devil in its own perfect and incomparable way. Hope’s work is to defeat the demonic lie that this is all there is, I am all I am, you are all you are, and we are all we ever will be. Our enemy wants us to focus on and be disappointed with what is incomplete and unfulfilled. Hope declares that God is able to and certainly will finish what faith sees that he has already begun. Hope knows that you and I are being changed more and more into Jesus’ likeness until the Day when we “will be like him because we will see him as he really is.”

We not only have hope and live in hope, but we rejoice in hope. When you see God’s best purpose for me and I see the same in you, it comes out in a kind of divinely-inspired optimism. His will is that you come to know an increasing measure of his glory – in fact, that is your hope and mine, and that gives me the victory of joy. Given your destiny, why would I bite someone destined for glory?

So, to paraphrase one of my favorite biblical prayers, “Lord, I hope; help my discouragement.”