“Be ye kind, one to another,” the epistle to the Ephesians says.
Ephesians 4:32 is a famous verse, one of those simple, straightforward passages that gets cited and recited and memorized in Sunday schools and youth groups. It’s been set to music several different ways — I found a half-dozen or more versions searching YouTube without finding the one we sang back when I was in youth group. Our version was, of course, based on the King James, which is also the translation I memorized for church and school:
And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
The admonition there to “be kind” can seem soft or timid or inadequate. It doesn’t seem as forceful or fierce as those biblical passages we think of as “prophetic.” Nor does it seem quite as soul-stirring. It’s hard to imagine Amos or Isaiah thundering about “kindness” the way they do about justice. Can’t really imagine anyone thundering about kindness.
That’s partly because we’ve watered down the meaning of the word to something flaccidly sentimental. “Kind” has been reduced to “nice” and, as Sondheim said, “Nice is different than good.” So we’ve come to imagine it’s possible to be kind without being good. Or that it’s possible to be kind without being just.
We imagine it means something like the absurdity of the unkind “kindness” in that bit from Tolstoy I’m always going on about here: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible … except by getting off his back.”
We’ve so thoroughly convinced ourselves that kindness and justice are distinct categories that part of our brains instinctively leaps to insist that of course you can be unjust and kind at the same time — unfair and kind at the same time. We vaguely sketch out some scenario or setting with a kindly jailer or a kindly plantation owner or some such and fail to notice that every such scenario, once we think about it for more than a fleeting second, quickly reveals itself to be a Kafkaesque nightmare darker and crueler than any more candidly honest form of injustice.
This vague, neutered meaning of “kindness” renders the word limp even when we encounter it outside of Sunday school, such as in that bit from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
That still trips me up a bit. Kurt Vonnegut* gets his turn to recite all of Torah while standing on one foot and instead of love and justice and the Golden Rule he just says “be kind.”
It trips me up because I’m still infected with all the White Jesus nonsense I was steeped in growing up, and because I live in a culture shaped by that same White Jesus nonsense, which insists that it is possible to “be kind” without love and justice. This is, of course, absurd and contradictory. You cannot be unfair, but still kind. You cannot be oppressive, but still kind — or exploitative, but still kind, or predatory, but still kind, or exclusionary, but still kind. You cannot be anti-diversity, anti-equality, or anti-inclusiveness and in any way be anything anywhere close to kind.
Shake off that absurdity — “throw it over your shoulder,” as Vonnegut would say — and you start to realize how radical and revolutionary and prophetic “be kind” actually is. You start to realize that the determination to be kind denies the option of injustice because injustice always denies the option of kindness.
I suppose that in one sense what I’m doing here is arguing that the commandment “be kind one to another” is just another way of saying “Love one another” — treating kindness and love as basically synonyms. I don’t want to do that because I don’t believe in synonyms. There’s no such thing or else we wouldn’t have all these different words. But it’s also not worth spending our time or energy or precious time here alive parsing all of the fine distinctions between the varied words we have in this cluster of related ideas: love, kindness, mercy, compassion, generosity, magnanimity, graciousness, etc. Just recognize that they’re all intertwined. They’re not separate things, but components of one another that cannot be said to exist without the others present.
That Vonnegut quote above would have been upsetting to the Sunday school teachers and youth ministers who taught me to recite Ephesians 4:32 because he included a mildly blasphemous phrase for emphasis: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” It’s fun — and, I think, edifying — to read Ephesians 4:32 in Vonnegut’s voice. It’s easy. Just turn “Paul’s” parenthetical remark on atonement into a variation of Vonnegut’s blasphemous emphatic intensifier:
Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God — for Christ’s sake! — hath forgiven you.
“For Christ’s sake” is, like “God damn it,” one of those supposedly blasphemous phrases that my Sunday school teachers and youth ministers all taught us was a violation of the commandment against “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” But Jiminy Christmas that’s not what that means at all.
“Blasphemy” is not incantation — the verbal expression of forbidden words or phrases. Blasphemy is misrepresentation — bearing false witness against God. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain” means doing things in God’s name that defy and demean and disobey God’s character. It means praying with bloody hands, or worshipping instead of “Seeking justice, defending the oppressed, and taking up the cause of the fatherless and the widow.”
My former Sunday school teachers and youth pastors would also be horrified that I put the name “Paul” in quotation marks when talking about the author of Ephesians. Yeah, that’s what Ephesians 1:1 says, but the authorship of this epistle is a little more on the dark side.
Literally. As in John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band’s “On the Dark Side.” I like that song. It’s pastiche and imitation and tribute and rip-off, but it’s a very well done pastiche and imitation and tribute and rip-off. It’s not Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, but it does a terrific job of pretending to be them, borrowing riffs and mannerisms and themes from the original.
Ephesians is like that. It’s pastiche and imitation and tribute and rip-off, but it’s very well done. (Much better at all of that than, say, the pastoral epistles.) Ephesians is Paul-ish even if it isn’t actually “Pauline.”
And this famous verse, Ephesians 4:32, is one of the places where the cover band sounds most like the original artist. It sounds like Paul in the same way Vonnegut does when he writes “There’s only one rule that I know of.” That’s as Pauline as it gets, unless maybe if it said, “There’s only one rule that I can know for sure.” That’s the epistemology and ethics of Paul, his rule for rules and law for laws. The rest is commentary and the rest is contingent on that one and only rule.
Realizing here that I’m over a thousand words in and I haven’t yet even mentioned John Calvin when this was supposed to be a post about John Calvin and his “spectacles of scripture.” So, OK, then. Hold that thought for now and, in the meantime, just be kind.
* OK, Vonnegut’s narrator is not the same as Vonnegut himself. But sometimes it is and here, I think, is one of those sometimes.
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